The People Could Fly

The original of The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton was published in 1985. I remember buying the book for my daughter, Ariel, when she was a baby (this would have been back in 1993!), and being so taken by Black folklore, in much the same way that I was taken with Jewish legends and story-telling. I liked introducing my daughter to Black folktales through the work of Julius Lester (including his famous re-telling of the Uncle Remus Tales) and Virginia Hamilton. I liked my daughter learning that oral history was a part of her cultural identity on both sides – Black and Jewish. The People Could Fly was one of those books we went back to over and over again.

I majored in English at Barnard College (graduated in 1987), and during my time there, English professors were beginning to make changes to the canon. I vividly remember my favorite professor telling us that he was taking Fitzgerald off his reading list that semester, and putting Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in its place. This shouldn’t have seemed a bold move in 1984 (considering that Alice Walker helped bring great attention to Hurston’s work after the publication of her  article, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in 1975), but in some ways it really was a radical departure from the traditional canon – and what a gift to us it was! All of us had already read (and appreciated) the Fitzgerald we had in high school, probably the most frequent choice being The Great Gatsby, and I would continue to read (and often love) Fitzgerald and Hemingway in college and in graduate school. But it was pure delight to be introduced to Hurston’s work, and to learn also that she too had gone to Barnard. Hurston was an anthropologist and a Black folklorist, and it seems remiss not to bring up her name in any discussion of Black folklore in the 20th century. 

Virginia Hamilton may perhaps be most familiar to many of you as the author of M.C. Higgins The Great, for which she won both the National Book Award and the Newbery Medal (first Black author to do so). Like Toni Morrison, she grew up in Ohio (which, unbeknownst to me until writing this, is home to some truly phenomenal Black authors. Check out the books on this list!) Per this biographical essay, Hamilton is sometimes considered the “Toni Morrison of children’s literature,” although the Brown Bookshelf (great resource) might argue that Toni Morrison is the “Virginia Hamilton of adult literature.” No matter! Hamilton herself references Morrison, specifically Song of Solomon and Morrison’s use of the motif of flying.

 Virginia Hamilton’s work, like that of Toni Morrison, Beyonce, Julius Lester, etc., is a redress: it is art that insists that readers pay heed to voices they may not have listened to in the past, those voices that have not been heard enough – historically and contemporaneously. Hamilton’s retelling of this story for young children teaches the power of heritage, of yearning always for freedom, of dreaming, and of the power of magical thinking made real. While the body may have been imprisoned, tales like these show an enormous capacity for mental freedom. As Marcus Garvey said, “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”

Words, of course, repurposed by Bob Marley in his “Redemption Song”: 

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds