Response to The People Could Fly

I had never read much of anything like this before, so I found it immediately interesting and engaging. As a white boy that grew up in white suburbia, I don’t really have anything like this in my family’s history, or even in my culture’s history for that matter. In fact, I don’t even really feel like I have a “culture” per se. But, actually, as I write this, I think of one piece of folklore that is a part of this land, and that’s the story of Paul Bunyan and how he created Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes with his footsteps. How about that? I honestly just thought of that right now. But I still don’t feel like I have a culture that is a community of people like the slaves or the Native Americans or any number of immigrant people groups. And that’s what I think is really cool about stories like this. They bring a group of people together and give them a common experience and understanding of the world around them. Though the details may be a little different, the stories are very much the same no matter which group of slaves is telling the story.
Of course one of the first things I noticed was the dialect of the stories. I fancy myself a pretty quick reader most of the time, but when I get something like this I have to slow down and focus and make sure that I’m completely understanding what I’m reading. I like that a lot, because it forces me to block out everything else. Usually I can read a book while watching a game on TV and be totally fine, but not with something like this. I had to hole up in my bedroom with no music or anything and slowly read the words. I think this adds a lot to the stories because it makes them seem more authentic. They wouldn’t have the same effect if they were written in modern American English. It would still have the same message and the same lesson, but it wouldn’t feel connected to the slave culture like it does now. It would just feel like any other story that tries to teach a lesson, and so much of the power of these stories is connected to the fact that they are about the slave culture.
The last section of the book, “Carrying the Running-Aways and other Slave Tales of Freedom,” had a similar effect for me as the dialect did because it tell stories from a perspective that few other cultures know. Through the first sections of the book, there were stories that were meant to explain natural phenomena or teach children to act a certain way, and those types of stories come up in a variety of cultures. But the stories of freedom and slavery are so specific to the African-American culture that it really is the essence of the book.
The two stories I found most interesting in that last section were “How Nehemiah Got His Freedom” and “The Talking Cooter,” mainly because they seemed so implausible. For a slave owner to basically say, “Well, I did say I’d let you free if that happened, so you can go free” seems pretty unlikely. And I think that says a lot about how the slaves wished and hoped for freedom, enough to invent stories like this that give them a little glimmer of hope that if they’re smart enough or clever enough they will find their freedom. This implausibility is different in “The People Could Fly” because that is simply a fantasy story while the others seem realistic. Still, the title story again shows how the slaves would cling to these stories as a type of hope.
Finally, I loved how in the freedom tales the slaves seemed genuinely happy and excited that other slaves gained freedom. There didn’t seem to be any hint of “Why did Nehemiah get to go free and not me?” or “How come those people could fly and I can’t?” It really did seem like they were excited that some people got out and if those people can get out, maybe someday the other slaves could gain their freedom as well.