Senegal, 1940
53. IT WAS THE AFTERNOON that she finally confronted her father about his illness. It was something she’d overheard her mother discussing on the phone with the doctor the night before.
“I am not sick, Sokhna,” he said, his glasses at the bridge of his nose, his mouth full of grilled chicken and rice. “Your mother exaggerates.” But his eyes could not meet her eyes, so she knew he was lying.
“Just tell me,” she said.
He sighed.
“Just tell me what’s going on, Père. I’m strong.”
“I know …” he said to his thirteen-year-old daughter. He took his glasses from his nose, placing them down on the table, picking them up again, staring, as if surprised by their weight.
“I know that you are strong. Perhaps it’s me.” He rubbed his face with both hands and returned his glasses to his nose. “And I was having such a good lunch,” he said. She was already weeping, facing the door so that he couldn’t see.
Sokhna ran out onto the tarmac where the planes were parked. The men were about painting and repairing planes, and the ground was slick from fuel and water.
From the age of five, and with great protest from her mother, Sokhna would climb into her father’s lap and accompany him while he tested commercial and private planes for routine maintenance at the Saint-Louis airport. The rides were usually short, and sometimes, to excite her, he’d do tricks: twisting and rolling the planes in the bright orange sky of the early evenings—military tactics he’d never had a chance to use in combat.
When she could no longer fit with him in the pilot’s seat, she sat beside him. She’d gotten used to talking over the engine, venting to him about fickle schoolboys and difficult professors, her mother’s strictness and high-pitched voice, and her mother’s kitten heels and hot bakery in the city. She hated dough.
She’d kick off her shoes, pulling her feet into her lap, waiting silently for her favorite moment in the plane ride: when the image of Saint-Louis—a sight ever-softened with red dust, of white and Black folks, cars and horses moving slowly through crowded streets—would give way to the Atlantic Ocean, a sparkling, flat jewel that belonged to her and her father alone.
“Be patient with the world, Sokhna. We are not all as swift as you,” he would tell her.
And so, on the day that she fled her father’s office in tears, upon reaching the tarmac, she instinctively opened the door to his favorite jet: a sparkling Bréguet. She kicked off the brake, pulling the small plane out into the open lot. The handle was wet; it still reeked of those chemicals in the yellow buckets the men threw over the planes in the mornings. She lifted the loose gear, and it took her straight into the air, an easy, faultless lift; all the time of watching her father fly had made aviation second nature to her. She was surprised to find herself aboveground so quickly. Then she felt fear.
It was a dreary afternoon, and the fog hadn’t cleared. The cockpit quickly grew cold, and she became blinded by the thickness of the clouds. She took her hands from the wheel. They were trembling.
Her father had told her once before that the plane could go some ways away.
“How far?” she’d asked.
He’d hesitated to answer. “Not too far.”
“How about to Paris?”
“Not unless the pilot was very, very foolish,” he’d said, suspecting her.
Now up in the air, on her own for the first time, there was nothing above or below but a piercing whiteness that led to more whiteness, a huge tunnel of loose, whirling clouds that looked to be made from smoke rather than air.
The plane plunged downward, throwing her through the layers of the atmosphere. When the sun pierced through the whiteness, she saw the edge of Mauritania. She knew it by the strip of scant trees that separated it from Senegal. She saw the sparkle of the water as she descended rapidly toward it. She turned the wheel to the left, holding it in place with all her might.
She strained and grunted, keeping the wheel to the left until the plane followed.
When it steadied in the air again, she laughed with relief.
As she landed, she smiled at her father, who was standing with two men on the tarmac.
She opened the door and put her foot to the ground, dizzy, feeling the earth’s motion. She laughed again in awe of herself.
Before she could reach for her father, a security man had her by the arm.
“Come with us, miss.”
“Where are you taking me? Père!” she screamed.
“You’re under arrest, miss,” the man said, dragging her inside.
By her father’s request, Sokhna was locked into one of the unused offices. The room was dark. There was only a desk and chair and old colonial maps, handwritten and heavily doodled on and edited, zones retraced, extracted, redefined as the country resisted independence.
At first, she was too in awe of her feat to contemplate the realities of jail, but then worry settled in. By the time her father entered, claiming that he’d bailed her out on the condition she commit to attending flight school, she agreed.
As her father’s condition worsens, Sokhna spends more and more time at the airport. Her mother begrudgingly allows her to forgo most of her sophomore year at Catholic school to complete her flight-school courses.
Each Friday, as soon as her classes are over, she meets him at his office.
“Let’s go flying, Père.”
One day they go, for what turns out to be the last time, through the clouds. There is very little turbulence, not even any birds about, but her father struggles to bring the plane to an even balance in the sky. They are both silent as he struggles, as if speaking will reveal what both of them can already see.
He turns the plane around well before they reach the water, cutting the journey to half of its usual time. When he lands, they still don’t speak. She opens her door and descends. But when she is far away from the plane, she turns back and catches him banging the yoke hard enough to break it, her father’s screams muted by the plane’s steel body.
