On Air Travel: Pat-Downs, Pissing, and Passport Stamps

Flying Au Naturale

Connie Porter

Reading the New York Times this past August, I was drawn to the headline, “With Hair Pat Downs, Complaints Of Racial Bias.” Two African-American women, Timery Shante Nance and Laura Adele, were both stopped by TSA agents this summer.

Ms. Nance was stopped at the security checkpoint in the San Antonio airport, Ms. Adele in the Seattle-Tacoma airport. Though neither woman had set off any alarms, both were stopped and TSA agents felt they needed to pat down their hair—their natural hair.

One might argue that these are isolated incidents. Since we live in a post-9/11 world, for matters of security, we must allow the TSA and its employees to set up procedures that assure that we are all safe. If the TSA deems natural hair on black women as a potential threat to the nation, who is to say it isn’t?

Being a black woman who wears her hair natural, I know that black women’s natural hair can be big and thick, so wound in dark clouds of twists and braids that maybe it looks to an untrained eye as if we are hiding something in our hair. But after clearing metal detectors, what exactly is suspect? What could we be hiding in our hair?

Is the baby Moses asleep in our reedy dreads? Is there a smuggled lorikeet nesting in our braids?

Perhaps our hair itself is suspect. Terrifying. That hair. Unbent by curling irons, untouched by relaxers, straightening combs, or flat irons. Our natural hair has the profile of a potential terrorist and has made it onto the “Do Search” list.

The “Do Search” list isn’t new. It existed pre-9/11. I know because I was on it when I began flying au naturale.

Two years before then, I was happy to be nappy, flying frequently to promote a novel and children’s books I had published. If you were behind me, you wouldn’t have noticed me, a small dark-skinned black woman with an Eddie Bauer briefcase, a bottle of water, and a head full of natural twists. You wouldn’t have known that I was a one-woman delay. My stop would’ve seemed random to you. Except that it wasn’t. Virtually every time I stepped a foot through security, I was pulled aside for additional screening. Like Ms. Nance and Ms. Adele, I passed through the metal detector, my bag made it through the x-ray—then I was pulled aside.

It became frustrating, and more, something that angered me. I began observing that during these checks, I was the only one pulled out of line, or if someone else was, it was because he or she had set off the alarm.

When I told one of my brothers about it, he said, “They probably think you’re a drug courier.”

I laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of the thought. “Me!? I have never done an illegal drug in my life.”

My dark-skin and nappy-hair twice-monthly flights were adding up to the screeners—not as me being an author, but a drug mule.

When I was in college, I used to get asked by male students of the African Diaspora where I was from—Jamaica, Haiti, Ethiopia, Cameroon? One young man didn’t believe me when I told him that I was from Lackawanna, New York, and that my parents were from Alabama. My answer angered him. He insisted I was a Jamaican, as was he. Worse, I was a self-hating Jamaican whose family had instructed me to lie about my heritage. That was his theory, and he was sticking to it.

We all are capable of formulating theories, and sticking to them. They don’t have to be based in fact, just our beliefs. In college, I didn’t realize I was the face of the Diaspora, the embodiment of all the women they thought I was, and who I knew I was. I was from Africa, east and west, a sojourner through the islands of the Caribbean, a daughter of the Second Great Migration of African-Americans from South to North.

Perhaps Chaka said it best—to these young men, I was “every woman.”

To airport security, I was that woman. The one to be stopped and searched. The one who was suspect. A long-lost daughter whose lineage crossed through Kush—was I carrying Kush now, perhaps, in my hair?

With a growing intolerance of my “random” searches, I informed my mother that the next time I was stopped, I was flying au naturale: I would jump on the belt at security and strip. Being a well-raised, Southern woman of a certain age, she said, “Well, you wouldn’t want to do that.”

I didn’t do that; instead, the very next time I flew and was stopped, I confronted the screener who stopped me and asked why I was being stopped.

“Ma’am this is a random check,” he assured me as he swabbed my briefcase.

“No, this isn’t. As a matter of fact, you are the same agent who stopped me the last time I flew.”

“No I wasn’t,” he insisted.

“Yes, you are, and you have stopped me before.” This is when I assured him. “You may check thousands of passengers, and don’t remember them. I remember you, and I want your full name. I’m reporting you.”

He refused to give me his full name, but that didn’t matter. I reported him anyway, wrote a letter of complaint to his employer. I never received a reply.

I was still stopped, searched, and had my bag swabbed. I became stoic, feeling as though I had at least said my piece.

