Abstract
African American literature has been one of the chief purveyors of African American culture’s folklore tradition. Writers, through fiction and nonfiction accounts, keep alive the stories of such figures as Br’er Rabbit, High John the Conquerer, and John Henry. Other than these manifest folktales, there is also a canon of latent folktales that modern writers are attempting to bring back to African American consciousness. Such is the case with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a novel that shares the informative and inspirational folktale of flying Africans. This article explores the role that flying plays not only in Morrison’s novel but also its continued relevance and effectiveness for African Americans, and other oppressed communities, seeking liberation. I propose that flying is a mode of religious conversion (i.e., an act of (re-)turning) that has enabled African Americans to come in touch with supernatural resources during times of sociopolitical, communal, and personal sorrow.
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Notes
See Kenneth M. Stampp’s Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1989) for descriptions of the different administrative roles on the plantation.
A thorough yet approachable overview of Hegel’s political philosophy is Judith N. Shklar’s (2010) Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Z. A. Pełczyński’s (1971) edited volume Hegel’s Political Philosophy: Problems and Perspectives is also a useful resource. Susan Buck-Morss (2009) takes an unconventional approach to Hegel’s views on African people, especially with respect to Hegel’s views on the Haitian Revolution, in her book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History.
For more on the relationship between race and philosophy, particularly epistemology, see a number of excellent texts by philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, including Achieving our Humanity: The Idea of a Post-Colonial Future (2001), and On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism (2008).
Morrison tells a story of superhuman strength in her interview with Ruas. She says, “I remember the story of a woman who was a worker on the plantation. She was sassy, she spoke up, was always being beaten and resold. She was powerful: at one point she was chained to a tree and lashed, and she let it happen. Then something snapped, I guess, and she pulled the tree out of the ground and with it beat the man and his dog” (p. 115).
Milkman does have one physical ailment that is mentioned in the novel. At the age of 14, he notices that one leg is shorter than the other. This made him walk a little awkwardly, which leads someone to comment, “[W]hy is he walking like that [emphasis added] for” (Morrison 1995, p. 71).
In Africanisms in American Culture (2005), Joseph E. Holloway, a scholar of Pan-African studies, labels this debate about Africanisms in the African American experience the Herskovits-Frazier Debate. On the one hand, there is anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, whose most influential text, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), makes the argument that there is evidence of Africanisms throughout the Caribbean and South America and in the United States as well. For example, Holloway quotes Herskovits as arguing that “in North America the most direct remnants of African culture are found in isolated communities, mainly in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina” (Holloway 2005, p. 3). Conversely, there is Frazier (1974), who, as already mentioned, argues that African Americans have suffered a complete loss of African culture.
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Hinds, JP. Flying Home: A Mode of Conversion in the African American Context. Pastoral Psychol 69, 383–404 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00923-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00923-4