In my first year at Bread Loaf I had the privilege of learning from Dr. Robert Stepto in his course “Morrison: Texts and Contexts”. In November 2024, still inspired by that learning, I presented The People Can Fly: Exploring Black American Mythology and Folk Literature in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual meeting in Boston. Drawing from my ongoing research on Toni Morrison’s use of flight as metaphor, I used these slides to structure a presentation that follows the outline of a more detailed paper. I include here a few excerpts of the paper, as well as a link to the full text. I welcome your responses.

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Igbo Landing holds symbolic importance within Black American folklore as a powerful and evocative story of resistance against enslavement. It inspired tales of Africans flying or walking on water to return home. It is the impetus for numerous Black American cultural works including Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, and Beyoncé’s Lemonade. As the myths, legends, and oral literature surrounding the event persist, the truth endures at the center of it all—liberation.

In almost every account of Igbo Landing, the Africans sing before they fly. They chant in a dialect of Bantu, one of Africa’s five hundred known languages: “Kum buba yali kum buba tambe, / Kum kunka yali kum kunka tambe.” Those words are spoken by Solomon in Song of Solomon and we see it in the song that the children sing about his flight. They don’t have a direct translation, but some claim that the chant means, “The Water Spirit brought us, the Water Spirit will take us home.” The words, more often, get described as secret, magical or lost. But it’s important to note that music is at the heart of this mythology. 

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The location where Igbo Landing occurred is also significant. Located on the Sea Islands off the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Northern Florida, are communities of people who are the descendants of enslaved men and women. They have a unique culture and language that is directly linked to West Africa. The language they speak is referred to as Gullah (Gul-luh). Geechee derives from the Ogeechee River, the untamed blackwater river in the heart of Georgia. Many historians believe that the word “Gullah” comes from Angola, a West African country from which many of the enslaved came. Others say it stands for the Gola tribe; rice-growing people near the border of Liberia and Sierra Leone, who brought their expertise with them to the south to develop rice fields for white landowners. 

The Gullah culture is rich in storytelling, with music and language (an English-based Creole language with roots in West African dialects) at its center. St. Simons, Georgia, where Igbo Landing took place, is part of the archipelago that stretches from Florida to North Carolina and long remained separate from the mainland United States. This isolation allowed African customs to survive, where elsewhere they were assimilated or vanished. Historians describe the Gullah-Geechee people as cultural conservators, tasked with the duties of preservation.

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(Here I trace the links from Gullah oral stories to Julie Dash’s 1991 film, Daughters of the Dust and Beyoncé’s Lemonade to various contemporary artists’ evocation of the Black American mythology of flight.)

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What is Morrison saying about the sacrifices men make in order to gain their freedom? And is she challenging us to center the stories of those they’ve left behind? Morrison wrote Song of Solomon after the death of her father, and we see the loss of several fathers in the story. Might the loss of a loved one feel like a type of abandonment? Perhaps some enslaved Gullah people watched the chorus of Igbo ebb from the shores of Dunbar Creek and battled internally with love, envy, mourning, and pride. 

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Morrison understood why the mythology of flight resonated so deeply with Black Americans and why the oral literature around flight persists after two hundred years, even among today’s Black artists and intellectuals. Flight is more than just an escape from harsh circumstances. Migration and movement are integral, but it’s not merely about geography. It’s about a profound belief in what is possible—the possibility of building a better reality for ourselves and for our people. It’s about self actualization, the drive to be all of the things that we know that we can be and must be for, and with, one another. In Beloved, Morrison writes, “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Once Milkman finally surrenders to the air, and rides it, what will he do with this newfound power? Is the end of Song of Solomon really the end of Milkman’s story or just the beginning? Perhaps the entire novel is an origin story. The ability to fly might merely be the beginning of a deeper understanding of our own potential as individuals and as a global community. 

It may be difficult in our current social and political climate to maintain a vision for all of the good that we can do and be in the world. But Milkman was eventually able to learn from his history, accept and express compassion, and transform his fearfulness into flight. We can do the same, especially for the sake of our students and the families who place them in our care. In the introduction to her collection of Black American folktales, Virginia Hamilton wrote, “These tales were recreated out of sorrow. But the hearts and minds of the Black people who formed them, expanded them, and passed them on to us were full of love and hope. We must look on these tales as a celebration of the human spirit.” By continuing to pass on these stories in our classrooms and in our lives, we celebrate humanity and grow feathers for our wings.