LITR 5731: Seminar in American Minority Literature
University of Houston-Clear Lake, Fall 2001
Sample Student Midterm

Alcira Molina
Seminar in American Minority Literature
Professor Craig White
UHCL
2/21/03

Fly me to the Moon:

 Exploring the theme of flight in African-American Literature  

            The theme of flight is recurrent and central to the African American literary tradition.  African slaves were torn from their families, uprooted from their lands, and forced into indentured servitude.  As a result, the gnawing desire to return to the motherland translates itself into an obsession in the slave narrative genre and later in African American literature, where flight evolves as a metaphorical tool synonymous with freedom from oppression.  The Life of Olaudah Equiano, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Song of Solomon, and Push are all vastly different texts.  Nevertheless, the theme of flight is used as a literary device in each work. 

            In order to analyze the metaphor of flight in African American literature, it is important to consider the role that the conversion to Christianity played in the lives of many African slaves.  The slave trade was both an economic and an ideologically-based undertaking in which the capturing of the slave was often viewed as only half the battle.  Once kidnapped, slaves were subject to rampant proselytizing which explains the strong Christian tradition present in African American culture today.

            Flight can be associated with Jesus’ ascension following the crucifixion.  This attribution likens the slave to a martyr in a state of sacrifice.  In so doing, the negro feels a proximity to God that it is assumed his/her white master does not share.  To some extent, the dehumanizing pain of slavery and the humiliation of servitude and abuse become the slave’s stages on the way to the Calvary---nails in the cross that he/she must bear.  As a result, the slave’s life is one in which suffering leads to redemption and deliverance, and ultimately, one hopes, to the gates of Heaven and on to a life better than the one endured on earth.       

Flight imagery also subscribes to man’s most ancient drives.  Ever since Icarus and his waxy wings, man has sought to conquer the skies.  In Icarus’ case, we are reminded that pride goes before the fall, but even in this age of space travel, man still dreams of touching the clouds and children wish to grow wings.  Flight has an ethereal and undoubtedly otherworldly lure.  It has the power to exorcise us, extracting our mere mortality and leaving only what is light and pure in its wake.  All guilt, shame, responsibility, and suffering are shed off in flight, and it is precisely this quality that makes flying so dangerous and so attractive. 

One of the enduring legends of African American folklore is the tale of the flying Africans, a group of slaves who mysteriously sprouted wings and flew to their freedom.  In their case, wings were not the result of pride, but they allowed the Africans to be wafted off into the clouds like angels and carried safely back home.          

Although the authenticity of its authorship is often questioned, The Life of Gustavus Vassa (Equiano) remains one of the most vivid testimonials ever written by a slave.  Equiano’s conversion to Christianity surfaces steadily throughout the story and his reference to flight relates directly to the concept of religious deliverance.  As an elated Equiano rushes to buy his freedom, he says, “My imagination was all rapture as I flew to the Register Office…like the apostle Peter…My feet scarcely touched the ground; for they were winged with joy…like Elijah, as he rose to Heaven […]” (Equiano 1814, 101).

This ascension is later followed with an excerpt from Equiano’s verses: “Prevented that I could not die, Nor could to one sure refuge fly, An orphan state I had to mourn, Forsook by all, and left forlorn…Oft times I mus’d, and nigh despair, While birds melodious fill’d the air. Thrice happy songsters, ever free! How blest were they compar’d to me!” (ibid, 146-147).  In this sense, Equiano parallels flight with redemption by juxtaposing his captivity to the freedom of birds. 

Similarly, Frederick Douglass contrasts his confinement with free flowing ships: “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels…I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O that I could fly! ...God, deliver me! […]” (Douglass 1845, 293-294).  In this case, the undercurrent of a slave’s frustration is expressed in the form of a religious supplication. 

Although Douglass’ style is decidedly more sober and North American in tone and content than Equiano’s flowery European turn of phrase, both men bear the weight of slavery like a stifling noose and search out freedom in such abstractions as birds, boats and angels.  The reader cannot help but find a perverse irony in Douglass’ desperation as he poignantly envies a ship—the very instrument that imprisoned and bore his ancestors over the sea, tearing them from the womb of Africa.

