SOURCE: Ogunyemi, Chikwenye Okonjo. “‘The Old Order Shall Pass’: The Examples of ‘Flying Home’ and ‘Barbados.’” Studies in Short Fiction 20, no. 1 (winter 1983): 23-32.

[In the following essay, Ogunyemi assesses Ellison's “Flying Home” and Paule Marshall's “Barbados.”]

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.

—Margaret Walker, 1942

“Flying Home” by Ralph Ellison and “Barbados” by Paule Marshall are two exceptional stories in Langston Hughes' 1967 collection, The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the Present. The stories in the collection range widely in subject matter, and a sampling will show some of the writers' concerns: Charles W. Chesnutt examines the tragic mulatto theme in “The Sheriff's Children” and Willard Motley does the same in “The Almost White Boy”; Arna Bontemps presents the negative side of black life in the tragedy of the old, suicidal pair in “Summer Tragedy”; the aggressive protest tradition, rightly the domain of Richard Wright, is represented in his “Almos' a Man,” where he portrays the black man as less than a man and equates him to a mule to arouse the white man's conscience and in Chester Himes' melodramatic “Marihuana and a Pistol” that traces the psychology of the black criminal to the ills of racism; Frank Yerby and Mike Thelwell present the integrationist cause, Yerby in his story of jim-crowism, “Health Card,” and Thelwell in the confrontational “Direct Action”; more positive tones of black togetherness are depicted by Zora Neale Hurston in “The Gilded Six-Bits” and Langston Hughes in “Thank You M'am”; Alice Walker's concern is existential in “To Hell with Dying.”

The thematic concerns of Ellison and Marshall show a divergence from these. Writing primarily for a black audience rather than a white, as is the case of many of the writers above, their stories are striking in the manner they exude a strong, positive blackism in their portraits of a renascent black people. More intriguing is the technical versatility that each of them displays in handling a deceptively simple plot to produce a dense, compact story with rippling effects. Their forte is for the impressionistic and the symbolic presented on a background that demonstrates a keen sense for the historical and traditional. The resulting complex narrative skill is more stimulating than the straightforward, linear presentation that one finds in most of the other stories.

“Flying Home” and “Barbados” are similar thematically and in the fundamental optimism that informs them. In the tradition of Alain Locke, Ellison and Marshall demonstrate that the old black order, marked by its aping of white ways and its longing for white approval, and by the debilitating effects that isolation and a crippling individualism entail, has passed away or will pass away. It will be replaced by a virile black race, united in a strong peoplehood. The old black man is culturally a tragic mulatto, overwhelmed and emotionally incapacitated by the burden of the “double consciousness”¹ that makes him ambivalent towards blackness; he occasionally denies his blackness, yet he remains an invisible outsider in white society. Invariably he bemoans his lot, and, dissociating himself from fellow blacks, he has no home to call his own. In “Flying Home” and “Barbados” a new generation, proud of its black identity and the new ethos, supplants an old, ineffectual Negro generation, to establish a future in which people aid one another in a spirit of togetherness.

“Flying Home” deals with the “old” young man, Todd, who flees from home, his black identity, and his roots. He acquires a double consciousness, shamed by black associations and yearning desperately for white acceptance. His frustration is further exacerbated by a career in which he is made less of a man by his remaining a perpetual trainee pilot, his skill unacknowledged by the white world that denies him the opportunity to fight in WW II. He is doubly an outsider, from the black world by choice, from the white by racism. To recover from his traumatic situation, he unconsciously sets off on a quest for a father (his real father had died when he was a child) to guide him through his confused state. He finds a father in Jefferson,² who ingeniously leads him back to his black roots, to the home he had shamelessly deserted.

