But on the other hand, a lot of these tales would have been lost without Joel Chandler Harris. We can debate the fact that, well, he certainly wasn't a black man, and we could debate what his motivation was, and we can wonder, did African-Americans receive any percentage or share of the enormous profit that he made? The answer is absolutely not. Gates: Joel Chandler Harris did an enormous service. On the complicated history of Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories It was a transition in the literal sense of going from one realm of existence to another, and these stories are told with an enormous amount of admiration and respect, but also it's a musing about a form of suicide - that it was better to will yourself back home to Africa, will yourself back to the other side of the Atlantic, than to live the social death of human bondage here in the United States. You know, it wasn't a kind of magic carpet when you go to another world and then return to your previous life. Gates: The relationship between flying, freedom, and death is one of the curious things about the African-American oral tradition, that you would fly away, as Paul Robeson just so beautifully sang, but you fly away after death to heaven. On the importance of flying Africans in folktales "They give us mysteries wrapped in enigmas inside riddles. " have that magical quality," Tatar says. The anthology is edited by two Harvard professors: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Maria Tatar. There were also folktales told by slaves of newly arrived Africans - who, unlike the slaves, had not yet lost the ability to fly stories of Africans who escaped slavery by flying back to Africa.
In one chapter called "Defiance and Desire," there's a section devoted to flying Africans, where there's a lyric that I was familiar with from a song Paul Robeson recorded many years ago - "All God's Chillun Got Wings." Browsing through a weighty new anthology called The Annotated African American Folk Tales is a journey across space and time.
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