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 he 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.
The driver and overseer ran after her as far as the edge of the field; but she was gone, high over their heads, over the fence, and over the top of the woods, gone, with her baby astraddle of her hip, sucking at her breast.
Then the driver hurried the rest to make up for her loss; and the sun was very hot indeed. So hot that soon a man fell down. The overseer himself lashed him to his feet. As he got up from where he had fallen, the old man called to him in an unknown tongue. My grandfather told me the words that he said;3 but it was a long time ago, and I have forgotten them. But when he had spoken, the man turned and laughed at the overseer, and leaped up into the air, and was gone, like a gull, flying over field and wood.
Soon another man fell. The driver lashed him. He turned to the old man. The old man cried out to him, and stretched out his arms as he had done for the other two; and he, like them, leaped up, and was gone through the air, flying like a bird over field and wood.
Soon another man fell. The driver lashed him. He turned to the old man. The old man cried out to him, and stretched out his arms as he had done for the other two; and he, like them, leaped up, and was gone through the air, flying like a bird over field and wood.
Then the overseer cried to the driver, and the master cried to them both: “Beat the old devil! He is the doer!”
The overseer and the driver ran at the old man with lashes ready; and the master ran too, with a picket pulled from the fence, to beat the life out of the old man who had made those Negroes fly.
But the old man laughed in their faces, and said something loudly to all the Negroes in the field, the new Negroes and the old Negroes.
And as he spoke to them they all remembered what they had forgotten, and recalled the power which once had been theirs. Then all the Negroes, old and new, stood up together; the old man raised his hands; and they all leaped up into the air with a great shout; and in a moment were gone, flying, like a flock of crows, over the field, over the fence, and over the top of the wood; and behind them flew the old man.
The men went clapping their hands; and the women went singing; and those who had children gave them their breasts; and the children laughed and sucked as their mothers flew, and were not afraid.
The master, the overseer, and the driver looked after them as they flew, beyond the wood, beyond the river, miles on miles, until they passed beyond the last rim of the world and disappeared in the sky like a handful of leaves. They were never seen again.
Where they went I do not know; I never was told. Nor what it was that the old man said . . . that I have forgotten. But as he went over the last fence he made a sign in the master’s face, and cried “Kuli-ba! Kuli-ba!” I don’t know what that means.
But if I could only find the old wood sawyer, he could tell you more; for he was there at the time, and saw the Africans fly away with their women and children. He is an old, old man, over ninety years of age, and remembers a great many strange things.4
SOURCE: Told by Caesar Grant of John’s Island, carter and laborer. Published in John Bennet’s Doctor to the Dead (1943–1946), 137–42.
John Bennett (1865–1956) was a writer and illustrator of children’s books who moved from Ohio to New York City and finally settled in Charleston, South Carolina. For nearly three decades, he collected stories told at dusk on front porches, sometimes rendering them in Standard English, sometimes in Gullah dialect. His Doctor to the Dead: Grotesque Legends and Folk Tales of Old Charleston collects twenty-three narratives told by South Carolina storytellers. The excerpt below is from his introduction to the volume, and it reveals something about Caesar Grant, the man who told the story “All God’s Chillen Had Wings.”
Forty-five years ago, while a transient resident of the ancient city of Charleston, South Carolina, I chanced upon traces of bizarre legendry, folk story, fable and myth, unobserved by students, unnoted by residents, and untouched by travelers, remnants of a body of folklore already far decayed and rapidly passing out of existence.
These legends and tales differed markedly from the humorous tales of Uncle Remus; yet were hardly less interesting in their revelation of folk mind; yet no one had given them the slightest attention or exhibited the least interest in them. . . .
Sometimes all that remained was the emptied husk of a long-disintegrated tale. Of some only the beginning remained; of others, an end without a beginning. It was often necessary to assemble the fragments of an almost-forgotten story, bit by bit, from spokesmen in widely separated social groups—housemaids, butlers, nurses, washerwomen, coachmen, stable boys, day laborers, and fishermen. . . .
Many were survivals of long-forgotten but actual scandals; such shady reminiscences as are picturesquely referred to by dark-faced storytellers as “jay-bird gossip” or “mockingbird tales.” . . .
There emerged from the piebald company a handful of folktales and legends which were more than disreputable scandals, and not merely fanciful fairy tales, but tales having their source in traditions of characters and events once actual, but by primitive superstition and naïve credulity metamorphosed beyond recognition, stories not of things which ever were, but of things which never were, their appeal being not to reason but to unreason. . . .
I regret that I cannot reproduce the scenes in which these stories were set, nor picture my two old black friends, Caesar Grant and Walter Mayrant, sitting on my back porch steps on a moonlit summer evening, smoking their corncob pipes and telling stories for our mutual amusement.