54. THE WORK IN PILOT SCHOOL doesn’t come nearly as easily to her as her high school classes. She studies incessantly to pass the first two courses, Aerodynamics I and II, usually staying up until 4:00 a.m., when she goes into the kitchen to watch her mother and her six bakers separate two hundred eggs in time with the tick of the broken Swiss grandfather clock that her mother keeps around for its beauty. They slice up cold butter into enough cubes to fill a bathtub. Occasionally stirring a pot of ganache, or testing the icing for the correct stiffness, her mother mostly supervises the bakers and completes paperwork at the breakfast table.
Sokhna opens the shuttered window and sits on the deep mahogany ledge, watching from over her mother’s shoulder as she checks off inventory in the old thick P&L notebook for the bakery. It’s filled with pages of her perfect cursive, without one scratch or blotch of ink. Sokhna’s mother, a Martiniquais with her same chestnut complexion, hums old plantation songs that she remembers her own mother humming back in Fort-de-France.
They are songs the enslaved once sung about deliverance. Songs about sky and sun. But the sky and sun are places Sokhna goes to almost every day. She’s stared into their infinity, and it bothers her that the songs of the enslaved put so much stock in reaching the sky: a place no safer, no more welcoming for humankind, no more forgiving than Earth.
Still, when neither of them can bear to hear her father vomiting upstairs or coughing through another morning, they hum together to drown out the sound. The maids, two slight Jola women from Thiès who quietly wipe up behind the bakers, have never heard such a sour song. They have never heard of slaves or slavery. They smile and wait for the terrible tune to end.
After she passes her first two courses, Sokhna starts to lose interest in pilot school, her mind drifting again and again to her father, who is stuck in his office across the hall, a senior pilot unable to fly his plane. Every time she hears another engine start outside on the ground, her heart breaks, knowing that it couldn’t be him. She spends her bathroom breaks passing his door, looking through the keyhole to make sure he’s still alive. Most times he seems like himself, listening to the radio, reading documents. But sometimes she finds him staring straight ahead at nothing. She tries not to overthink, to not read into his recent mood swings, his vomiting, his disinterest in her mother’s cooking, as signs that he’s slipping away, but sitting in class she can think of nothing else.
Sometimes she falls asleep in class. Other times she calls out answers to every question with a sarcastic response. She turns in assignments early, or not at all, and the instructor is losing patience.
The instructor, in his early twenties, has not long returned to Saint-Louis from Paris. Just getting from his apartment—a mosquito-infested bedroom at the top floor of a municipal building—through the unmitigated traffic of the city each morning exhausts him.
He’d been shocked to see Sokhna when he looked out on the first day: a young dark girl in the back row of his class. A class exclusively of men who were at least eighteen: three of them biracial, one of them as dark as her, the rest white.
“Sir, she’s quite … disruptive,” the instructor finally says to her father when he meets him one evening.
“Disruptive …” Sokhna’s father could think of no better word to describe the instructor himself, a white man—no—a white boy, named Claude, who’d been flown in by the mother country overnight to take his job. He’d expected to be replaced as his symptoms worsened, but he’d hoped to pass the position on to one of the other Wolof men he’d trained for years. Not Claude.
Still, it is his responsibility to mentor the Frenchman, so he does.
“Actually, sir,” Claude corrects him the next day as they walk out toward the plane lot, “I’m from Saint-Louis. I was born here.”
“My apologies,” her father says, with a smirk across his lips, though it was true that Claude’s ancestors had first arrived at the town’s coast on the Méduse in 1816, surviving the shipwreck that killed almost half of the passengers.
Sokhna’s father and Claude hear an engine start.
Their eyes go to Sokhna, who is sitting in her father’s old plane.
“Stop! Hey, stop!” Claude yells.
She doesn’t understand that her father has been officially stripped of all flying privileges, nor why, while she sits in his plane, the white man has something to say about it. She doesn’t even know that he’s talking to her.
“Père, come on!” she calls from the open window. Her father smiles back, but his eyes are empty with sadness. He shakes his head.
“Go with her,” he shouts to Claude. The young man turns around, and his gray eyes widen. “Don’t worry,” her father continues. “She’s a far better pilot than you.”
Claude approaches the plane, cursing to himself, remembering the warnings of his university roommates in Paris, their anxieties over the chain of African revolutions. “They’re taking over now,” one had said. “They’ve lost their heads.”
He pounds on Sokhna’s window, but she ignores him. He bangs louder, screaming over the engine.
“I have to come with you!”
“What?”
“I have to go with you!”
She looks at him: wiry and short, a heavy brown bang obscuring his eyes. She turns her attention back to the gears.
He opens the passenger-side door in a huff, slams it shut.
“How’s the fuel?”
“Why are you here?” she replies, without looking at him, flicking on the lights.
“Because … because I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he says, thinking over his life decisions. “Now check your fuel.”
Sokhna looks up.
“Release the—”
“I know, I know,” she says, dismissing him.
He’s forcing his back against his seat, his shoulders stiff and high at his ears.
But despite himself, he is taken with her. An intense admiration as she, at thirteen, tilts the plane into the air, steering them up into the sky with ease and confidence. A smoother takeoff than he could manage half the time. He’s never seen anything like her before. The round wooden beads at the ends of her braids clank on her shoulders as she turns her head to the left and the right, taking in the sky.
She flashes her full smile and says, “Don’t look down if you’re afraid.”