Todd belongs to a line of black characters that resort to flight (a vivid metaphor to mark the syndrome) to cope with the racial dilemma.³ He dissociates himself from his lowly, black beginnings, falls from the aerial enthronement of acquired whiteness, and then reintegrates himself to the black world after his fall down to the earth. Ellison works out this schema through an intricate series of linked images of flying creatures, animals, death, and rebirth. Todd is severally referred to as the locust that has cast off its shell⁴ and the buzzard that feasts on a dead horse (p. 157). He is thus associated with destructive, obnoxious, winged creatures, “damned” and useless to anybody. Contrastingly, he is likened to Jonah in the whale (p. 159), with the images of death and rebirth that are part of that tale. Todd, like Jonah emerging from the whale or the wasp coming forth from its cell (p. 162), is delivered from the crippled plane with a new opportunity to live differently. The plane represents the sophisticated, white world, attractive yet unfulfilling and disastrous to a black man. The field where he crashes demonstrates, in terms of status, how far below the black world is from the white. It represents the earthiness of the black world close to the soil. Todd can no longer flee from it now that he is physically injured. He undergoes a rebirth, an emotional metamorphosis, when he is exposed to his new father, Jefferson. Ellison traces the hero's downward movement towards blackness not only in this psychological dimension but also in images. In contrast to the airplane that takes him away from reality, Jefferson offers him an oxteam to convey him to a doctor. The paternal Jefferson describes the fall of the plane in terms of his own experience in the field: “When I seen you coming down in that thing with it a-rollin' and a-jumpin' like a pitchin' hoss, I thought sho' you was a goner” (p. 156). These animal images of the ox and the horse are Ellison's attempt to cut Todd down to size. During the process, he strips him of the camouflage borrowed from the white world, so that he can become natural and himself.

Having been brought down to earth, Todd has to be formally initiated into blackness for he knows that he was “flying unwillingly into unsafe and uncharted regions”; in other words, he is flying into darkness and descending into his black unconscious, into history. (James Baldwin would later depict a similar situation in John's trance during his confrontation with the armies of darkness in Go Tell It on the Mountain.) Todd realizes the significant role of the buzzard that had knocked him “back a hundred years” into a comprehension of his historical slave past, into an acknowledgement of its lowliness and an acceptance of it. The buzzard, in another sense the jim-crowism of the air force, has made him see the truth of his life. Todd has to battle with his feelings of “humiliation,” “shame,” and “embarrassment” towards blacks, represented by Jefferson, whom he condescendingly considers a child (p. 154). Ironically, this child will father the man that will emerge from the real child, Todd. Todd will then cease to be “a monkey doing tricks” (p. 154) and become a man. He is in a battle field with Jefferson as captain, fighting himself in the most essential war of his life. Unlike the Todd, who falls with a thud in Invisible Man thereby falling out of history, this Todd experiences a “fortunate fall.”⁵

With our present full knowledge of the denseness in narration that Ellison exhibits in Invisible Man, it might not be too farfetched to see a similar technical skill already at work in this 1944 story. Jefferson's anecdote of his heavenly flight, that is the inner story narrated to Todd, might fruitfully be considered, from a historical perspective, as a dramatization of the Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence for America, the “nigger” of all nations in the eighteenth century. Britain-ole St. Peter will not permit America to speed to real independence with reckless abandon without putting a harness to her; hence the American war for independence. As the French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville perceived, the impact of democracy in America will be felt, and, in the anecdote, is felt, in the elitist club of world dominions and powers. We can deduce another message. Through the anecdote, Jefferson underscores the black desire for genuine freedom in the true, American tradition. His tale is a bid, in the Jeffersonian tradition, to proclaim freedom for blacks, knowing there would be hardship which comes in the inner tale and the outer story as white abandonment of the black man. He indirectly predicts success for Todd, that is, the black man, as his personal problems are akin to those experienced by the young nation; since America emerged victorious and strong, a similar desirable ending can be prognosticated for Todd and the black race. By equating the black dilemma to that of an emerging America, and by creating an ironical situation where an unfree black man would desire but not be allowed to fight to help free the world in WW II, Ellison was in 1944 probing the conscience and double standards of white America.

