As I touch down on the gray runway at San Juan, I hear
people clapping. It is mainly the older persons; some of the children, grinning
and straining against their seatbelts, clap high above their heads, as well.
They pray out loud, a chuckling chorus of Thank
you, God, thank you Jesus, praised be your name, down the seats. None of
the Americans have done this, though one has clapped. It is the people from the
island. They do not glare, those descendants of transatlantic trade, if the others
do not pray; and yet, if I, who live between worlds, were to say, There is no need to send up prayers because
an airplane has landed where it has landed every day for years, there is a
chance I would find something of mine besieged when I return home: a poisoned
dog, a defaced gate, an emptied house, a father with crushed ribs.
When we were still on the plantations, in chains or like
monkeys in suits in the Big House, the bible gave us hope that those same slave
masters, blind fools, would burn in the same hell they warned us about. We would be saved, not them. Or, if they
were saved too, they would be our equals.
But now, when we need a hope that is not holding a saw, when
we can fly on the same plane to the same place high above the clouds we were told
held angels with six wings—now, I sit on the plane, listening to the happy
claps, and wonder why nothing is any different.
Jonathan Bellot is pursuing his MFA in Fiction at Florida State University. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in BIM: Arts for the 21st Century, Transnational Literature, and Belletrist Coterie. His work has also been featured at the Nature Island Literary Festival in Dominica. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to Dominican parents but has lived in Dominica for over half his twenty-four years.
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