So Out of Style It's in Again —
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Volume II, Issue I - April 2011

I retired my garment bag only a little more than a year ago. This was after flying to Iowa to meet my father-in-law to be. Until that point I had been stubborn about luggage on wheels. This was still true after multitudinous instruction from George Clooney on the necessity of compact rolling luggage in the then ubiquitous runs of “Up in the Air” trailers. I just couldn’t understand how people traveled without hangers. I’d never cared about fitting into bulk overhead. I’d always trustfully waited in baggage claim, even while noting my garment bag was nearly always the sole on the turnstile. This made it easy to grab from the chute, though hard to carry the long way out the door to the cab. Free carts in American airports were always for me a true delight to catch.


Though the Iowa trip was only a few days in late autumn and could justifiably be squeezed into a medium North Face duffel, I was going to meet for the first time my husband’s only living parent. To meet who is now my ninety two year old native Iowan father-in-law, retired and living in a Masonic home, I needed my pleated plaid skirts and silk blouses to arrive crisp. Or so I thought. My husband—then fiancé—and I were staying at the historic arts and crafts style Hotel Pattee, an anomaly, the only landmark in small town Perry, population 8000. Outside of nearby Des Moines I wasn’t expecting to see many African Americans like myself, but there was one leaving the hotel as we arrived, and I was so relieved to see her that I didn’t feel the usual physical awkwardness of hefting my garment bag to the hotel desk.

After having two meals across the table from my father-in-law to be who failed to look me in the eye even once, I saw how pointless it was to have been so selective from my closet. My husband told me his father had been around black people before and had even voted for President Obama, but what he hadn’t considered was the year his father had been born, and what kind of norm “being around black people” must have been for a white small town Midwesterner of his generation. I couldn’t imagine that he would make it to our wedding, which was true—he’d insisted upon his fear of flying.

Since I’d grown up in Los Angeles with well-traveled parents, “fear of flying” was an Erica Jong title. For my father’s many business trips, and my mother’s many accompaniments, they had two hall closets devoted to luggage, the garment bags being of most importance. All suits, shirts, dresses and gowns were packed on hangers to go straight from the bag into the hotel closet. My parents were born in the thirties, and dressing well as African Americans went without saying; it spoke as much to survival as it did to success. My father still flies in blazers with never a rubber sole on his feet, my mother in knits and patent leather. And though I’ll fly to a tropical destination in flipflops or to cold spots in Uggs, I still have enough of that “dress presentable” ingrained to appear clotheshorsey. Dressing presentable is self-defense from extra conflict and scrutiny. My sister once told the anecdote of a white liberal attorney colleague who excitedly extolled what he thought were the unpretentious virtues of New York’s Park Plaza Hotel, where he’d stayed for the first time. He said, “They even let in normal people, there were two black guys in sweats,” which was his description of the men who shared the elevator. This colleague was only delighted to deliver the punch line of how wrong he’d been when he discovered the black guys in sweats were Will Smith and a friend post gym. My sister expressed her disappointment in his failure to realize even an iota of what he’d said.

I was far from comfortable at the thought of visiting my father-in-law again, but we returned fourteen months later to snowy Iowa. I had rolled into balls old turtlenecks, jeans and a thick sweater to fit into a wheeled bag, one of a wedding gift set of five that store like Russian dolls. Upon arrival I was in no need of a prized free airport cart. I could be as nonchalant about them as I was overseas. In the museum that is the Hotel Pattee, having forgotten my sweats, I rode the elevator in a hotel robe to and from the sauna, not caring who worried whether the Pattee let in "normal blacks" or just the likes of Will Smith's sister.

During both meals my father-in-law, who is now suffering from early stage dementia, looked me twice in the eye, and brought up out of nowhere the “first professional negro ball player” before color lines were drawn, Bud Fowler. What he thinks of me, even though I’m his daughter-in-law, is no longer my concern. I can only be there for my husband and his worry for his father’s health. The inevitabilities of life aside, I was feeling happy to have joined the lot of the twenty first century and taken the weight of garment baggage off my shoulders. All baggage can be dropped to the floor and more easily dragged around.

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