Excerpt: airplanes

I think Momma's got a different perspective on this than I do. After that talk, a few days later, she came up to me again and said sit down baby, I got to tell you something. She told me there was some kind of rising up when she was a little girl herself, some kind of race solidarity. Something about how it wasn't right that so many black people were left behind, and so many white people got to rise up to the heavens. She said back when that first happened - when we first got to start going up to the heavens - there had been some sorting out of people, some dividing of the deserving and the undeserving. First it was about who had the money, and then it was about who deserved to go. Some people had to stay behind, they said, because someone has got to take care of things back here. Someone has to take the responsibility. Who else would make sure the criminals didn't get out of hand, didn't take advantage of their situation here being in this empty land?

So it was us who was chosen. Deserving but not deserving enough.

Why so many of the undeserving are black? That's what they started asking themselves. And after a while they got violent. They got righteous.

Momma I said, why they want to rise up for this kind of foresaken land? Why don't the heavens just give it to them? What would anyone want with this place, so bad that they start fighting for it?

Momma shook her head at me and smiled. They didn't want the land, honey. They wanted to go _up_there_. They just knew their place and it probably would never have happened. Their place is down here with us. They just fight for that and - heavens maybe wouldn't have cared.

But they did care. There's no chance of going up if you're dead, and the righteous fell in masses. They ain't the right kind of righteous, that's the verdict that got dropped down to us.

Something didn't feel right to me listening to that story. I looked down at my own arms, my skin the color of an old newspaper and dotted all over with freckles. My eyes are dark, and my hair is curly and full of red and brown. I don't look any different from anyone else here, though. We're united in dirty clothes and mud streaked on our limbs, our eyes red with smoke. There's no difference when we're all digging in the same pile of scrap.

I can't picture that, racial solidarity. To go up to the colonial government and really believe yourself when you argue that we all should get to go up too. When I look around at the others digging in the scrap heap, yeah they look like me, but I know they're not _like_ me. Their thoughts are on tomorrow, on the next day. I got my thoughts on dinner just like anyone else, but I got my thoughts on the future too.

They come home and sleep in the mornings, or they play with their kids, or they kiss someone in secret. They go out on the streets and cause trouble with my brothers.

I'm in the bright corner by the window, struggling against the twilight - the electric only comes on in the early evening - struggling to read some government document, to make one that looks just like it for the old woman in the forest house they want to take. They're building a prison extension, and she's got to go. Didn't she know she was supposed to move into the apartment blocks with everyone else? It's her own fault.

I got to get out of here. I belong in the heavens.