Response to The People Could Fly

           My earliest memory: I was sitting on the deck of my grandparent’s cabin.  There is family everywhere.  It is nighttime.  I choose to sit on my grandma’s lap-not my mom’s.  Before we count bats (once I get to 10 I have to go to bed), my grandma tells me stories.  We say nursery rhymes, we practice the alphabet, but my favorite part is her stories.  Her stories are the same ones that she listened to when she was growing up.  I never believed her when she said that she used to be my size, but I never doubted that whatever story was her favorite that night would be my favorite also. 

  

          Folk tales are an important part of all cultures and of most people’s childhood.   We share these stories with the people we love because we love these stories.  We have memorized the story of the Tortoise and the Hare, Cinderella, and countless others, and we don’t need the words on the page to tell the story for us.  Everyone cherishes these stories with a nostalgic fondness, but hardly ever, outside the world of academia, do we examine how these stories reflect our culture’s values.  As we get older, our literature classes teach us that folk tales have a meaning and this realization often times leaves us dumbfounded.  Childishly, we don’t realize that, through these stories, we are taught that you can outsmart evil people, that good wins out over bad, and that you will get punished if you do something wrong.  Most folk tales emphasize the difference between right and wrong.  The power in folk tales is that these values are impressed on us in an implicit way, and that our oral tradition helps us to understand our cultures in a way that textbooks and teachers cannot.  As children we don’t need to analyze the hows and whats of folk tales to learn behavioral rules and the beliefs of our culture. 

  

          The People Could Fly is a collection of American Black folk tales, but I struggled to find the meanings and values reflected in every one of the stories.  Folk tales are powerful because they live on through oral tradition.  We hear folk tales one by one and rarely stop to analyze their message.  A collection of folk tales leaves itself vulnerable to being simply a collection of stories and words on a page.  I couldn’t help but to observe that on paper the meaning of traditional tales are lost.  The stories are undoubtedly seeped in lessons and cultural meaning, but in this format, I found that some of Virginia Hamilton’s stories lacked relevancy.  With story after story, the tales ran together and the meaning of one story melded into another.  Had I been sitting on my grandparents’ deck, on my grandma’s lap, counting bats, and listening to a story that is important to my grandma, these stories would’ve had relevancy.  But words on a paper or a collection of culturally relevant stories will never be as powerful as the oral tradition in which they should be presented. 

            The structure of Virginia Hamilton’s collection of folk tales helps all readers, whether they are familiar with the stories or not, to understand the significance of each of the folk tales.  There are two elements of the structure that make her collection cohesive: the groupings for chapters and Hamilton’s insight after each story.  The organization of the chapters clusters all stories with similar motifs together; while the stories don’t build upon each other, a stronger understanding of the motifs in the genre of American Black folklore is created with each new story.  As in all chapters, all stories included in the chapter “He Lion, Bruh Bear, and Bruh Rabbit” have a consistent theme.  Each story has major animal characters with very few humans; the personification of the animals allows us to understand these animals to be symbols of humans.  The structure remains cohesive through the insight Hamilton offers after each story.  It teaches new information about the cultural importance, the meanings of concepts and words, and significance of certain character types and actions.  There are examples throughout the collection.  We learn that “Little Eight John” is meant to teach behavioral rules to children.  We can use her Glossary for Gullah Words after dialect-heavy “Bruh Alligator Meets Trouble” to better understand the story.  Lastly, we learn after “Tappin, the Land Turtle” that common “African animal prototypes” like the jackal, hare, and tortoise transitioned through time into the more American animals: a fox, rabbit, and turtle.  The structural consistency helps readers to build understanding of patterns in American Black folklore.

  

          All folk tales seem capable of being connected to one another through common links.  These motifs are what help us to feel that the story is familiar and that we have heard something like it before.  The American Black folktales used to make up this particular collection use both familiar and unfamiliar motifs found in common folk tales.  There are many examples of common motifs, such as the trickster in “Doc Rabbit, Bruh Rabbit, and Tarbaby” and magic and transformation in “Wiley, His Mama, and the Hairy Man”.  However, Hamilton introduces many new motifs that can be found in this culture’s folklore but in few others.  One unfamiliar motif mentioned was the magic-hoe motif in “Bruh Lizard and Bruh Rabbit”; Hamilton’s explains that this motif is common in Europe and Africa.   “The Beautiful Girl of the Moon Tower” mentions a life-in-an-egg motif, and while I haven’t heard any folk tales with this detail, I imagine it would be quite common in creation myths.  The weaving of the familiar and unfamiliar motifs made these stories both predictable and surprising at the same time.

            As mentioned earlier, Hamilton often has to clarify meanings of words in The People Could Fly.  The book uses dialect as a way to root itself in its traditions.  It is mentioned in the Introduction that the dialect “reflect[s] the expressiveness of the original slave teller, and later the free black storyteller.”  The story “Bruh Alligator Meets Trouble” uses the most Gullah words of all the stories.  In fact, so many words are used a glossary is necessary to translate them.  The Gullah language impacts the story by adding the authentic quality of an oral tradition; these words still exist and are understood because of their social significance.  It is also interesting that some statements remain in the tales even though their meaning has been lost through time.  One of my favorite stories, “A Wolf and Little Daughter”, uses a chorus sang by the young protagonist, but Hamilton explains that the meaning of this chorus “does not survive”.  The story is still an entertaining tale and readers are not put off by the lack of understanding; we are most interested in the young girl’s outsmarting of the wolf.  However, we are left to wonder if her song would add another layer of significance to the tale.  The use of dialect in this collection emphasizes the cultural traditions from which the stories were created.  The language reminds us that these stories have traveled many miles, many years, and through many people and experiences.  The traditional phrases remain as an important reason that these stories still exist.     

           American Black folk tales have an important place in American folklore because the stories have survived the same adversity as the storytellers themselves.  “No amount of hard labor and suffering could suppress their powers of imagination.”  The original storytellers didn’t set out to write their stories down or to have scholars study them generations later.  They created their stories with the messages that were important to them and with their words to inspire others and to inspire themselves.