"One of Dese Mornings, Bright and Fair,/ Take My Wings and Cleave De Air": The Legend of the Flying Africans and Diasporic Consciousness

Beginning of article

"O Daedalus, Fly Away Home"

Drifting night in the Georgia pines,

coonskin drum and jubilee banjo.

Pretty Malinda, dance with me.

Night is juba, night is conjo.

Pretty Malinda, dance with me.

Night is an African juju man

weaving a wish and a weariness together

to make two wings.

O fly away home fly away

Do you remember Africa?

O cleave the air fly away home

My gran, he flew back to Africa,

just spread his arms and

flew away home.

Drifting night in the windy pines,

night is a laughing, night is a longing.

Pretty Malinda, come to me.

Night is a mourning juju man

weaving a wish and a weariness together

to make two wings.

O fly away home fly away

--Robert Hayden

Some people said that when a Negro died he went back to Africa, but this is a lie. How could a dead man go to Africa? It was living men who flew there, from a tribe the Spanish stopped importing as slaves because so many of them flew away that it was bad for business.

--Esteban Montejo, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave

The African don't eat salt, they say they come like a witch... those Africans who don't eat salt--and they interpret all things. And why you hear they say they fly away, they couldn't stand the work when the taskmaster them flog them; and they get up and they just sing their language, and they clapping their hands--so--and they just stretch out, and them gone--so--right back. And they never come back.

--Ishmael Webster, qtd. in Alas, Alas, Kongo

The legend of the Flying Africans is a canonical tale which resonates throughout the expressive traditions of that part of the African diaspora which has known slavery in the New World.(1) The three examples above, from, respectively, an African American, a Cuban, and a Jamaican, demonstrate the wide geographic currency of the legend within Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean communities as well as in the U.S., the latter being the geographic area where the legend is most commonly located by researchers. In fact, all the shores touched by the Atlantic slave trade produce a collective mythology. The fact of this legend's appearance and resonance in this widespread physical area demands both a pan-American and a pan-African analytic perspective, a theoretical framework which encompasses Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin geographic and cultural areas, in addition to looking at the perhaps more commonly cited North American examples.

Along with being a canonical tale, the legend of the Flying Africans is commonly recognized, and subsequently categorized, as a piece of folklore. This classification subjects the legend to analysis in the discourses of the social sciences, specifically anthropology and folklore studies. There are two characteristics of this discourse which this essay will challenge. The first is the separation of folklore and literature. And the second is the notion that folkloric elements are static units which can disappear or be lost. My argument is that the novel form, as used by black women writers, constitutes an alternate realm of transmission and transformation for the canonical tales of black communities. Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow are two novels which, in their transformation of the legend of the Flying Africans, articulate a counter-discursive historiography of slavery. The novels (as opposed to folklore collections) function as dynamic sites for contextualizing this legend, and for questioning previous versions of the legend as they have existed in cultural memory and in recorded folklore histories. Morrison's and Marshall's revisions and altered emphases raise questions about previous cultural definitions of heroism and community responsibility, seeing these now from a feminist and an Afro-centric perspective. Both Morrison and Marshall incorporate the legend of the Flying Africans into their larger artistic projects, with the ultimate aim of producing a transformative or even revolutionary cultural form. Along the way, they rework and revise the legend, thus showing that when seen in the context of literature, as opposed to the discourse of social scientific collection, the legend of the Flying Africans is process, not product, still very much alive within the culture and still offering important contributions to culture development.

While several scholars have addressed Morrison's and Marshall's use of the legend, I set my work apart from previous studies by my methodology of comparative cultural studies which allows the delineation of a more triangular diasporic context--both pan-American and pan-African.(2) By seeing the legend in its more widespread pan-American context we can enable a wider notion of diasporic consciousness in addition to seeing fruitful connections within American literary history. There are connections, based on "deep structural similarities" or "families of resemblance" between African American expressivity and Afro-Latin or Afro-Caribbean expressivity. In From Trickster to Badman, John W. Roberts calls for a focus on "deep structural similarities" in an Afrocentric folklore scholarship that recognizes, rather than universalizes, African cultural diversity (9-10). Michael M.J. Fischer, in "Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory," states that "Cultures and ethnicities as sets are more like families of resemblances than simple typological trees" (199). When we turn our attention to the literary examples of the legend from a widespread geographical area we may begin to redirect "the Eurocentric focus of earlier scholarship in American Studies and [identify] a distinctive postcolonial, pan-American consciousness" (Saldivar xi). This altered focus then, calls into question previous definitions of "American" literature and even asks us to question and redefine our notion of what is meant by the term America itself. In expanding our definition of America to include South America and "the extended Caribbean,"(3) we are also forging a counter-hegemonic literary historiography. Thus while the novelists' actions can be seen to revise slave histories and folk heroic celebration, the critics' actions revise literary history as based on geopolitical boundaries and definitions that are rapidly becoming obsolete.(4)