Their telling was simplicity itself. No tale began with a grandiloquent Oriental preamble, “In the name of Allah, the All-Powerful, I, Abou Hussein el Khurassan,” but quietly, when their pipes were well lighted and glowing in the dusk: “Now let’s we talk about one time, fac’ fo’ fac’ an’ true fo’ true, lak de Lo’d talk een de Gospel.” Or, as once, with the most delightful opening of all: “A long time ago, befo’ yestidy was bo’n, an’ befo’ bygones was uster-bes.”
Frequently the end of a tale was simply “that’s all.” Except when the authenticity of a particularly bizarre tale was affirmed by the statement: “Ah knows dat ter to be a fac’, ’cause Ah saw it wid ma own two eye.”
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1 native Africans: That the slaves are African born becomes an important point, for they have not yet, like the descendants of Africans living in the United States, lost the power to fly.
2 The driver could not understand her words: The slaves are set apart by speech that is incomprehensible and mysterious.
3 My grandfather told me the words that he said: As in many variants, the speaker is not an eyewitness but has heard the story from an ancestor. The magic words cannot always be recalled, but in some versions they appear in the story.
4 remembers a great many strange things: The wood sawyer, or carpenter, is presented as witness and as the repository of cultural memory. The narrator himself is a griot of sorts, telling a tale that has been passed down from one generation to the next.
ALL GOD’S CHILLUN GOT WINGS
I got a robe
All o’ God’s chillun got a robe.
When I get to heab’n I’m going to put on my robe
I’m goin’ to shout all ovah God’s Heab’n
Heab’n, Heab’n
Ev’rybody talkin’ ’bout heab’n ain’t goin’ dere
Heab’n, Heab’n
I’m goin’ to shout all ovah God’s Heab’n.
I got a-wings, you got-a wings
All o’ God’s chillun got-a wings.
When I get to heab’n I’m goin’ to put on my wings<
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I’m goin’ to fly all ovah God’s Heab’n
Heab’n, Heab’n
I’m goin’ to fly all ovah God’s Heab’n.
I got a harp, you got a harp
All o’ God’s chillun got a harp.
When I get to heab’n I’m goin’ to take my harp
I’m goin’ to play all ovah God’s Heab’n
Heab’n, Heab’n
Ev’rybody talkin’ ’bout heab’n ain’t goin’ dere
Heab’n, Heab’n
I’m goin’ to play all ovah God’s Heab’n.
I got shoes, you got shoes
All o’ God’s chillun got shoes
When I get to heab’n I’m goin’ to put on my shoes
I’m goin’ to walk all ovah God’s Heab’n
Heab’n, Heab’n
Ev’rybody talkin’ ’bout heab’n ain’t goin’ dere.
Heab’n, Heab’n
I’m goin’ to walk all ovah God’s Heab’n.
This well-known African American spiritual takes up the theme of flight in a Christian setting, turning the destination into Heaven rather than Africa. Its title inspired Eugene O’Neill’s 1924 play about an abusive white woman who destroys the career of her black husband.
SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
I looked over Jordan and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home,
A band of angels, coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.
If you get there before I do,
Coming for to carry me home,
Tell all my friends I’m coming too,
Coming for to carry me home.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
Conceived by Wallis Willis, a Choctaw living in Oklahoma, the words and melody were transcribed by a minister named Alexander Reid. The Fisk Jubilee Singers popularized the song when they toured the United States, and it played an important role in promoting solidarity during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
NOW LET ME FLY
Way down yonder in de middle o’ de fiel’,
Angels workin’ at de chariot wheel,
Not so partic’lar ’bout workin’ at de wheel,
But I jes’ wan-a see how de chariot feel.
I got a mother in de Promise Lan’,
Ain’t goin’ to stop till I shake her han’,
Not so partic’lar ’bout workin’ at de wheel,
But I jes’ wan-a get up in de Promise Lan’.
Meet dat Hypocrite on de street,
First thing he do is to show his teeth.
Nex’ thing he do is to tell a lie,
An’ de bes’ thing to do is to pass him by.
Now let me fly,
Now let me fly,
Now let me fly
Into Mount Zion, Lord, Lord.
SOURCE: Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, The Book of Negro Folklore, 301.
Like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” this spiritual holds forth the possibility of returning to the Promised Land, in this case to Mount Zion, which can designate a hill in Jerusalem or the land of Israel. Tropes from the story of Moses, the release of the Israelites from slavery, and the return to the Promised Land became a not so veiled way of talking about liberation from slavery in the United States.
LITTLE BLACK SAMBO FROM GUINEA
A long time ago, before the Negroes were freed, there was a slave named Sambo, owned by a planter whose big house was near Gourdvine Creek in Union County, North Carolina.
Now Sambo was no ordinary slave. Others on the plantation were the sons and daughters of slaves. But this Sambo had been smuggled in by a blackbirder1 who had captured his cargo in Africa.
This little old Sambo looked wild and afraid at the slave market in Fayetteville where the planter brought him. The old folks who tell the story about Sambo say that the planter was a kindhearted man. He felt sorry for the strange black man from Guinea who had come to a strange land. So he didn’t work Sambo as a field hand. He let him work in the big house so Sambo could learn the English language from the white folks.
