What if I told you the first African American Culture Hero was a black woman? Would you believe me? Well, it’s true! This unnamed hero is buried in our African American folklore. Today, we exhume her!
Are you familiar with the story of the flying Africans? A group of Africans who used their unique ability to grow wings to fly back to Africa in order to escape slavery in America? Toni Morrison revealed these mythical characters in her 1977 novel Song of Solomon. The actual story of the flying Africans, however, is based on the folktale entitled “All God’s Chillen Had Wings,” as told by Caesar Grant, a laborer from John’s Island, South Carolina, and published in John Bennet’s Doctor to the Dead (1943, 1946) and later in Langston Hughes’s and Arna Bontemps’s Book of Negro Folklore (1958).
“All God’s Chillen Had Wings” tells the story of a group of Africans deposited along “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” (Grant). These slaves were entrusted to a cruel master who worked his slaves until they died. Among the slaves in his charge was a young woman who had recently given birth to her first child. Working long hours in the cotton fields with her baby straddling her hip or on her back, the woman would collapse in exhaustion, only to receive lashings from their master. Grant reports:
Soon she stumbled and fell again. But when the driver came running with his lash to drive her on with her work, she turned to the old man and asked, “Is it time yet, daddy?” He answered: “Yes, daughter; the time has come. Go; and peace be with you” . . . and stretched out his arms toward her . . . so.
With that she leaped straight up into the air and was gone like a bird, flying over field and wood.” (104)
Ladies and gentleman, in this moment, our first African American culture hero is born: a woman who flew away “with her baby astraddle of her hip, sucking her breast” (Grant).
This nameless African woman bore the lash in America but ultimately chose to fly to the place where she and her child could be free. This place, we know not whether she knew it or had merely heard of it from the father who toiled with her in America. What we do know is that she wanted better for herself and her baby; and in one move that inspired other flying Africans, better meant freedom.
Read “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” here:
Credits:
Grant, Caesar. “All God’s Chillen Had Wings.” The Doctor to the Dead: Grotesque Legends and Folk Tales of Old Charleston. John Bennett, ed. New York: Rinehart & Co, 1946. Rpt. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Henry Louis Gates, et al, eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. pp. 103-105.
Sorrell, Robert, “The People Could Fly and Other Tales of Freedom.” South Side Weekly. 3 February 2015. https://southsideweekly.com/the-people-could-fly-and-other-tales-of-freedom/. Accessed 8 March 2022.
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