I also had the option of attending specialized high schools, such as Aviation High School in Queens or Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, just steps away from the Twin Towers. When I first heard about Aviation High, I was very excited as I thought I could get a jumpstart on learning to fly before college, but my initial excitement waned when I learned that they specialized in aircraft maintenance, not in flying. I considered Stuyvesant because it was one of the more prestigious high schools in the city, and graduating from it virtually guaranteed any student their choice of college. However, the prospect of getting up extra early in the morning to take the bus to the Staten Island Ferry terminal, taking the ferry across New York Harbor, and then walking from the ferry terminal to the school and doing the same thing in reverse after school, every day for the next four years did not particularly excite me. Susan Wagner High or simply Wagner as we called it, had a program called the Scholar’s Academy, which was just a fancy name for their honors program, run by a Miss Kirsch. The brochures described the Scholar’s Academy as a kind of school within a school and promised a rigorous program in which if I did well, I would virtually have my pick of colleges. This was the same thing that Stuyvesant promised, minus the epic trek to school and back every day, and so after much deliberation, I chose Wagner.
High school
I met her on the first day of high school. She was the prettiest, sweetest girl I’d ever seen. She had long brown wavy hair, the most beautiful smile, and the cutest laugh. Her name was Jennifer, and I was elated to learn that she would be in most of the same Scholar’s Academy classes with me, which meant I would get to see and talk to her throughout the day. As the weeks went by and I got to know her better, I liked her even more, but couldn’t find the nerve to tell her. I was afraid she wouldn’t feel the same. I had never been much of a “ladies’ man” and got nervous and tongue-tied around any girl I liked, so I settled for being the friend, while hiding my true feelings out of fear of rejection. Starting with my first big crush on Erica from Mr. Kuck’s fifth grade class, continuing through I.S. 27, and now high school, I had been trying to overcome a feeling of inadequacy around girls. I felt that I was not desirable enough, tall enough, or handsome enough to attract the attention of the girls I liked, a feeling I still struggle with sometimes. I envied the guys who could just walk up to any girl and start talking to them, but I wasn’t one of them. I wished I could’ve be like “The Fonz” from one of my favorite television shows, Happy Days who, at the snap of his fingers, would have the girls all come running to him. However, no matter how much I snapped, they never came running.
Soon after school started, couples started forming, and love (the adolescent kind of love that fourteen-year-olds feel) was in the air. Jennifer did not have a boyfriend, but I thought she was too pretty and popular ever to be interested in me. She was a white Jewish girl from a nice neighborhood, and I was a black kid living in the projects. Having learned the subtle, unwritten rules of society, especially as they related to interracial couples in the States, it seemed a lost cause even to try. How could she possibly ever be into me? I thought. However, socioeconomic class issues and race aside, I was just a boy who liked a girl (a lot), and I promised myself that one day before we graduated, I would find a way to tell her.
My four favorite classes during my freshman year were English, biology, gym, and band, in which I continued to play the trumpet. I thoroughly enjoyed the novels we read in English class, such as Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, JD Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”. My love of reading made me look forward to that class every day, and discussions about the novels were always very lively. I was one of the weird kids who actually enjoyed writing essays and book reports, eschewing the “Cliff’s Notes” versions, which were smuggled into school and sold by some enterprising students. I discovered that I was more verbally inclined and stronger in English than in math or science, but I did my best to get through geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and chemistry. I knew that my intended profession involved quite a bit of math, but I hoped that since I would be flying the airplanes and not designing them, that I would be able to escape the more involved math that Aeronautical Engineers had to know. Whatever the case, I resolved to put in whatever extra time and effort was needed to get through math and science. However, English class was a joy, and much like anything one truly enjoys, it ended all too quickly each day, and it was off to math class.
The director of the Scholar’s Academy, Miss Kirsch, taught biology, and I quickly discovered I had an aptitude for it. She was very passionate about her subject and put lots of work into her lectures. She used visual aids and different kinds of media to keep the class fresh and interesting, and her passion was contagious. As I look back, she, like Mr. Kuck before her, encouraged me to dream big, saying that if I worked hard, nothing could keep me from becoming a pilot one-day.
My band teacher Mr. McCarthy, a tall, slim, grey-haired Irish gentleman in his early fifties, was also passionate about his class and had an intense love for classical music, which he tried his best to transfer to his students. While growing up in 1980’s New York City, Betty and I had been at the epicenter of the rise of Hip-Hop and had grown to love it with a passion. Classical music grew to become a very close second for me and still is to this day, in large part due to Mr. McCarthy and my years in the high school band.
I dove into high school fully aware that I was less than four years away from starting college and my flying lessons. From the very beginning of high school, the dreaded Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) had been looming large on the horizon because along with my high school grades, it would be used by colleges to decide whether to admit me. Knowing that doing well in my classes and on the SATs would be the key to my future dream of flying, helped me to stay focused. With my goal in mind, I settled into my daily routine of waking up early, taking the thirty-minute bus ride to school, going to my classes, taking the thirty-minute bus ride home, doing my school assignments, watching a little television, going to sleep, and starting the cycle again the next day. Mom and Dad always reminded my siblings and me that our education was something no one could ever take away from us.
Back to the past
In the summer of 1989, before the start of my junior year, Mom and Dad arranged a family vacation to Haiti. This would be my first time back in nine years and the first time that all seven of us would be there together. The trip was planned to last six weeks, and my siblings and I were excited because we would be staying in our own house. While saving up to buy a house on Staten Island, my parents had also been sending money to Haiti throughout the 1980s for the construction of a house, which my dad’s cousin Arnold, an architect, was supervising. It was a large, two-storey, four-bedroom house. It had a balcony that wrapped all the way around the second level. Construction had begun on the house when I was in the seventh grade, and as progress was being made, I brought photos of it to school to show my friends in part to ease my feelings of inadequacy at living in the projects as if to say, “See, I have a nice house too!”
As the day of our departure neared, Betty and I talked excitedly about all the fun we were going to have with our many cousins and about how cool it was going to be having a maid to cook, clean the house, and wash the dishes for us. For me, there was a heightened sense of anticipation, as this would be my first time flying since I had first arrived in New York almost a decade earlier. The flight back to Haiti was just as mesmerizing as that first flight had been, and I stared out the window pretty much the whole time and fantasized about the day I would be sitting in the cockpit.
Over the prior nine years living in New York, my Kreol had slowly been growing weaker from disuse, and although I still understood and spoke it, I had ironically developed an accent in my native language. Although my parents often spoke to me in Kreol at home, I usually replied to them in English, and we had long conversations with them speaking in Kreol and me replying in English. In the build-up to our trip to Haiti, I was worried about how my family and friends in Haiti would react to the fact that the little boy they knew who had left only nine years earlier was now speaking his native language with an accent. I wondered how the country would look after so many