            Flying can be interpreted as symbolic of birth, or rebirth, and escapism.  In Push, Sapphire choice of title is telling.  Although pushing is not exactly flying, the push to emerge from the birth canal is a metaphor for emergence into a new life.  When the angelic “coffee-cream”-colored paramedic tells Precious to “Push”, she remembers it and him and she says, “God, I think he was god” (Sapphire 1996, 10).  With this the Jesus/Savior parallel is established, and the labor becomes representative of Precious’ push to attain literacy, social acceptance, and a sense of self-worth. 

            When Precious listens to the testimonial of one of the participants at the Survivors of Incest Anonymous meeting, it both evokes her violation by her father and causes her to react to the realization that she is not alone by saying: “Everything is floating around me now.  Like geeses from the lake.  I see the wings beating beating hear geeses.  It’s more birds than geeses.  Where are so many birds come from.  I see flying. Feel flying.  Am flying.  Far up, but my body down in circle.  Precious is bird” (ibid, 129).

 This is one of the most profound and provocative passages in the book.  While Precious feels liberated on the one hand by the fact that there are many people who have suffered what she has, the passage is also a subtle allusion to the Greek myth of Leda who was raped by her father Zeus when he took on the form of a swan and swooped down upon her.  Leda is impregnated by her own father, just as Carl impregnates Precious. 

These five lines are contradictory and layered in meaning---just like Precious.  The school of geese description evokes the dream-like out-of-body experiences that Precious uses to block out her father’s violations and her mother’s molestation.  Although she tries to resist sexual pleasure at the hands of her parents, it is often physically impossible for her to do so and she lives with deep inner conflict, shame, and denial.  As Precious pushes, hoping to penetrate and burst through the clouds, she feels that she is flying but that her body is weighted and pinned down by her parents.  By the end of the evening, however, Precious exclaims: “I am alive inside.  A bird is my heart.  Mamma and Daddy is not win.  I’m winning” (ibid, 131).  She has cast off the shackles and is liberating herself as she begins to feel warmth and acceptance from those around her.

Precious shares more with the slave narratives than meets the eye; she has been the denigrated victim of society and of her own kin.  In that way, an impoverished life of abuse is no different from slavery.  Literacy becomes the path towards self-discovery and social integration for Precious as it does for both Equiano and Douglass.  Education has always been the supreme liberator.

It is in Song of Solomon that the theme of flying is used most widely.  Indeed, the exhaustive references to flight surface constantly throughout the book, making it the dominant leitmotiv of the story.  Even before the first chapter begins, Morrison’s epigraph reads: The fathers may soar and the children may know their names (Morrison 1987).  The story itself debuts with Robert Smith’s suicide note which says: “[…] I will take off tomorrow from Mercy and fly away on my own wings […]” (ibid 3).  In a dramatic crescendo worthy of our friend Icarus, Mr. Smith spreads his blue wings and plunges to his death.

Meanwhile, the book’s protagonist, Pilate, has a name both biblical and homonymous with someone who flies airplanes for a living.  The book derives its title from the “Song of Solomon”, which the reader discovers is not in fact the beautiful and infamous biblical love poem but rather an old negro spiritual which goes: “O Sugarman done fly away, O Sugarman done, gone Sugarman cut across the sky, Sugarman gone home…” (ibid 6).  The name Solomon metamorphoses into Sugarman who flies back home to Africa.  Throughout the book, Pilate is repeatedly haunted by her father’s words: “You can’t just fly off and leave a body” (ibid 147, 208).  

Subsequently, it is said about Milkman, another character in the story:

“Mr. Smith’s blue silk wings must have left their mark, because when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing that Mr. Smith had learned earlier---that only birds and airplanes could fly---he lost all interest in himself.  To have to live without that single gift left his imagination so bereft […]” (ibid 9). 

