Flights, Talking Images, and Subverted Gazes: Returning to the Heartbeat of Black Children’s Literature

• In Event: “Be Real Black For Me”: Black Livingness in Children’s Literature - From Past to Present to Hopeful Futures

Abstract

Flight is foundational in Black storytelling and can be characterized by metaphorical, physical, and material escapes from tumultuous past to hopeful futures. The chaos of the current political moment of book banning, story censorship, and historical erasure urges an escape back to the foundation of uplifting our humanity in Black storytelling. I turn to family, flight, and food in traditional folktales and contemporary children’s literature to escape the noise, chaos, and racist distractions (Morrison, 1975) of this current moment in time.
Foregrounding Commander’s (2017) theoretical conception of Afro-Atlantic Flight, I critically uplift flight and the ancestor in We Could Fly (Giddens, 2023), The People Could Fly (Hamilton, 1985), Auntie Luce’s Talking Painting (Latour, 2018), Never Forgotten (McKissack, 2011), and Rice and Rocks (Richards, 2016). I explore an ongoing research question of How do stories and text reinforce the fullness of Black children? Particularly in this study, how do authors and illustrators bridge the past, the present, and the future in Black children’s books? The children’s literature highlights the centrality of flight and the ancestor to Black identity, historical legacy, and Black storytelling. The selected children’s books radically move in and out of time and space bridging the past, present, and futures. Each of the stories radiates Black Aliveness (Quashie, 2021) and Black livingness (Johnson and Turner, 2023), but remembers slavery’s impact on the connective, intergenerational lineage of the African Diaspora. The ancestor facilitating historical re-memory is pivotal in Black protagonist’s capacities to fly between the past and the present, while traversing into the future. In this research study, I listen to images (Campt, 2017) and utilize Black Ancestral Text Analysis (Teague & Nagbe, 2024) and Multimodal Content Analysis (Serafini and Reid, 2019), to trace the ancestor as rendered through flight, family, and food in folktales and contemporary children’s literature. The characters in the selected children’s books offer glimpses into the lives of children across the African Diaspora while reckoning with their historical legacy. By returning to the imaginary, the heart of what is important to children, and escaping the current political climate and troubling times, we arrive at the heartbeat of Black children’s books: love, family, food, and community, but most importantly, flying. The findings urge researchers and storytellers to fly high away from noise and distractions and to return to the pulse of stories. By subverting the child’s gaze and soaring to the foundations, the unsettling realities of today strip away rendering empathy and offering healing and hopeful futures.

Author

• Latoya M. Teague, University of Tulsa