[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img] I hold a grudge.
An elephant has nothing on me.
My memory of slights and poor service is impeccable.
Twenty-one years ago, on Aug. 8, 1988, my mother bought me a first-class ticket on Delta Airlines. I don’t remember all of the other circumstances surrounding the flight, but I had to return to New York from Los Angeles in a hurry, and my round trip ticket on another airline couldn’t be salvaged.
Excited about my first time in front of the curtain, I bounded on the flight, an exuberant sixteen-year-old ready for a good flight where I could finally hear the in-flight movie for free.
As I pulled back the curtain, I glanced at my ticket while matching my seat number to the numbers running along the bulkhead, I ran into a flight attendant. Was I in the right location? she asked me.
I misunderstood, and told her my seat number. Then she looked me up and down and clarified. Was I sure I was supposed to be in first class?
I was sure. So I kept walking, the attendant offering no assistance on finding the seat. The next stewardess asked me the same question – but still with no direction toward the right location. I found my seat myself.
As this was long before the days of individualized, reclining seat pods, I was seated next to some woman addressing “thank you” cards for her wedding gifts. I just had pulled out my own book for entertainment and made myself comfortable when a third flight attendant approached me.
What I Really Wanted
Naively, I thought she’d offer me a beverage or the much-desired free headphones. Instead she, too, asked to see my ticket. She checked the numbers against the bulkhead and tossed my ticket in my lap, apparently satisfied that I hadn’t snuck up to the front.
Fortunately, I was able to put my ticket away after it was checked this one last time. The rest of the first-class cabin, all white, including my scribbling neighbor, never looked up and did not endure my ticket-checking woes.
After my five-hour flight, I stalked off the plane, disgusted with my Atlanta based crew. Although I was seated the entire time, I felt the same as when shopkeepers followed me around their stores or insisted upon searches of my backpack. The disrespect shown to me as a paying customer made that the worst flight of my young life.
I vowed never to fly Delta Airlines again.
Despite the overwhelming consolidation of airlines and the endless bankruptcies and reorganizations, I have always managed to find a flight from my origin to my destination without darkening Delta’s door.
Unfortunately, my one-woman boycott had to come to an end. The only way to get from Los Angeles to Myrtle Beach, for a vacation with my mother, came by way of Delta.
To avoid the airline would have increased the number of connecting flights from two to three or four. And having experienced my own twelve-hour tarmac nightmare last year – I thought it best to avoid an excessive number of takeoffs and landings.
A New Era? Not Quite
I am not so naïve to believe all the newspaper columnists and political pundits who have insisted that after the election of President Obama that we live a “post-racial” society, where Americans have “transcended” race. One only has to look at the recent incident involving Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the Cambridge police, or the magnifying glass the U.S. Census places on racial identification, to understand that the legacy of slavery and America’s addiction to racial categorization will linger for a long time.
But I must say, my flight on Aug. 8, 2009 was much better. Girding myself for a possible confrontation, I approached the first-class counter to check my bags and get a boarding pass for my flight. Rather than questioning me, the airline representative in her snappy red uniform kindly took my bags and printed my passes. Nor did the gate agent question me when I took advantage of the opportunity to board the plane ahead of coach-class passengers.
Rather than doing the ticket/bulkhead neck swivel, the flight attendant offered me cold water and a hot towel. Despite the endless problems with American airlines in this cost cutting era – it was a comfortable, uneventful flight. Whether this was due to the fact that there were African Americans other than me in Business Elite (no one seems to use the term “first class” anymore), that the Atlanta-based flight crew was as multi-cultural as our country, or that maybe, just maybe, things get better with time, I don’t know. But I had wound myself up for nothing.
To borrow a phrase from Paul Harvey, now the rest of the story.
Unfortunately, the American South does not seem to have progressed as quickly as Delta. I wish I could say that the service I’ve received during my first few days on the ground in South Carolina has been good as what I received on the plane. Suffice it to say that America still has a long, long way to go, and it shows.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