As a result, Milkman is a black man who lives with one foot in the black community and the other in the white man’s world.  He is breast fed by his perverse mother until an unwholesome age and is emasculated by his domineering and prominent father.  In many ways, Milkman and his friend Guitar, a black man from the wrong side of the tracks, are foils.  Milkman’s very name betrays whiteness while Guitar is a black nationalist and an outlaw.  In one passage, the two men spot a white peacock:

 “‘Look---she’s flying down.’  Milkman felt again his unrestrained joy at anything that could fly.  ‘Some jive flying, but look at her strut.’  ‘How come it can’t fly no better than a chicken?’  ‘Too much tail.  All that jewelry weighs it down.  Like vanity.  Can’t nobody fly with all that shit.  Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down’” (ibid 178-179). 

In this passage, the white peacock is clearly Milkman.  As a black man wrapped in a white veneer, Milkman’s materialism and vanity keep his feet firmly planted on the ground, extinguishing his dreams of flight.  Throughout Song, Milkman attempts to leave home and break free of his father.  He defiantly spends time at Pilate’s home against his father’s wishes and even leaves town towards the end of the story.  These “flights” are attempts at emancipation and independence.  At one point during Milkman’s journey, he is sleeping with a lover when he dreams:

“It was a warm dreamy sleep all about flying, about sailing high over the earth.  But not with arms outstretched like airplane wings, nor shot forward like Superman in a horizontal dive, but floating, cruising, in the relaxed position of a man lying on a couch reading a newspaper.  Part of his flight was over the dark sea, but it didn’t frighten him because he knew he could not fall.  He was alone in the sky, but somebody was applauding him, watching and applauding.  He couldn’t see who it was” (ibid 298). 

This passage marks a slow oozy coming into his own for Milkman.  He does not know exactly who is watching him, God, Pilate, Solomon, Guitar?  But he is away from home nestled in his lover’s arms and he is flying more confidently than ever before, albeit in his dreams. 

Interestingly, when Milkman hears children at play singing the Solomon song, his first impulse is to pull out his airplane ticket stub and scribble the words on the back, but finding neither pen nor pencil, he resorts to memorizing the rhymes (ibid 303). 

When Pilate finally recounts the story of her ancestors, the passage is filled with aviary imagery.  She tells of the Indian Singing Bird, of her father Crow, who later changed his name to Crowell Byrd, and of how Solomon was said to be one of  the flying Africans: “Oh that’s just some old folks’ lie they tell around here.  Some of those Africans they brought over here as slaves could fly.  A lot of them flew back to Africa…He was flying…You know, like a bird…Went right back on to wherever it was that he came from” (ibid 322-323). 

Milkman explodes into a fit of glee when he learns that Solomon, his great grandfather, was one of the flying Africans, as if by virtue of blood ties, he may vicariously take flight: “He could fly!...He left everybody on the ground and he sailed on off like a black eagle. O-o-o-o-o-o Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone, Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home!” (ibid 328-329). 

In the final climactic scene of Song of Solomon, Pilate’s death leads Milkman to the following conclusion: “Now he knew why he loved her so.  Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly” (ibid 336).  This is ironic for a woman named Pilate, about whom several chapters earlier it is said that she refused to “set foot on an airplane”, but in this line lies the key to Milkman’s deliverance (ibid 334).  As the birds fly off with Pilate’s earring, it dawns on Milkman that his wings are within himself and that flying is a question of setting the soul free.  With this, he calls for his friend Guitar, wipes away his tears, and leaps into the air.  The final line of the novel is surely etched in Milkman’s heart: “[…] if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it” (ibid 337).

In the four works analyzed, flight represents escape, deliverance, redemption, ambition, survival and freedom.  Although the texts studied are varied and the plight of the protagonists diverse, the theme of flight communicates the same universal message throughout African American literature: one of liberation, of overcoming difficulty, of hope, and of optimism.  With flight there is always a window of opportunity whether one is fleeing slavery, communing with God, learning to read, finding one’s self, or simply trying to get back home.

Bibliography:

ed. H.L. Gates, The Classic Slave Narratives, 1987 (NAL)

Sapphire, Push, 1997 (Vintage)

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, 1997 (Plume)