Artist Faith Ringgold, born in 1930, created this glass mosaic for the 125th Street station of the New York City subway. Flying Home: Harlem Heroes and Heroines (Downtown and Uptown), depicts Harlem celebrities flying over city buildings. The title references the song “Flying Home,” composed by Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman, with lyrics written by Sid Robin.
Embedded in the notion of flight back to Africa is a double pathway, a realistic route leading to a suicidal plunge into the ocean that separates Old World from New and a mystical one enabling a spiritual journey back home. Legends about flying Africans often capitalize on both possibilities, leaving the question of survival open, perhaps in part because tragic plunge, like redemptive ascent, means release from the punitive labors of slavery. Flight offers a wonderfully compact double meaning, pointing not just to aeronautical activity but also to escape plain and simple. Some tellers are pessimists, revealing that “dey gits drown,” while others credit slaves with supernatural powers that enable them to return to their homeland.
In Rebel Destiny, Melville and Frances Herskovits published an account foundational for the Dombi clan among the Sarmacca living in the country now known as Suriname. Yankuso, one of the leaders of the clan, told the following story:
The Dombi Negroes had their man, too. He was Sabaku. He was leaving his people to run away from slavery. He was going into the bush. “If we do not meet again in life, we shall meet in death,” he said. He had no boat in which to cross the river, so he went to Yank’o, the buzzard, and he asked him to carry him. “I have no home, O Yank’o,” he said to the buzzard, “but I will get on your back, and there my home will be. You who fly high, who fly over water, and over the high bush, carry me to safety.” (256–57)
The buzzard spirit hovers over a broad array of sacred and profane cultural practices ranging from blessing and healing to singing and dancing. That same buzzard, invoked and animated by words alone, will have the power to effect material transformations when it appears in the folklore of the Georgia coastal regions, once again carrying a slave back home.
In the 1930s, the Georgia Writers’ Project interviewed residents about stories they had heard growing up and published them under the title Drums and Shadows. They collected a remarkable set of narratives about flying Africans, some harking back to what the Herskovitses had heard in Africa, some flavored by local customs and even commercial enterprises, including one about a con artist taking down payments for a set of wings. There were also tales about magical hoes and other farm tools that work by themselves, freeing slaves to go Somewhere Else.
In some of these oral accounts, slaves use incantatory language before taking flight; in others, they create a ring formation and run rapidly in circles. That tales about flying animated African American storytelling sessions becomes clear from Toni Morrison’s assertion that everyone in her social circles was familiar with the trope of people flying. There may be no living witnesses but there are many true believers. Morrison emphasizes the double meaning of flight as ascent and escape, with escape haunted by the specter of death: “That was always part of the folklore of my life; flying was one of our gifts. . . . It is everywhere—people used to talk about it, it’s in the spirituals and gospels. Perhaps it was wishful thinking—escape, death, and all that” (LeClair 1981).
Legends about flying Africans were linked historically to a group of Igbo (Ebo) captives whose faith embraced the notion that the soul returns to ancestral lands after the death of the body. In 1803 about seventy-five slaves were shipped from what is today Nigeria to Savannah, Georgia. The two coastal planters who purchased the slaves loaded them onto a small vessel named the York for transport to St. Simon’s Island. What happened after that is not entirely clear. The slaves, who had been confined belowdeck, evidently rebelled against their captors, seized control of the ship, and forced the agents into the water. The Igbos then either jumped overboard and drowned or “took to the swamp” and committed suicide collectively. Ebo Landing in Glynn County, Georgia, takes its name from the tragic events that unfolded there. The Igbo mutiny has powerful symbolic importance as an act of resistance and as the first freedom march in African American history. In 2002, the site, which has no historical marker, was consecrated by Chukwuemeka Onyesoh from Nigeria. “I came here to evoke their spirits,” Onyesoh movingly declared, “to take them back to Igboland.”*
Suicide was not an uncommon practice among captive slaves on ships embarked on the Middle Passage. One chilling document describes a voyage from the coast of West Africa to Trinidad, with 118 survivors of the roughly 250 originally on board. Here is a vivid description of the captain’s strategy for preventing slaves from committing suicide:
Some of the slaves on board the same ship . . . had such an aversion to leaving their native places, that they threw themselves overboard, on an idea that they should get back to their own country. The captain, in order to obviate this idea, thought of an expedient, viz: to cut off the heads of those who died, intimating to them, that if determined to go, they must return without their heads. The slaves were accordingly brought up to witness the operation. One of them seeing, when on deck, the carpenter, standing with his hatchet up ready to strike off the head of a dead slave, with a violent exertion got loose and flying to the place where the nettings had been unloosed . . . he darted overboard. (Abstract 1855, 53–54)
Given the squalid conditions onboard—shackles, darkness, hunger, disease—along with the barbaric behaviors on display, the logic of jumping into the ocean becomes compelling. Fears about the unknown (some captives believed that “these white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair” were driven by cannibalism) as well as the horrors of a lifetime in bondage meant that many resorted to any means possible—hanging, self-starvation, drowning—to escape (Piersen 1977, 147).