In another skillful move, Ellison restates a historical perspective on the racial situation by his impressionistic portrayal of Dabney Graves on whose land Todd crashes. Graves is a white man with feelings of love and hate towards blacks. The Northern and Confederate states are united in him. Reechoing the Yankee role in the Civil War and the Reconstruction period, Ellison has Jefferson say that Graves sometimes fights for blacks but occasionally abandons them, at which point they are worse off socially than they were before. As a Southerner, Graves kills emergent blacks in the spirit of the Ku Klux Klan. With a keen sensitivity to verbal associations, Ellison, through the name Graves, suggests the deadliness of white America to the black man and the graves of the blacks who had died from white blows in the North and in the South. The old Todd dies and lies buried in Graves's land. The new Todd, sarcastically referred to as the “black eagle” by Graves, is indeed the great black hope and is to be returned to his element, the black airfield. As a white man and as a taxpayer, Graves lays claim to the damaged plane, an index of his crippled life. He, as well as the plane, are the “shell” that Todd has cast off. Ironically and ominously, he is left with his mad cousin, Rudolph, who is “liable” to kill anybody, black or white including Graves. So Graves goes away to his grave—Ellison's optimistic picture of the end of white intractability. Todd, on the other hand, emerges independent, equipped to attempt to secure true independence for America in her peculiar need—her racist bondage.

The intricacy of the story also lies in its tripartite structure, balanced by the three variants in narrating Todd's flight from black reality. The triple retelling underscores the horror of his rootless life. The first variant involves Todd's childhood experience to secure a plane; the second concerns his adolescent flying career, replicated in the anecdotal flight by Jefferson in heaven—the inner story; the third and the outer story deals with his fall to maturity. Like Invisible Man, this story traces the growth of the protagonist. Each of the three phases of growth is identified with a winged creature or a winged instrument: the locust, the plane/buzzard/angelic wings, and the eagle. His childhood is associated with the locust. This period is marked by Todd's unreasoning intractability and his desire to grab and grasp that which is not his in the destructive and aggressive spirit of the locust. His mother is the controlling force, albeit an ineffectual one.

The adolescent phase is represented by his frustrating, flying experience in the training school and dramatized by Jefferson's anecdotes about the buzzard and the dead horse and the flight in heaven. As an adolescent, Todd is schooled in the nature of flying. He concedes despairingly that “Maybe we are a bunch of buzzards feeding on a dead horse, but we can hope to be eagles” (p. 161). As a buzzard, Todd is necrophagous, feeding on the dead white culture, portrayed here as a dead horse masquerading as a live one. In the second anecdote concerning the flight in heaven, Jefferson-Todd, like a typical adolescent, is uncontrollable, rebelling against constituted authority—Todd had not followed his flying instructions meticulously. Jefferson is “dead” in this anecdote just as Todd is dead to the black race during his flight. Jefferson is resurrected from the dead when he returns home to Alabama as Todd does after his crash in Macon County. Graves-St. Peter is the opposing spirit.

The story proper starts off where the anecdote ends, that is in Macon County. It records Todd's maturity. This stage is marked by the struggle to put immature thoughts away, replacing them with feelings of humility, conciliation, and acceptance. The emblem of this phase is the eagle—black or bald or golden or imperial, all merged. The dynamic father Jefferson is the spiritual guide.

These three phases on the individual level are interconnected with the three perspectives on the historical level where independence is the bone of contention—that is, on the American national level, the black level, and now more importantly and in 1944 during World War II, on the individual level. Independence is imperative to prevent enslavement of a nation by another nation, a race by another race, or a man by another man and his ideas. After the narration of the escapade in heaven, Todd, who had drifted away from his people and, isolated, was suffering from the repercussions of Western individualism, dissociation, and alienation, learns about himself from Jefferson's “nigger joke.” He ceases to be an outsider as he moves physically and emotionally towards Jefferson and blackness. The straitjacket which Graves causes to be used to restrict Todd clarifies for Todd that he had been insane to think that flight towards whitehood was a means to secure “liberty.” His mother had earlier doubted his sanity as a child because of his longing for the inaccessible plane. His newly found father, Jefferson, is also puzzled by his unrealistic ambition and questions him, “Son, how come you want to fly way up there in the air?” (p. 155). Where his mother fails to nurture him in black ways, his father who had been through it all before guards and guides him, helping to raise him up. In the uplifted stretcher, Todd finds that “he had been lifted out of his isolation, back into the world of men. A new current of communication flowed between the man and boy and himself” (p. 170). His father, by lifting him out of despondency, and Graves, by unwittingly referring to him as the “black eagle,” acknowledge, differingly, his leadership.

