 |
Storyteller's Cabin |
Written by Veronica Byrd
I bet you always thought those songs were about dying and goin to heaven didn't you. Well, I'm here to tell you different. Those songs and many other Negro Spirituals were actually secret songs. They sounded like one thing but they actually meant something else. For instance, during slavery time "flying away" actually meant running away or stealing away late in the midnight hour when Ole Massa wasn't paying his slaves no attention. Whenever one of the slaves would start to sing that song, that was a message to the others that somebody was gonna run away that night. But long before slavery time, before the slaves were brought over from Africa, that song was really telling the truth.
You see, long ago, when Africans were still living on the continent of Africa, they had a special God given ability to actually fly. Oh yeah, what I'm telling you is true. It wasn't until just recently here that black folk lost their ability to fly. I remember this story my great great granddaddy used to tell me.
There once was this old slave master down in south Georgia, down by the coast, by the name of Jessup. Now Ole' Massa Jessup was the meanest man you'd ever want to meet. He worked his slaves so hard he near bout'; killed them all off, and those that were left were so worn out from the cruel treatment that they weren't able to do the hard work that needed to be done in the fields. He decided he was gonna get him "the real thing", not these "domesticated" Negroes from America, he called them. He went right down to the dock and brought him a whole company of native Africans, just off the boat from Africa. He figured they were much stronger than the "watered down Americans." He wasted no time. He took them on back to his plantation and put all of them straight to work in the cotton fields.
Return to top