When 9/11 happened, and airport security was raised to code ridiculous, I wondered how much had been missed by screeners leading up to that fateful day. Who had they missed, what had they missed while believing some theory about the threat level of my hair? And now, while the au naturale hair of black women has taken on a new and heightened threat level of its own, who is breezing past them? Unsuspected, unsearched, sleek-haired and dressed to kill.

* * * *

It All Happened With Courtesy

Jess Stoner

It was 2000, and I had arrived at Reagan National Airport with enough time to have a beer before my flight.

It was only a few months after the Music City Miracle had yet again stuffed the hearts of every Buffalo Bill’s fan into the garbage disposal, where there was already a spoon, and flipped the switch. It was the fourth quarter of the Wildcard Game, and the Tennessee Titan’s Lorenzo Neal handed the ball off to Frank Wycheck, who tossed a (it wasn’t a) lateral to Kevin Dyson, who ran down the sidelines for the game-winning seventy-five-yard touchdown. I had watched the loss alone, living in Washington D.C., far away from the lake effects and lip-chapping winds of Western New York, my home.

I piqued two business travelers’ attention when I asked the bartender if she had Labatt Blue. Or maybe it was the denim skirt, the thickly knitted turtle-necked tank top, or that I finished my first beer in less than five minutes. Whatever it was, we got to commiserating and they got to buying me more. Five beers and 30 minutes later, I heard the last call for my flight.

There wasn’t enough time to find the ladies room. The flight was only 45 minutes long. And anyway, there would be a bathroom on the plane.

It was on takeoff that I realized my mistake. It was a small plane; there were less than fifty seats available and each passenger had their own row. The flight attendant, who seemed personally offended there weren’t more of us, told us where the emergency exits were and that the “Fasten Seatbelts” light would never go off. I looked to the back: there was no sign that the bathroom wasn’t occupied. There was no sign of a bathroom, period.

I began to pray for prevailing winds. Or whatever winds make you arrive more quickly at your destination. Twenty-five minutes into the flight, I stared out into the clouds, willing the announcement of the initial descent, and began to cry. I remembered a scene from The Simpsons, when Grampa Simpson held it in too long and his kidneys burst. The pain. I remember the pain. A part down there, near a part that I liked and wished no harm to, was about to burst. My swollen, ripe bladder pushed muffinly against the waist of my skirt.

And I thought: I’ll just pee a little bit. No one will know. It’ll relieve the pressure and—I shifted uncomfortably and promised myself I would prove false the long-proven fact that you cannot just pee a little bit.

The few seconds I let it loose were nearly orgasmic—my eyes drooped sensually, my shoulders relaxed. Until I closed the dam and felt the warm. And the pain began again, though this time worse: if registered in decibels, it would’ve resulted in the death of hearing tissue. I practiced square breathing through the tears. Focused on the tray table in front of me. And realized what I would have to do.

I quickly asked for another Diet Coke before the flight attendant strapped herself in for landing. And I peed myself. Time seemed to dilate. I gloriously, gloriously pissed myself, the urine pooling between my thighs, breaking the barrier of the denim and seeping into the seat. When it finished, my mind clear and my bladder empty, I knew what needed to happen next.

I moved the arm rest, scooted over to the middle seat, and poured my entire drink on that place I had ruined. And then, a different kind of miracle happened: I found scented hand-sanitizer in my backpack, squirted it on top of the wet to cut the smell, and prepared for landing.

I exited the plane and said nothing. I had wiped down my legs with notebook paper. I would not draw attention to myself.

And then I proceeded to the bathroom, where I put my ass in front of the hand dryer and waited for my boyfriend to pick me up.

When Gérard Depardieu pissed himself before his plane had reached cruising altitude, he gave a warning to his fellow passengers, “Je veux pisser, je veux pisser.” A witness explained what happened next: “…and then he did it on the floor. No one said anything. It all happened with courtesy.”

And though Depardieu and I took different approaches, he didn’t piss himself so much as asked if he could go, was refused, and then pulled his junk out and let loose in the aisle. I feel we are forever bonded. A kindly father, an unlikely hero.

* * * *

Flight Benefits

Tony D’Souza

My mother worked reservations at United Airlines in Chicago before all those jobs were sent to India, and, not having any clue how fortunate I was, I grew up on planes. I have no idea how many millions of free miles I flew, but I did manage to visit 50 countries by the time my benefits ran out when I turned 25.

It was an odd experience for a kid from a middle-income family; while everyone else in our neighborhood was lucky to hit the skies to Disney or Cancun once a year, I could fly whenever I wanted. My parents started letting me take daytrips alone when I was 15. I remember flying to St. Louis just to buy a rare comic book. Another time a neighbor paid me $150 to fly to Portland and bring back an exotic breed of cat for her.

