The story of human flight among enslaved African men and women returning to the homeland has long been told as a myth, but I have reason to believe it is as real as the cosmos. The story takes place around 1803 along the costal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, and concerns an estimate of 13 men and women who chose to fly rather than be enslaved. They lay in the river or climbed in the air and ascended like birds. Believing in the unseen and the unheard made them believe that in the end they would fly and finally return home to be free. If energy cannot be created or destroyed, the magic of the ancestors can somehow transcend the spirit through time and space and give us freedom and flight if we allow it to. The essence of this story is that flight threatened the tradition of the enslaved Black body which demanded total control over the enslaved African. Total control of the body and the mind. If you close your eyes and imagine a flying slave, that would mean that the oppressor’s would no longer have either. If I can choose to fly, I mean really fly, I have controlled my entire being.

I am most familiar with this Literature and Lore because of Toni Morrison’s ‘Song Of Solomon’, about a Black man who chose to stand on the mountain top and fly into the sky. At the very end of the novel, Morrison famously writes, “If you surrendered to the air you could ride it.” In an interview clip (below) Morrison expresses that myths always seem to have some type of truth. I interpret these African myths as spiritual stories somewhat hard to grasp by the modern mind. If you think about it, ancient Egyptian spirituality could have easily been told as myths, yet we continue to believe that these brilliant human beings managed to intellectualize a lot of what we know today. If we are connected to a higher source, nothing is unimaginable if we have the ability to imagine.

The story of the flying Africans so eloquently explains the concept of spiritually ascending and freeing oneself. There’s a liberating process when you allow the spirit to lead the body because it is all connected. You are not separate from your soul. It is important to keep telling these stories if we are to honor our ancestors travels through dimensions, giving voice to their dreams and secrets.