All God's Chillen Had Wings pushed the work along without a moment's stop for breath, until all grew weak with heat and thirst. ere was among them one young woman who had lately5 borne a child. It was her first; she Traditional had not fully recovered from bearing and should not have been sent to the field until her strength had come back. She had her child with her, as the other woman had, astraddle on her hip, or piggyback. e baby cried. She spoke to quiet it. e driver could not understand her words. She took Prereading. A folk tale is a story found in The People Could Fly: American her breast with her hand and threw it over her shoulder that the child might suck and be content. originating in the oral tradition, often Mock Folk tales, by Virginia Hamilton and en she went back to chopping knot-grass,6 but being very weak and sick with the great heat, one containing fanciful or fantastic In JuBus Lester's Mock Folktales. This she stumbled, slipped, and fell. elements. This African-American folk traditional story evolved from similar e driver struck her with his lash 7 until she rose and staggered on. Late was collected from a teller named tales told in West Africa. It is a moving She spoke to an old man near her, the oldest man of them all, tall and strong, with a forked Caesar Geant, of John's hiand, South tale, expressing via fantanny what is beard. He replied, but the driver could not understand what they said. eir talk was strange to Carolina and published in the early not fantiny at all-the unconquerable him. 1900s in a book called Drums and nature of the human spirit, which can She returned to work, but in a little while she fell again. Again the driver lashed he until she Shadows: Survival Studies among the sour above and beyond adversity. The Gromgla Coastal Negroes and then in 194s story provides an important motif and 5. lately. recently 6. knot-grass. A creeping grass with the scientific name Paspalum distichum that grows in wet, in a book by John Bennet called Doctor thematic element in the prize-winning marshy areas of the southern United States. 7. lash. whip 8. Their talk . . . to him. They have newly arrived from to the Deed: Grotesque Legends of Old novel by Toni Morrison, Song of Salomon Africa and are speaking an African language unknown to the driver. Charleston Versions of the story can be C nce all Africans could fly like birds, but owing to their many transgressions, their wings were taken away. ere remained, here and there, in the sea islands2 and out-of-the-way places in the low country, some who had been overlooked and had retained the power of flight, though they looked like other men. ere was a cruel master3 on one of the sea islands who worked his people till they died. When they died, he bought others to take their places. ese also he killed with overwork in the burning summer sun, through the middle hours of the day, although this was against the law. One day, when all the worn-out Negroes were dead of overwork, he bought, of a broker in the town, a company of native Africans just brought into the country and put them at once to work in the cottonfield. He drove them hard. ey went to work at sunrise and did not stop until dark. ey were driven with unsparing harshness all day long, men, women, and children. ere was no pause for rest during the unendurable heat of the midsummer noon, though trees were plenty and near. But through the hardest hours, when fair plantations gave their Negroes rest, this man's driver4