Three key figures operate in the narrative logic of flying African tales: the African armed with a “password,” the African American Slave as witness or participant, and the white Overseer, generally armed with a whip. As Olivia Smith Storey points out, the three figures each have a different relationship to language, technology, and power (Smith Storey 2004). The African’s command of language offers a form of resistance to the Overseer’s whip, and both instruments of power contrast with the Slave’s utter lack of resources. Lacking access to ritualized forms of language and to the blunt instruments of power, the Slave is left with nothing more than ordinary words to tell this odyssey of withdrawal. Yet those words are not mere breath in the wind but the start of what Zora Neale Hurston called “a whisper,” a whisper that transforms itself into hope and into the liberating power of songs and stories that create ancestral solidarity.
Moving and yet without any verbal pyrotechnics, the story “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” is told in a terse style that lacks affect but builds up to a crescendo of emotional ferocity. Enriching and expanding reports heard from elders, the story dramatizes hope and elaborates on the liberating forces of faith, imagination, solidarity, or whatever we choose to call the power that enables spiritual levitation and elevation. We become thunderstruck auditors of the poetry describing slaves in flight.
The words used to enable flight resonate with sacred mysteries. “Their talk was strange to him [the Overseer],” we read in “All God’s Chillen Had Wings.” “Kum . . . yali, kum buba tambe,” the old man Toby whispers to the young woman carrying a child, and she feels “the magic, the African mystery” in Virginia Hamilton’s rendition of the story (169). “Dey gabble, gabble, gabble, an nobody couldn unduhstan um,” we learn in Wallace Quarterman’s recollections of the tale (Drums and Shadows, 159).
“Powerful magical language,” Bronislaw Malinowski tells us, “is distinguished by a very high coefficient of weirdness” (220). Substituting performative energy for ordinary meaning, the unfamiliar sounds can take on transformational power, making it seem possible to do things with words, in this case to escape the whip and to become “light as a feather,” as we read in one tale var
iant. The word becomes more powerful than the lash, and the story itself enacts a trope familiar to us today as the pen being mightier than the sword. In real life, of course, all of this was impossible, and yet the lesson about language is more profound than it seems at first sight, for the ability to find the right words, to communicate with passion, and to speak in compelling ways is exactly what enabled change in the postbellum era.
It is not surprising that the story of the flying Africans flashes out to us from the words of a spiritual (“All God’s Chillun Got Wings”) as well as from novels, films, and musical productions. It has roamed freely, crossing geographical and cultural borders and making itself at home in new media, putting on new disguises, creating fresh moods, and transforming itself into “something else.” Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1997), Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1984), Richard H. Perry’s Montgomery’s Children (1984), and Gayl Jones’s Song for Anniho (2000) all rework aspects of the folktale, as do a number of films, ranging from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) to Haile Gerimsa’s Sankofa (1994). Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home,” a jazz composition inspired while he was nervously waiting to board a plane for the first time, was recorded in 1939, just a few years before Ralph Ellison published his short story “Flying Home.” Maya Angelou brilliantly plays off the title “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” in her autobiographical account, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). And who can forget Robert Hayden’s powerful poem “O Daedalus, Fly Away Home,” with its line about “weaving a wish and a weariness together to make two wings.”
If Jung, Freud, and other psychologists invoke flight as a universal expression of rapturous transcendence, African American writers inflect it differently, as a strategic means of escaping the bodily degradations and spiritual humiliations of slavery and its toxic legacies. Ralph Ellison complicates that point in multiple ways in his short story “Flying Home,” which begins when an African American pilot crashes his plane and is found in a rural region by an old farmer and his son (Ellison 1996, 147–73). Drawing on multiple discursive fields—mythical (the stories about Icarus and about the phoenix) and biblical (the fortunate fall and the prodigal son)—Ellison constructs a story that positions flight as an act that can be seen, by turns, as hubristic, predatory, self-destructive, and transcendent. Challenging the idea of univocal meanings or messages, Ellison gives us symbolically charged fields, with a buzzard turning into the avian savior of African lore but also into the lethal force that brings the pilot’s plane down.
Ellison’s story begins and ends with the sun. Todd, presumably one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, is blinded by it, unable to tell if the two faces staring at him after his crash are black or white. Jefferson, the old man who comes to his rescue, represents everything that has led Todd to deny his racial identity and cultural heritage, and yet he also becomes the means by which the young pilot reestablishes kinship ties, with a new “current of communication” (172) flowing between the two. As Ellison himself put it, “Todd comes to realize that Jefferson’s folk wisdom (his own confabulations about flying) prepares him for a new way of seeing, a way of transcending the internal slavery he has imposed upon himself as well as the actual restrictions that white society places on him.” The story ends with the buzzard, a “dark bird” that feeds off prey, gliding into the sun and glowing “like a bird of flaming gold” (173). Todd has secured for himself, through his hard-won understanding of flying as a failed means of self-actualization, a way back home.
In Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison writes out of deep conviction that identity is tied to ancestry and community. Milkman Dead, the protagonist of her novel, will not rise from the living dead until he recovers his past, remembering in ways that bring meaning and dignity to the lives of those who came before him. Returning to his ancestral roots, Milkman discovers exactly why he has always had a yearning to fly: “My great-granddaddy could fly . . . ! He didn’t need no airplane. . . . He just took off. . . . No more cotton! No more bales! No more orders No more shit! He flew, baby. Lifted his beautiful black ass up in the sky and flew on home” (328). Milkman himself is empowered by the story—whether he will soar like Pegasus or perish like Icarus is not clear—and takes flight. For Morrison, that freedom to soar has a price, and that price falls on children, who experience loss but also find restitution through story: “All the men have left someone, and it is the children who remember it, sing about it, mythologize it, make it a part of their family history” (Taylor-Guthrie 46).
Milkman finally understands the song sung to him by his aunt Pilate (a homonym for pilot) about his great-grandfather Solomon, who “cuts across the sky” and flies to freedom. First, he must rid himself of the ballast of all the material things that drag him down, then he must retrace his ancestry, discovering both his personal and cultural heritage. Unaware of the stories told about his great-grandfather, Milkman suddenly understands his own fascination with flight:
“Why do you call Solomon a flying African?”
“Oh, that’s just some old folks’ lie they tell around here. Some of those Africans they brought over here as slaves could fly. A lot of them flew back to Africa. The one around here who did was this same Solomon, or Shalimar—I never knew which was right . . .”
“When you say ‘flew off’ you mean he ran away, don’t you? Escaped?”
“No, I mean flew. Oh, it’s just foolishness, you know, but according to the story he wasn’t running away. He was flying. He flew. You know, just like a bird. Just stood up in the fields one day, ran up some hill, spun around a couple of times, and was lifted up in the air. Went right on back to wherever it was he came from.” (322–23)
Song of Solomon is informed by African myths, cosmologies, and cultural practices in powerful ways. The “current of communication” valued by Ellison makes itself felt for Morrison in an even larger ancestral network that connects African Americans to their cultural heritage and to the rites and practices of their enslaved ancestors. Reviving, reworking, and restoring cultural legacies, Morrison drew not only on the lived experience of storytelling in her own social circles and communities but also on the written record of reminiscences in Drums and Shadows. Searching far and wide, she remembers not only her own past but reanimates a body of lore, making it new even as she preserves a tradition. Knitting together the vernacular with the literary, Morrison also reinvigorates the tradition of the talking book, the print volume that captures lore and transmits it to future generations. “The novel has to provide the richness of the past as well as suggestions of what the use of it is,” she writes. “I try to create a world in which it is comfortable to do both, to listen to the ancestry and to mark out what might be going on sixty or one hundred years from now” (Ruas 1985, 28).
* http://www.ssiheritagecoalition.org/articles-about-ssaahc.html.
FLYING AFRICANS
THE FLYING MAN
I heard about the flying man up in Arkansas, at Jonesboro. The polices went up to him, and the faster they walked the faster he walked, until he just spread his arms and sailed right on off. And they never did catch him. Said he was faster than the planes. They told about him all through the South, in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas.
SOURCE: J. D. Suggs as told to Richard M. Dorson, American Negro Folktales, 279.
ALL GOD’S CHILLEN HAD WINGS
Once all Africans could fly like birds; but owing to their many transgressions, their wings were taken away. There remained, here and there, in the sea islands and out-of-the-way places in the low country, some who had been overlooked, and had retained the power of flight, though they looked like other men.
There was a cruel master on one of the sea islands who worked his people till they died. When they died he bought others to take their places. These also he killed with overwork, in the burning summer sun, through the middle hours of the day, although this was against the law.
One day, when all the worn-out Negroes were dead of overwork, he bought, of a broker in t
he town, a company of native Africans1 just brought into the country, and put them at once to work in the cotton field.
He drove them hard. They went to work at sunrise and did not stop until dark. They were driven with unsparing harshness all day long, men, women, and children. There was no pause for rest during the unendurable heat of the midsummer noon, though trees were plenty and near. But through the hardest hours, when fair plantations gave their Negroes rest, this man’s driver pushed the work along without a moment’s stop for breath, until all grew weak with heat and thirst.
There was among them one young woman who had lately borne a child. It was her first; she had not fully recovered from bearing, and should not have been sent to the field until her strength had come back. She had her child with her, as the other women had, astraddle on her hip, or piggyback.
The baby cried. She spoke to quiet it. The driver could not understand her words.2 She took her breast with her hand and threw it over her shoulder that the child might suck and be content. Then she went back to chopping knotgrass; but being very weak, and sick with the great heat, she stumbled, slipped and fell.
The driver struck her with his lash until she rose and staggered on.
She spoke to an old man near her, the oldest man of them all, tall and strong, with a forked beard. He replied; but the driver could not understand what they said; their talk was strange to him.
She returned to work; but in a little while, she fell again. Again the driver lashed her until she got to her feet. Again she spoke to the old man. But he said, “Not yet, daughter; not yet.” So she went on working, though she was very ill.
The Annotated African American Folktales Page 18