When the bobwhite and the whippoorwill and the red fox would talk from the woods, Sambo would answer them in their own language. He’d often ask the white folks where Guinea was. The white man would take a globe map and tell Sambo that the world was round and that Guinea was on the other side of the earth from Gourdvine Creek.
There was a time when the fever struck whites and Negroes, too. Sambo told the white folks that he was sick of the fever. He said he’d seen a dark man at the edge of the woods—and that the dark man was death.
The white man told Sambo that this was a lot of foolishness, but he wiped the tears away from his eyes when Sambo told him he had to die.
Then Sambo asked his master again where Guinea was. “Is it right straight down, Massa?” he asked.
The planter nodded his head.
Then Sambo said, “Mass, dig my grave way out in the woods, and don’t let nobody traipse around it. Bury me on my face, because maybe if I look that way sometime, I’ll git back to Guinea. If a man yearns for a place maybe he’ll get back. Massa, that may take a long time, and that’s why I don’t want nobody to traipse around my grave.”
So when Sambo died the planter had the field hands dig a grave far out into the woods. Then he put out the word that nobody was to traipse around Sambo’s grave.
The planter finally died, too, and after freedom came, the planter’s family sold the plantation and scattered to the four winds. As the years went by many people forgot that Sambo didn’t want anyone to traipse around his grave.
Then strange things began to happen in the woods where Sambo was buried near Gourdvine Creek. The occurrences were told about by fox, coon, and possum hunters. If the hounds chased their quarry into Sambo’s woods the dogs would come howling back to their masters, quivering with fear.
Some of the old folks in Union County remembered that they had heard their fathers and grandfathers tell the story about Sambo, who yearned to go back to Guinea. Hunters and hounds feared Sambo’s woods for more than a hundred years.
“But today the hounds run fast and free along Gourdvine Creek,” said an old man I was talking with recently, who lives near Sambo’s woods.
I guess the hounds used to feel Sambo’s homesickness. But now, since the hounds run fast and free, I guess Sambo finally got back to Guinea.
SOURCE: J. Mason Brewer, American Negro Folklore, 48–49. Told by Heath Thomas.
Born in 1896, J. Mason Brewer received a master’s degree from Indiana University, where he studied with the distinguished folklorist Stith Thompson. He was the first African American to be elected to the American Folklore Society, and he taught for many years at Livingstone College in North Carolina. In his preface to the anthology from which this tale is taken, he laments the fact that a “rich strata of Negro folk phenomena still remain undiscovered.” “When these are unearthed and brought to light,” he added, “they will constitute a meaningful and worthy supplement to the great mass of Negro folk material that already exists.” Brewer felt confident that the folktales he had collected were derived from an African culture “that flourished in spite of environmental disadvantages” (ix).
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1 Blackbirder: Blackbirder was a name used to designate men who kidnapped laborers for plantations. The term was associated in particular with the sugar cane industry. It originated in Australia, where blackbird is a slang term for indigenous peoples.
FLYING AFRICANS
Now Sjaki wanted to see the flying slaves. Sjaki had heard of the flying slaves who flew and made an awful noise once a year. And this particular night, Sjaki’s brother
had explained was the night of the flying slaves, since it was the First of July and Emancipation Day celebration. . . . [Slavery was abolished in Suriname in July 1863.]
“But you don’t know it all,” said the man-bird. . . . “It was a long time ago, many years before Emancipation, that word had gone round that those of us who could stop eating salt would be able to fly back to Africa. So we all went on a salt-free diet. But our wives and children were forced to eat food in the houses where they worked. So it became clear that it would be mostly us men who would fly back. Our children did not want to lose us. You know what happened next. . . . . Now all we can do is to return every year and shout a warning to our people. We warn them that they cannot fly.”
SOURCE: Petronella Breinburg, “Sjaki and the Flying Slaves,” in Legends of Suriname, 32–38.
Salt was associated with diets in white cultures, and eating it implied the loss of the ability to return home. The story of Sjaki offers an explanation for the departure of men and why women and children are left behind.
MAGIC INSTRUMENTS
Every once in a while, inanimate objects go wild in folktales. Walt Disney’s 1940 animated film Fantasia popularized the story of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in which an apprentice, unable to stop an enchanted broom from fetching water, floods his master’s workshop. In the first of the two tales below, a magical hoe migrates from Africa across the Atlantic and makes its way back again in a mysterious allegory of a tool and its enchanted origins.
“The Do-All Ax” begins by invoking the story of flying Africans. As in legends about flying Africans, incantatory language works magic with the hoe, setting it in motion and enabling it to execute agricultural work. Kwako’s carelessness and mischief-making lead to a world in which people must labor by the sweat of their brow. Stories about flying Africans deliver a utopian message about nostalgia, solidarity, song, and a collective return home. The tale about the Magical Hoe, by contrast, gives us the dark underside to magic, showing how its invocation can quickly create a form of mad excess that makes matters worse than they were at the start. Magic can always cut two ways.
The Annotated African American Folktales Page 19