So much has changed about air travel; I remember when flying was a luxury experience, when the flight attendants were nice to you and everyone got a meal. Today, it’s as rough as hitchhiking and the planes are all beat to hell.

What I loved best was flying internationally, mostly because once you left the States, nobody cared how old you were, and there was always free booze on the planes and in the international lounges. I used to always get really drunk in those lounges. The best time was when I had a layover in Tokyo on my way to India in 1993. I was 18, I ended up drinking seven or eight Asahis with some business traveler from Houston wearing a cowboy hat. By the time I checked the boards for my flight to Singapore, I saw that I’d missed it. Missing a flight is no cause for concern when you fly for free; you simply hop the next one. Unfortunately, there was no next flight to Singapore that day.

I asked the Japanese United agents what I should do and they said I should spend the night in Tokyo. Fine, I said, but how much would that cost? Well, they said, Tokyo is very expensive. I might find a room for $200. Since that was almost half the cash I had, I shook my head and asked what else I could do. They said there was a last flight to Hong Kong, which was cheaper than Japan, so I hopped it.

My memory is pretty vague about what happened next, but I do remember drinking a couple vodkas on the plane, and later being helped up off the gritty airport floor by some Chinese soldiers, in British uniforms, carrying sub-machines guns. Then my passport was stamped; I know this because I still have that old passport with the stamp in it. Then I was in a cab, and somehow in a tiny room on a high floor of a beat-up hotel looking down at the lights of Victoria Harbor. There were a couple of dreadlocked French guys in the room with me smoking hash. I’m not sure how they got there. Then I was in a bar where a white chick was belly-dancing for all these Asian businessmen. When I tried to talk to her, she was Russian. I guess I said the wrong thing, because I got karate-chopped in the stomach by someone and thrown out.

Anyway, I ended up winning this dart contest in a British pub and met this Hungarian girl and we spent a few days shacked up in her filthy little Hong Kong tenement. Why a chick who could pass for American had to live as low as that, I didn’t understand, but I didn’t know about the conditions of Eastern Europe at that time. I just thought it was really romantic. She was a nanny for an English family, and we mostly spoke in pantomime. I’d lost my bag because I couldn’t remember the name of the first hotel, so I wore an I Love Hong Kong T-shirt I bought from a street vendor, plus some cheap sunglasses. But I had my passport and a few travelers’ checks. Me and the Hungarian had a fight about something and she kicked me out, so I went to the only safe place I knew: the airport.

All the flights out of Hong Kong were packed, so I got stuck sleeping in that airport for two nights. Then I got to Singapore and spent two weeks there trying to get to India because the flights were all full. One of the weeks I spent hunkered in the airport, trying to get on flight after flight and living on crackers and butter that I kept stealing from a sandwich shop. It wasn’t as bad as that Iranian who lived in Charles De Gaulle airport for 18 years, but it was shitty enough. International airports are cool when you’re just passing through, all duty-free cigarettes and hot chicks from everywhere. But when you’re trapped in one, it’s the worst sort of purgatory. There’s nowhere to clean up in any decent way. A few hours of the stress of being stuck, coupled with the benches designed to keep you from getting comfortable, and pretty soon you look like what you are for the moment: homeless. The second week I stopped trying the daytime flights, instead took the bus into downtown Singapore, walking along glitzy Orchard Road where I couldn’t afford to buy anything, and melting in the heat as I ate greasy noodles in cheap basement chop shops packed with Filipino laborers.

Finally, I made it to India after having to do something I never had before: buying a ticket. This was on India Airways and the plane had metal plates riveted to the fuselage so it looked like a motley quilt-work of patches, and the cabin was filled with fog. The flight attendants in saris ladled curry into bowls that people brought with them for the meal. It was like being in the bowels of a cargo ship; pretty much what flying in the States is like today.

I would travel like that, saving up just enough money at home cutting lawns and selling pot to let me live in the Third World cheaply for months. Then when my flight benefits ran out, I immediately joined the Peace Corps, which got me over to Africa for three years. I love to fly, still get a giddy feeling each and every time I board a plane, even if I try to look as experienced as all the snooty Business Class travelers lining up to walk over the tiny and ridiculous red carpet. I used to like talking to strangers on planes, but not anymore. The rest of it is the same for me to this day, the plane lifting up, your body feeling strange, the earth receding and receding until it all just has to be a dream. Anything still feels possible for that one moment.