While the characters might change and the language of the teller might differ, the message does not. Despite the cruelties of slavery, Black people throughout the diaspora held onto these old tales that had been used to teach and entertain. At the end of many of the stories, Virginia Hamilton lets the reader know that the tales she is retelling are not just told by Black people in the United States but by people in South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. What is most powerful about these tales is that they have been told for so long and by so many people. A tale naturally changes as it is told by one person to another.” Although the stories have been altered in Hamilton’s interpretations, they continue to hold their own timeless power. To this very day, folktales are being told, altered, retold, and made. For they are told in my own voice, echoing the voices of the slave and fugitives, some of whom are my ancestors. In the introduction, Hamilton states, “They show you how I tell the black folktales.
The People Could Fly was her best remembered venture into retelling folk literature.
Throughout her distinguished career, Hamilton wrote it all - realism and fantasy for both teens and younger readers easy readers nonfiction. Published in 1985, The People Could Fly is a collection of Black American folktales retold by the brilliant and inimitable Virginia Hamilton. If Grandma Best had been the storytelling type, I could imagine her telling stories like the ones in Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly. My grandmother lived with her great-grandmother, Grandma Best, who had been enslaved. When she was a child, my grandmother picked cotton, strawberries, and potatoes with her family to ensure that they could pay rent on the land on which they lived. Born in 1924, she and her family were sharecroppers. Since I was a girl, my grandmother would tell me stories about growing up in Mount Olive, North Carolina. We look back on this iconic Coretta Scott King Author Award winner (also a CSK Illustrator honor) as it celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary.
The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon, was published by Alfred A.
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