African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee

Summoning the Ancestors: The Flying Africans’ Story and Its Enduring Legacy

Timothy Powell SummoningtheAncestors The Flying Africans’ Story and Its Enduring Legacy he flying Africans’ story undoubtedly constitutes one of the most powerful, enduring, and vital examples of the “mysteries of the Gullah and Geechee past.” This narrative has been told and embellished for more than two hundred years in the form of communal histories, local legends, children’s stories, movies, novels, and television shows. Based on an actual historical event, this remarkable tale of how members of the black communities of coastal Georgia rose up, both in rebellion and in flight, embodies the magical history of this unique region and teaches us a great deal about the curative powers of storytelling. The historical origins of the flying Africans’ story date back to the spring of 1803, to St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. Because the “facts” of the event come from archival evidence, much of it written by slave owners and slave dealers, parts of the story remain difficult to recover. What we do know for sure is that in May 1803, a group of Ibo (variations: Ebo, Ibo) slaves arrived at Skidaway Island, just south of Savannah, Georgia , after enduring the nightmare of the Middle Passage. The slave dealer William Mein sold the Ibo to Thomas Spalding and James Couper, both of whom five years earlier had signed the Georgia Constitution, which outT 254  timothy powell lawed the importation of Africans. On the short voyage from Skidaway to St.SimonsIsland,theIboroseinrebellion,leadingtothedeathofthewhite overseer and two sailors aboard the York. According to archival evidence, the Ibo did not fly, but instead committed collective suicide by drowning themselves in Dunbar Creek, at a place now called Ebos Landing.1 The black communities of coastal Georgia, however, remember the same historical event very differently. Drums and Shadows, a compendium of interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project (fwp) in the 1930s, abounds with flying African references that testify to the story’s enduring legacy in the form of oral histories. Interestingly, many black historians recorded in Drums and Shadows recall their relatives witnessing not just the events that occurred in 1803, but instances of flight that happened years later, in some cases providing eyewitness accounts. James Moore of Tin City, Georgia, for example, explained: “I seen folks disappear right before my eyes. Just go right out of sight. They do say that people brought from Africa in slavery times could disappear and fly right back to Africa. From the things I see myself I believe that they could do this.”2 George W. Little, a root doctor from Brownville, offered both an affirmation of the events at Ebos Landing and a firsthand observation of contemporary flight: “Take the story of them people what fly back to Africa. That’s all true. You just had to possess magic knowledge to be able to accomplish this. Not long ago I see a man vanish into thin air by snapping his fingers.”3 The story of the Ibo uprising was apparently widely known in the black community, albeit with a very different conclusion. Wallace Quarterman of Darien, when asked by an fwp interviewer to verify the history of the “Ibos on St. Simons who walked into the water,” replied, “Ain’t you heard about them? . . . They rise up in the sky and turn themselves into buzzards and fly right back to Africa.” The fieldworkers then asked: “Had Wallace actually seen this happen[?]” To which Quarterman replied, “Everybody know about them. . . . I know plenty what did see them, plenty what was right there in the field with them . . . after they done fly away.”4 The distinction between suicide and flight may very well depend on whether the analysis takes into consideration the spiritual dimension of the story, the realm of the ancestors. The greatest challenge in summoning the ancestors within the margins of the white page of academic discourse is overcoming conventions that inhibit the ability to speak of the spirits of the dead as being active agents in the story. Steven Feierman poignantly addresses these questions in “Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of summoning the ancestors  255 Invisible Histories.” Writing about public healers in Africa who are powerful enough to have lived in many different historical moments or who exist outside of historical time, Feierman writes, “Historians read (or hear) these narratives and conclude that the stories do not describe ‘reality.’ . . . Since the narratives are judged by historians to be inadequate...