Published on 26th January, 2003

Going on to Detroit

By Steven Malik Shelton 

The plane accelerated down the runway and lifted upwards toward the pale blue expanse of sky over Atlanta. I gazed out the port hole and saw the great city shrinking beneath me. Greenish brown patches of land, the winding and cube like thoroughfares, the red tile roofs of buildings and the sight of skyscrapers in the distance; an abiding testament to the financial prosperity and the social decadence of the southern metropolis. Thoughts crossed my mind that not long ago, chattel slavery had existed and flourished under these same southern skies and brave men from the opposing armies of North and South, Union and Confederacy, had fought and died in these same thoroughfares. Eventually the city disappeared beneath me, obscured by the clouds, and my thoughts turned to other things. 

The atmosphere  in the airliner seemed artificial, transfused. Periodically my ears would pop because of the air pressure. A flight stewardess, her face frozen in a perpetual smile, came by with a lunch cart. She was pretty, her complexion a smooth honey brown . She smelled like jasmine and her eyes hinted at soft summer nights. Yet there was something phoney and superficial about her, like a manikin propped up in a store window. I smiled back at her as she served me my meal, feeling awkward and clumsy in the small space, yet admiring her dexterity and balance. I leaned back in my chair and thought of Detroit. Although I had not been there in fourteen years, Detroit was never far from my mind. I was raised there. Detroit was my home and now, after a long interval, I was returning to the city I considered home. I realized that the fourteen years I'd lived in L. A. had left an indelible impression on me. The sunshine, the orange and palm trees, the wide range  of ethnic and cultural diversity, the different races of its people; Hispanic, African, Asian, Indian, Caucasian, then I was reminded of the sage who said, "There is only one race, the human race.'' 

Yet like an obscure dream from which one awakens after a restless sleep, I could find no significance in the memories. And although there was much about L.A. that I cherished, I had always felt like a stranger there. I thought about my mother whom I had not seen for over a decade and a half. I remembered how she looked the last time I saw her. She was fifty years old at the time but still youthful, energetic, and beautiful. Los Angeles had beckoned me with its promise of opportunity and speculation. I felt a need to traverse its avenues, to bask in its western sun, to listen to its rich diversity of sound and to achieve financial success and prosperity. I had not found in L.A. everything that I had sought to find but I had found Islam and this was more than I had ever hoped for. 

And now soaring through the clouds with my face turned toward Detroit, I sensed a new vista opening up before me, but a vista still held together by the vista of my past. I felt mysteriously a vague sense of melancholy consume me. Melancholy not so much for what I had left behind in L.A, but for what I had left unfulfilled ahead of me in Detroit. And what would I find there in Detroit? Even among the members of my family? Would there be love or indifference? Happiness or shattered hopes? Beauty or bitterness? Is home a place where love resides? Or is it a place of barely disguised hatred and contempt, concealed uneasily beneath a facade of goodwill? These thoughts made me wrap my jacket tightly around me, as if to fortify myself against a bitter cold. Time had laid its uncompromising hands on me, had made me weary of restlessness and uncertainty. I longed for something assuaging, something familiar to stabilize my listless, wayward heart. And home, instead of becoming less a reality because of my absence, had become more real and more crucial. And I thought of my grandmother who, when I told her that I was reluctant to return home because I had no material possessions to give her, no money or gifts with which to bestow upon her responded, ''Come on home, you'll be the gift.'' 

I looked at the vision of my face reflected in the glass of the port window, and I remembered a time years previously, when I as a youngster of fifteen, had stared at my image in the glass of a city bus. I had felt so alive, so strong, so full of vigour and hope. And now my face stared back at me, decades older. The same face but wiser and more cynical. But then I thought of Islam, my new-found faith, and I could discern a deep indecipherable curtain, or an essence of light and shadow that separates the past from the present, and the present from the future, and the future from eternity. And in the quiet and in the solitude of my thoughts I heard someone say: 

"You may cry in the night sometime, but if you hold on and keep the faith, I guarantee you that there will be brightness and beauty in the morning."