The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Middle Grade | Published in 1985

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Background

Historical Context: Slavery in the United States

Content Warning: This section discusses slavery within the United States and the violence enacted against enslaved people.

In her introduction to the collection, Virginia Hamilton provides historical context for folktales, writing,

American black folktales originated with peoples, most of whom long ago were brought from Africa to this country against their will. These peoples were torn from their individual cultures as they left the past, their families and their social groups, and their languages and customs behind (ix).

As enslaved people were brought to the United States, they were not viewed as human by the white landowning individuals who purchased them. Instead, they were seen as property within the chattel slavery system, owned forever by those who purchased them, as were their descendants. This system was reinforced by the United States governing documents, as the 1788 Constitution defined enslaved people as “three-fifths of a free individual.” This dehumanization paved the way for millions of enslaved Black people to be legally abused, brutalized, and murdered. In addition, millions of enslaved people continued to be separated from family and loved ones as they were bought and sold to increase a white enslaver’s capital, to intentionally demoralize them, or for other insidious reasons. Chattel slavery was the systemic oppression of Black people based on their race to uphold the comfort and privilege of white enslavers while exploiting their physical bodies to maintain the economic systems and success of the country. Enslaved people were forced to sow and harvest crops, maintain the plantations in which they toiled, and raise and attend to their white enslavers and their families, all while being denied their own humanity. Due to the legality of treating an enslaved person as physical property, enslaved people knew that anything could happen to them. These uncertainties and terrifying possibilities manifested in the creation of stories—known as folktales—that warned, predicted, hoped, imagined, and celebrated the cultures of enslaved African Americans at the time.

In the folktales highlighted in The People Could Fly, messages of agency, entertainment, hope, and empowerment were provided in an oral tradition that sustained a sense of identity. For example, characters in folktales centered on the experience of enslaved people do not rely on white people for freedom. Uplifting tales show characters freeing themselves through their own actions, or, in tales such as “Carrying the Running-Aways,” the enslaved people work alongside white abolitionists to gain freedom. Folktales also demonstrate the development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and provided a language to be passed down, whether separated from family or not. Folktales were a tool used for survival and showcase the lessons enslaved people hoped their peers and descendants would learn and remember. The most significant messages were that enslaved people could control their destiny and that the authorities of the time were not helpful or to be trusted. Folktales were a singular representation from enslaved people in the United States who had little possessions, if any. Folktales provide an oral history and record of their lives in a method that can still be read today.

Cultural Context: Publishing Black Folktales

American Black folktales gained prominence through a white journalist, Chandler Harris. During the Civil War, he worked on a Georgia plantation and recorded the stories of enslaved Black people. In 1880, he published a collection of the stories, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. In an article for NPR, Nina Martyris writes, “[Chandler] created a genial but stern character named Uncle Remus—the stereotype of the dialect-speaking ‘venerable old darkey’—who tells these stories to a rosy-cheeked child referred to as ‘Miss Sally's little boy’” (Martyris, Nina. “‘Tar Baby’: A Folk Tale About Food Rights, Rooted in the Inequalities of Slavery.” NPR, 11 May 2017).

Unlike Hamilton’s versions, Remus’s versions have a racist premise. His work represents cultural appropriation. Chandler took from Black culture and used their culture for the entertainment of white people. White readers made the book a bestseller, with famous white authors like Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain celebrating the work.

In 1935, the canonized Black author Zora Neale Hurston published a book about American Black folktales, Mules and Men. In her collection, Hurston herself becomes a character and interacts with people, asking them to tell her the tales. Here, the folktales appear in a sincere and collaborative context. Hamilton, too, works with the folktales, putting them in her voice and providing scholarly background after each story.

In 1959, the writers Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps edited and published the anthology The Book of Negro Folklore. Hughes and Bontemps were members of the early-20th-century movement known as the Harlem Renaissance—a loosely affiliated collection of Black artists in New York City that pointedly expressed what it was like for Black people in the United States. While Hamilton retells the folktales to make them comprehensible to a reader of any level, Hughes and Bontemps’s folktales presume an experienced reader. Aside from folktales, their book features songs and rhymes—though there are songs and rhymes in some of Hamilton’s stories.

The Black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the folklorist Maria Tatar edited and published The Annotated African American Folktales (2017), and, like The Book of Negro Folklore, the anthology presents a wide range of Black folktales for a more experienced reader. After Hamilton’s folktales, an interested reader can move on to Hurston’s books or the two anthologies for a deeper understanding of folktales and their meanings.