Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [46]
“i have not written one word,” the Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad, paradoxically, wrote soon after September 11th, “no poetry in the ashes south of canal street.”
One of the people in the ashes south of Canal Street was Michael Richards, a U.S.-born sculptor of Jamaican ancestry who had created a bronze cast statue of himself dressed as an African American World War II combat pilot, a Tuskegee airman, with dozens of miniature airplanes shooting through his body. Richards had a studio on the ninety-second floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center and was there when the first plane struck the building at 8:45 a.m. He had spent the night working on, among other things, a piece showing a man clinging to a meteor as it plunges from the sky. Richards had been interested in aviation and flight and had used them as motifs in his work for many years.
I did not know Michael Richards, but being both terrified and intrigued by the folklore of flight, I admired his work, which sometimes seemed like visual depictions of characters in pieces of literature that I loved. His pierced Tuskegee airman reminded me of Toni Morrison’s flying insurance salesman in Song of Solomon, who wrote what must be one of the most eloquent farewell notes in the world, ending with “On Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me, I loved you all.”
Michael Richards’s Are You Down, a series of life-size sculptures of three fallen Tuskegee airmen, remind me of Ralph Ellison’s short story “Flying Home,” in which a young pilot crashes his plane and hurts himself, forcing him to ponder a lifelong love affair with airplanes. Winged shows two joined arms with feathers attached to them. Those arms too were Michael Richards’s, cast in bronze and eerily reminiscent of the men and women jumping from the towers on September 11th, with their arms flapping as though they were trying to fly.
Did Michael Richards know how he was going to die? Did he somehow sense that his own body would one day represent that of so many? Maybe he was clairvoyant, what some might call “double-sighted.” One can’t help but hope that like the old Africans, suddenly remembering that he had the gift of flight and seeing the airplanes heading for him, he stepped out of his earthly body and flew away. In any case, he surely must have known what we all instinctively know, that we must all die and that whenever it is we die, it is always a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime too soon.
“The poet turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “For through that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis . . . that within every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form.”
Michael Richards was a poet of bronze and stone. He was the sculptor of private spaces and public gardens, except his gardens were purposely filled with tar and ashes. His death was no more tragic than that of the nearly three thousand other people who also left behind fingerprints on half-filled glasses and lipstick traces on collars and strands of hair on brushes and combs, but he leaves behind something that speaks not only for himself