The Way Art Buoys Us
The first time I flew alone on an airplane I was five. I think it was late June 1977 right around the time after my birthday. I was headed to Montreal, Canada. Inside Charles de Gaulle airport, I clutched my mother’s hand and wore a white plastic pouch, or maybe it was orange, around my neck with my important documents. When we got to the glass escalators, which looked like long transparent serpents my mother bent down and kissed me goodbye.
“This is it,” she said, “Bon été, ma puce. Have a good summer, little flea. I will write to you. See you in September.”
I might have nodded.
My mother pivoted in her high heels, vintage dress fluttering above her ankles, then she hugged her best friend, Annick, who’d come to support her because my father was probably already in Cairo waiting for my mother to arrive in order to begin their lovers travels.
I stepped onto the silver moving stairs, got onto my tiptoes and grabbed the railing, which at the time must have been high for me even though I was already tall, then I slid my pinkie too far around the rubber pinching my skin. By the time, I’d sucked the bright red spot on the pad of my finger, the pain of the pinch diminishing, a flight attendant was welcoming me to Air Canada at the top of the escalators. At least, that’s how I remember it.
As this new stranger with a high bun and wings pinned to her navy jacket and I walked through the couloirs with beige porcelain tiles on the walls and a faint stench of urine smell wafting out of the men’s restrooms, I thought of my mamie who would be waiting for me on the other side of the flight along with Ricky, my cousin who only spoke English. A language I did not yet know. I longed for the outside, for the fresh air and the trees, and I also wondered if I would recognize Mamie and Ricky as it had been a whole year since I’d seen my Canadian family.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in my airplane seat next to two boys who were 12 and rowdy that I was glad for my colored pencils and paper. I tucked my feet under my butt, brought the tray table down, and for the whole voyage drew little girls with patent leather shoes being devoured by transparent serpents. The beasts spat the tall girls out into jungles and oceans and onto glaciers. They lost their overalls and wet their red T-shirts and pixie haircuts though somehow the girls all survived. I also drew the lights inside the cockpit because when the co-pilot heard a five-year-old was traveling alone, he invited me to stand next to him, and as I craned my neck upward the ceiling looked like a Christmas tree.
This was the first time art buoyed me.
Even at five, I used the pencils and paper as a portal, a way to disassociate from the uncertain and scary present. I would do it again later with ballet when I moved from Paris, France, to Richmond, Virginia, at age 14. In the studio the fact that I did not speak English did not matter and as I chassé’d and pirouetted and relevé’d, my Freed point shoes pushing out just so, the girl with braces shoving my books off my desk and telling me to boat home in my English class disappeared.
Many years later, my daughter, Kayla, during a bout of depression drew several hours a day and gifted her book of drawings to the high school teacher who supported her. She made strange clocks, narrow doorways, and boats slipping on waves. Now, Kayla works at the innocence clinic in Ann Arbor where she met a client who spent 46 years in prison for a crime he never committed. A few months after first being incarcerated, Richard told Kayla that he was given water colors. He began painting and now finally lives as a free man and as a working artist. Richard told Kayla that his drawings saved him, that the long hours spent in captivity would have been unbearable if not for this portal he could enter, these worlds he could imagine and make brighter.
Recently, I watched a painting done by AI with smoke and waves of various blue, red, and yellow hues hanging some place fancy, and all I could think of was how a robot does not transform from its art—does it?—and how the result of a project is, of course, significant yet secondary to the human process, to the art saving us as we create it. During the pandemic, I wrote If I Promise You Wings, the story of a girl who is salvaged by the art of feathers, by the literal making of wings. The wings protect her as she and her story protected me from the tragic reality of COVID.
Check out A. K. Small’s If I Promise You Wings here:
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I thought then that I had learned everything I needed about being buoyed by art, that I was a veteran, but then I caught COVID for the first time at the end of September 2023. I was in the midst of a deep revision for a new novel, and as my fever reached 102.9, and lasted on and off for six days, I lay on my recliner in my study trembling and aching, yet surrounded by my plumes, my art, and my books, by hundreds of authors who have shaped me over decades, and as the fever ebbed and flowed inside me like a river, I sat and opened my laptop to wedge my way once again into the portal, into 15th century France. For minutes or perhaps hours as I wrote I forgot about my sickness. My 51-year-old body did not ache as I was once again 17 and COVID free, and far more afraid of catching the plague while galloping the French countryside on an old rouncey named Geezer in search of Joan of Arc and freedom.
Yesterday, I listened to Jesmyn Ward speak to Oprah and the novelist said that writing Let Us Descend, her newest novel, helped her cope with the grief of losing her partner during COVID. I do not know Jesmyn Ward personally, but I suspect that ensconced alongside her main character the author began to breathe again. If ever so slightly. I’m beyond sorry to hear of her loss, yet am thankful for her honesty and vulnerability as an artist, and for yet another Jesmyn Ward novel. I think of Matrix too, of Lauren Groff needing to create a world entirely of women in order to find comfort during the unfathomable Trump years.
Seems even the masters are buoyed by their art.
I do not know what will become of me and my art in the months and years to come. Mostly, I see myself head down in my study deep in a novel set inside Notre Dame or Versailles, a cardinal sometimes flying on a pine branch near my windows, its red feathers distracting me. And just like that little girl on the airplane, whatever it is I am battling—an illness, loss, anxiety, sadness about our grave state of the world—the rhythm of the words, the unexpected images, and the story unfolding onto the blank page will help keep me afloat and perhaps even save me.
At least, I’m counting on it.
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