West African folktales and myths about spiritual chiefs who could fly were brought to the United States by Africans who had been sold into slavery. These myths became the foundations for the legends of the flying Africans that are now significant in African American oral traditions, most commonly told in the Gullah regions of the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia. Generations of African American children have been told the story of how their enslaved ancestors flew from bondage and returned to the lives they had known in Africa. The story has several iterations and many names, including “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” “Ebo’s Landing,” and “The Flying Africans.” Based on the events of a slave rebellion on St. Simons Island, this tale has become a powerful metaphor for African American courage and a symbol of their longing for the idealized homeland of Africa. By transforming the painful memories of slavery and racism through the emancipating power of flight, the story of the flying Africans continues to play an important role in maintaining a cultural connection to Africa and empowering generations of African Americans.
Some versions of the story recount flight from the fields where a group of slaves, men and women, were being overworked and beaten in the hot sun. The eldest among them whispered and inspired their fight:
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. (“All God’s Chillun”)
The message of this tale was powerful: by recalling their knowledge of the ancient past, enslaved Africans could escape from the horrors of their present existence.
Although they may have originated in mythical and spiritual elements of West and Central Africa, the historical roots of the flying Africans legend in America can be traced back to the spring of 1803, when a group of slaves arrived in Savannah, Georgia, from the western coast of Africa. They were Igbo (historically spelled “Ibo” or alternatively “Ebo”), a West African people who were renowned throughout the American South for being fiercely unwilling to tolerate the humiliations of chattel slavery. Seventy-five Igbo men were purchased at the slave market in Savannah by agents working on behalf of slave owners John Couper and Thomas Spalding, and were loaded aboard a small schooner, the York. They were confined below deck for the trip down the coast via Dunbar Creek to St. Simons Island. As the York reached its destination, they rose up in rebellion against the white agents, who jumped overboard and drowned. The details of the events that followed are not specified in historical documents, but there are several versions concerning the revolt’s development, some of which are considered mythological.
Some variations of the legend state that the all of the captives aboard the ship jumped overboard upon sight of St. Simons Island, preferring death to slavery. However, historian Hal Sieber’s research offers the most popular version, which is that upon reaching land the Igbo followed the direction of a chief who was held captive with them and walked together into the creek singing to the “water spirit” in Igbo language. Sieber calls this the “first freedom march in this country.” They walked into the marsh, where ten to twelve of the men drowned. According to documents from a slave dealer, the others were transferred to Couper and Spaulding.
Gullah
Gullah refers to a language spoken in the coastal Sea Islands of Georgia and the Carolinas; developed among slaves who spoke a variety of African languages using Pidgin English as a common base, Gullah is a creole language that took on aspects of various component languages that took on aspects of the various component languages. Although imperiled because of its small number of speakers, Gullah is protected to a degree by the isolation of its communities, as well as by the functional bilingualism of its users, who often use it within the intimacy of the family circle, and who embrace it as an important cultural touchstone. Gullah—or Geechee—also refers to the people who speak this language, to their culture in general, and to their folklore in particular. A significant cultural product of this community is the popular “Sweetgrass Basket”—sometimes known as a “Slave Basket”—a form of traditional basket-weaving based on African coiled-grass methods.
C. Fee
Research begun in or around the 1980s has verified the historical accuracy of the Africans’ arrival, sale, and death; and according to newspaper reports from the area, the event has been incorporated into the history curriculum in coastal Georgia schools. A white overseer on a nearby plantation recounted that as soon as the Africans landed on St. Simons Island, they “took to the swamp”—committing suicide by walking into Dunbar Creek. African American oral tradition, on the other hand, has preserved a very different account of the events that transpired that day. As with all oral histories, the facts of the story have evolved as storytellers elaborated the tale over the years, such that there are now dozens of variations on the original episode. However, the endings of the stories are consistent with the Africans rising in the sky and flying right back to Africa. And as most of the storytellers would say, “… Everybody knows about them.”
The myth of flying is also a reference to suicide. Many Africans who chose death as the alternative to being enslaved were referred to as having “flown away,” perhaps euphemizing an act that in many Western and Central African cultures was taboo. Esteban Montejo questions the confluence and contradiction of death and flight in The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1994):
Some people said that when a Negro died he went back to Africa, but this is a lie. How could a dead man got 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. (Montejo 1994, 4)
The magical ability of flight was not confined to the Africans of the Gullah folktale. There are stories of Africans who flew away from the incomprehensible horrors of slavery throughout the African Diaspora, passed down through the history of America, including stories such as Montejo’s. In literature, flying was regarded as a symbolic return to Africa and is a longstanding trope in African American folklore. While some accounts recall that the people turned into birds or buzzards, other eyewitnesses claim that the slaves in their determination to return to freedom rose up, walked on the air, and “fl[ew] right back to Africa” (Rice 2003, 108).
The first formally recorded version of the story was collected and passed down from slaves in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers Project and published as “All God’s Chillun Had Wings” in Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes in 1940. In 1958 the story appeared in Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s The Book of Negro Folklore. Additional versions of the tale appear in Julius Lester’s Black Folktales (1969) as “People Who Could Fly” and as “The People Could Fly” in The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (1993) by Virginia Hamilton. The legends of these magical Africans have been incorporated into contemporary popular culture in novels including Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, Salt by Earl Lovelace, Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall. Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust also includes references to African ancestral abilities of flight.
Although the site of the rebellion has stood for years without a formal monument to the event itself, it is well known to local residents and in African American culture. It is called alternately “Ibo” Landing, “Igbo” Landing, and “Ebo” or “Ebo’s” Landing. Stories, folktales, and literary allusions serve as a type of memorial to the significance of the event in African American history. Recently, there have been efforts to commemorate the site and to remember the real men who died there. Some say that the site is haunted by their ghosts, and local residents claim that some nights, near midnight, they hear the clanking sound of slave chains.
Joni L. Johnson Williams
See also Ibo Landing; John the Conqueror (High John the Conqueror); Juneteenth
Further Reading
“All God’s Chillun Had Wings.” Voices of the People: African-American Literature and Arts. http://bobshepherdonline.com/uploads/Africanamerican_folktale.pdf. Accessed on August 31, 2015.
Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. 1940. Savannah Unit, Georgia Writers’ Project, Work Projects Administration. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.
Hamilton, Virginia. 1993. The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales. New York: Knopf.
McDaniel, L. 1990. “The Flying Africans: Extent and Strength of the Myth in the Americas.” New West Indian Guide 64: 28–40.
Montejo, Esteban. 1994. The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, edited by Miguel Barnet. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press.
Powell, Timothy. 2010. “Summoning the Ancestors: The Flying Africans’ Story and Its Enduring Legacy.” In African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee, edited by Philip Morgan. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Rice, Alan J. 2003. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum.
Wilentz, Gay. 1989. “If You Surrender to the Air: Folk Legends of Flight and Resistance in African American Literature.” The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) 16 (1): 21–32.