From Escape to Ascension: The Effects of Aviation Technology on the Flying African Myth

This essay traces the effects of aviation technology on the development of the Flying African myth within the United States. Ultimately I argue that these new technological possibilities converged with civil rights integration efforts so as to transform the mythic desires for physical escape into aspirations for socioeconomic ascension. Traditionally, the Flying African myth has reflected the desire for freedom and cross-Atlantic return shared by generations of African descendants who inherited the trauma of forced displacement and enslavement throughout the Americas. Stories about New World slaves who could fly back to Africa over the encumbering sea and escape slavery have permeated black popular culture and sacred ritual. This myth was created under the painful conditions of the New World, reflecting the desires for freedom, cross-Atlantic return, and even death shared by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Though strikingly, since the Golden Age of Aviation (1919–39), writers and storytellers in the United States have readapted the tradition of the Flying African myth to variously express a rejection of cross-Atlantic return, avow a distrust of Western technology, or focus on the barriers to socioeconomic ascension within the nation. But what unites all of these transformations is the redirection of desire from the collective memories of an African homeland to resolving the internal struggles of the United States. Although this redirection of desire followed larger efforts for civil rights integration, these shifts were also partially due to the concurrent developments in aviation technology that led to an increasing awareness about, and contact with, the African continent. Ultimately then, the Flying African myth was produced under the conditions of slavery, but altered under the possibilities that were generated by the very technologies of flight for which it had once expressed an impossible desire.

This essay thus explains the myth’s inception and early development, briefly reviews the history of black American aviation, and considers the myth’s subsequent twentieth-century transformations. The final section includes a broad range of genres and literary forms—exploring the travel writings and poetry of Langston Hughes (b. 1902, d. 1967), Ralph Ellison’s short story “Flying Home” (1944), Ishmael Reed’s novel Flight to Canada (1976), and Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977), as well as Faith Ringgold’s children’s story Tar Beach (1991). I consider these texts in chronological order so as to give a general impression of the shifts occurring between the First World War and our more contemporary moment following the civil rights movement—an era that moved from the height of separatist Garveyism¹ to the ubiquity of assimilation and multicultural integration. Analyzing the myth in this historical way thus reveals how some of these profound changes in political orientation came to be and how they came to be understood by blacks in America.

After enduring the Middle Passage, it became clear to enslaved Africans that the sea posed the greatest geographical barrier to freedom. It was thus necessary for narratives of escape to overcome this obstacle, and flight became the most common resolution in slave folklore throughout the Americas.² Thus, the sea performs a vital role in traditional versions, often portrayed as an adversary equal to the slave master. But the sea bears significance to this myth in other ways, as well. For example, the myth reframed the suicides of those captured Africans who threw themselves off slave ships. Rather than imagining such fatal leaps as suicidal, “[t]his logical and defiant act of rebellion actualized the return to Africa.”³ For many uprooted Africans,⁴ such as the Azande, Kanuri, Ibo, and Hausa, suicide was considered forbidden and shameful. Similarly, in Nigeria, the Tiv peoples thought suicide more ethically reprehensible than murder.⁵ Among the African slaves, “mythologizing or encoding the act” ritualistically cleansed the deceased so that “the individual’s soul could find peace in the spirit world and not roam in various ‘shape-shifting’ forms among the living.”⁶ Thus, extant oral history reveals that “the enslaved Africans who arrived in the Americas during the early centuries of slavery frequently dismissed, denied...