In his article on Afro-Latin minority discourse, Josaphat Kubayanda writes that "The African presence in the New World, according to Cesaire [in Return to My Nativeland], not only undermines mainstream monolithism but makes possible, theoretically at least, a unique multifacetedness which admits to collective or multiple existence in America" (120). Kubayanda's re-statement of Cesaire's theories calls to our attention the bifocality of outlook which informs the expressive cultures of the African diaspora: both Africa and the Americas contribute to the sociohistorical circumstances that produce a background for the legend of the Flying Africans. On the most obvious level, the legend is an evocation of "`The Return' as a pan-African theme." St. Clair Drake states that "nostalgia, coupled with the concept of the return, is an integral part of the paradigm of a diaspora. It was also an integral part of what I am calling traditional Pan-Africanism" (360). Drake further considers that "traditional Pan-Africanism consciously and deliberately attempts to create bonds of solidarity based upon a commonality of fate imposed by the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath" (352). Drake's discussion relies on sociohistorical, circumstances, the experience of enforced migration and enslavement as the basis for the cultural comparisons and connections he sees fruitful to pursue. In this way his position is aligned with the recent work of Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose book In My Father's House is explicitly critical of Pan-Africanisms based solely on race, which we know is a socially constructed, not biologically defined category. Appiah agrees that "...in constructing alliances across states--and especially in the Third World--a Pan-African identity, which allows African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Afro-Latins to ally with continental Africans, drawing on the cultural resources of the black Atlantic world, may serve useful purposes" (180). This emphasis on shared experiences of enslavement is not, however, meant to gloss over the very different historical facts of those particular enslavements. Similarly, in using a term like pan-Africanism one must be ever aware of the vast diversity among African nations--in other words, one must avoid universalizing either Africa or New World oppression and enslavement as concepts. It is this kind of universalizing which Appiah so eloquently warns against. An image such as the Flying African, the theme of nostalgia and return, become parts of collective memory because of the "deep structural similarities" existing between and among disparate diasporic cultures. Since such cultures are not monolithically unitary, the legend's context is ever-changing, and so is the legend itself. Thus, central to my comparative methodology is the conception of the legend as process, not product, dynamic, not static. Before turning to the ways that Marshall's and Morrison's works exist in dynamic interaction with the legend, I will discuss the more static or fixed way that folklore scholarship has viewed oral forms.(5)

Most of those folklore scholars who have in the past applied their studies to the issue of folklore in literature follow an essentially separationist mode of inquiry where folklore items are studied as items used by literary writers.(6) Words like "inauthenticity" are used to describe a creative writer's alteration of a seemingly fixed item of folklore. It is important to see this mode of inquiry as part of a larger attempt to define and re-territorialize institutional disciplines, to name what's what and what's not. Such territorialism allows the "folklore people" to set their rules and the "literature people" to stick to their own methods. Cultural studies, on the other hand, by virtue of its ability to move between and among disciplines, enables a more wholistic approach to the legend. Precisely that which would "inauthenticate" the legend as folklore--creative alterations by a writer--is that which becomes most fruitful from a cultural studies standpoint. Comparative cultural studies is less concerned with a seemingly arbitrary authenticity of contact between oral teller and literary author than with the analysis of changed contexts and accents. Such a methodology should go further than simply identifying variants of the legend, and should inquire into the ways the legend serves its various communities in culture-building.

The discourse of separateness is inappropriate for the study of the legend of the Flying Africans because the idea that oral and written forms are separate realms which do not mutually interface is a concept inimical to the principles of black expressivity. African and African American literature is structured by its varying relationship with oral forms such as the Blues, the sermon, jazz and oral legend. Morrison states, "There are things that I try to …