The People Could Fly Reflection

This collection of folktales is unlike anything I have ever read. Hamilton’s preservation of voice, the sometimes amusing-sometimes violently gruesome subject matter, and the enormity of the context make this an extremely valuable text. Reading through, I was immediately struck by the contrast between these stories and other watered down fairy-tales most often deemed appropriate for young people. The stories in The People often didn’t fit into the paradigm of morality tales that I am most familiar with, though a quick comparison of Little-Red-Riding-Hood versions in class highlights how much even these have been paired away from original versions.

I also enjoyed the way these stories displayed the African-American oral tradition. Stories would start with, “Heard tell about” or “Don’t know some animal tells. Hear um but forget um”. It wasn’t hard to imagine sitting and listening as the tales unfold from the storyteller. In this respect, the most difficult, but in many ways the most interesting story for me was “Bruh Alligator Meets Trouble”, because it was translated from Gullah dialect. When reading a passage like, “He tippin right pontop and ‘e shum he yeye”, I had to repeatedly consult the glossary at the end of the chapter. I thought about conversations I had in my pre-service classes about the pitfalls an educator can potentially face when students speak and write in vernacular. Too often, we assume that “standard” English is synonymous with “correct” English. This and several of the other tales in the collection story provided authenticity to a language that is full and vibrant but that isn’t necessarily the “power-language” of the time.

From a critical perspective, the use of metaphor and symbolism in these stories weave a rich fabric of moral lessons, and social critique. One story that displays an interesting use of metaphor is The Two Johns. Big John, in a constant desire to one-up Little John, kills his own prized horses, the other man’s grandmother and eventually himself. Little John proudly (though minus the grandma) marches away with his baskets of money. While it is initially difficult to figure out the moral of the story, Hamilton’s explanation that a message lies in the fact that the little man is smart and the big man is foolish, allows for a deeper understanding. In this tale and several others, size matters less than intelligence and wit. In other words, the quick slave could best the powerful master. This dynamic of the powerless overcoming the powerful speaks directly to the dreams of African slaves, forced into abominable conditions, but escaping through story and imagination.

This sentiment was echoed when Wiley outsmarts the Hairy Man, when Manuel overcomes the king, and in the “Got Free” stories where a slave would get the better of his master. However, the most beautiful use of this metaphor occurs in the last story of the collection. In “The People Could Fly”, slaves return to the magic of their African heritage and fly away from the whips and chains of their oppressors. In this story, the powerless transcend the physical constraints of their servitude and escape to freedom, “The ones flyin were black and whining sticks, wheelin above the head of the Overseer”. This story and the entire collection is testimony to the atrocities that plagued the lives of slaves and to the necessity of story for humans to make sense of our lives.