“ONCE UPON A TIME…”
“I believe that one of the principal ways in which we acquire, hold and digest information is via narrative. So I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with what I believe to be the first sentence of our childhood that we all remember—the phrase: “ONCE UPON A TIME…”
--Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate for Literature, 1993
On the Wings of the Wind is fiction. Imaginary characters inhabiting invented places are swept through the currents of life by events that never took place.
On the Wings of the Wind is historical because many events described in the story actually happened. The fictional characters relate their own experiences. Their narratives were taken from the actual words of real men and women who lived and worked as slaves in America.
The essential building blocks, the bricks and mortar that make up the substance of On the Wings of the Wind come from the historical record. In composing this work of fiction, I relied on authentic slave narratives—the words of Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, William Still, Henry “Box” Brown, and many many other voices, decades, sometimes a century old. Their words are the raw stuff of history. Primary source material—the God’s honest truth—is the Gold Standard for any historian.
The Slave Narrative genre is a literary form unique to the American experience. It originated and was inspired by the ancient African oral tradition. “The impulse, simply put, is to tell the story,” writes Maya Angelou, “to tell one’s own story…as one has known it and lived it and even died it.”
In 1760, the first book written by an African-American gave the genre its name: A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammond, a Negro Man.
The middle of the nineteenth century saw hundreds of books, articles and interviews by former slaves. The literary giant Frederick Douglass, master of the genre, wrote his narrative in three volumes. A short version appeared in 1845 shortly after his dramatic escape to freedom. He expanded his story in 1855 and finally published his comprehensive autobiography in 1881.
In the years before the Civil War, slave narratives were wildly popular, the best sellers of their time. By the end of the nineteenth century, interest in slavery and the Civil War era faded as the nation moved on to new issues.
For most of the twentieth century, the voices of those who experienced slavery have been almost completely absent. Despite the fact that nearly a hundred fugitive slave narratives were published before the Civil War—nearly all of them disappeared.
Scholars rediscovered slave narratives in the 1970’s. Historians studied all the published writings of former slaves and found 93 to be “authentic.”
The slave narrative is an extraordinary testament to the power of the written word. Personal stories of everyday toil and trouble told by living men and women are a striking rebuke to the cruelty that punished the crime of reading and writing. Writes Toni Morrison, “No slave society in the history of the world wrote more—or more thoughtfully—about its own enslavement.”
The largest, most extensive effort to record the stories of those who experienced slavery took place during the Great Depression. Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writer’s Project working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) sent out hundreds of interviewers seeking out aging former slaves. Their purpose was to ask questions, get them talking, listen to their stories and record their recollections. It was one of the most extraordinary and valuable research projects ever attempted.
All together the Federal Writer’s Project collected interviews with 2,194 former slaves. For many years, this wealth of information, what historians call “primary source material” was buried and ignored, lost in the bowels of the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress.
Finally, in 1972, the entire collection of Federal Writer’s Project
interviews, The American Slave: A Collective Autobiography was published in 19 volumes. It is now available to anyone online.
Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhome.html “No group of slaves anywhere, at any other period in history, has left such a large repository of testimony about the horror of becoming the legal property of another human being,” wrote Henry Louis Gates.
It was history from the bottom up. The people become their own historians.
Much of the narrative and dialogue describing the experiences of the characters in On the Wings of the Wind was taken from actual interviews and narratives of real men and women who lived and worked as slaves in America. Their haunting voices come packed with fierce and terrible emotion, plain unpretentious, human cries, now disembodied, yet all too real. They are from another time and another place, a world beyond the grave. As we read their living words, woven into this constructed narrative, we sense the power of their authenticity. We honor the authority of those who know the truth. They are the real American heroes.
The heart of On the Wings of the Wind is an invented slave narrative written in the voice of a fictional fugitive slave who tells us that he wrote it because he had an important story to share with the world. We are left with the nagging impression that, maybe one day, a handwritten, unpublished manuscript will turn up and it will reveal experiences just as startling as this one by Josiah Brantley.
“They keep finding Mayan cities and tombs of pharaohs,” says Professor Gates. “They’ve got to find more manuscripts from black people in the 19th century. I’m confident of it. It’s just the way it has to be.”
ONCE UPON A TIME…
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If you want to purchase the book, it is available from the publisher:
www.synergebooks.com and on my website:
www.wingsfirstflight.com I have about a dozen copies of the book to give away free of charge. If you are seriously interested in reading ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND, it will be my pleasure to see that it gets into your hands.
I hope you enjoy it.
PEACE AND BLESSINGS,
Rich
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Sunday, May 16th 2010 at 8:52PM
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