The last sentence in the story is affirmative. The buzzard image is visibly transformed to that of a golden eagle. It is parallel to the change in Todd from being a locust to a buzzard and finally to an eagle; and from being a destructive creature, existing on decadent ideas, to one majestic to behold, and, hopefully, imperial in thought and action. This is the optimism that underlies the story and the prize that Ellison holds out for the black race through the new, black son. The black woman, however, has no positive role to play in the upliftment. Marshall would remedy Ellison's sexist oversight in “Barbados.”

Paule Marshall's “Barbados” came out in 1961, seventeen years after “Flying Home.” She affirms Ellison's stand by depicting the replacement of the old order with a virile race of young, black men and women who measure themselves by their own standards rather than those set by white people as their predecessors, represented by old Mr. Watford, had done.

Barbados is the black home from which Mr. Watford had fled when he was twenty and “nothing had mattered after his flight.”⁶ He stands for old, conservative, dependent Barbados. In returning fifty years later, his self-exile over, he wants to be home. However, his hostility towards the new Barbadians marks him out as an outsider, “secure in loneliness, contained” (p. 309). His “colonial American” house suggests the continued dependence on white culture. The uncompleted house and the unarranged furniture are emblematic of his (and old Barbados') partial acculturation of white civilization and the ensuing confusion, now that the political tenets in Barbados have become aggressively self-assertive. The old way of life, as shown in Watford's, is stunted like the old, dwarf coconuts that fetch him money.

If the archetypal African memory held Marshall spellbound,⁷ it expresses her new Barbadian disposition. That mysterious black collective unconscious is lost on the Western oriented Mr. Watford. He has no inkling of the oral tradition and the African memory but prefers to read old newspapers from Boston with stale news at which he gives “a little savage chuckle at the thought that beyond his world that other world went its senseless way” (p. 311). Like Faulkner's Hightower, this recluse thinks he has bought his immunity and will have no meaningful connection with the vibrant world around him or the world beyond. There then arises the question of Mr. Watford's identity. Kapai has commented that “Miss Marshall also stresses the need for identity. She too believes in understanding of one's past, both individual and historical.”⁸ Who is this Mr. Watford? He feels no allegiance to the world of Boston, although he is secretly delighted when the young politically-oriented boy respects him as if he (Mr. Watford) were a white man. Like Todd, he aspires to be white. This idea is confirmed when we find that every night he wears a medical doctor's white uniform which makes him stiff, encasing him as the three-piece suit restricts LeRoi Jones' Clay in Dutchman or as the straitjacket was meant to restrain Todd. Since he merely worked in a boiler room, his fantasy in playing the doctor is as psychologically damaging as Todd's playing at being an aviator, all white bourgeois aspirations. Predictably, he is contemptuous of the earthy Mr. Goodman as Todd had been of Jefferson, yet the allegorical character, Mr. Goodman, in all his goodness attempts to rescue him from death, buried as he is in the past, in the tomb of his colonial American house. He is less fortunate than Todd because he rejects this succour. Marshall shows some daring in presenting Mr. Goodman, her mouthpiece, stereotypically. Nevertheless, she makes us identify with him against Watford because of her skill. Watford despises the impressionistically drawn Mr. Goodman for possessing those characteristics which appear gross to him (and to us?), the black stereotypes whose positive qualities Marshall wants the black man to cultivate. The gregarious Mr. Goodman is fat and carefree about money; a gambler, he does not believe in hard work and has fourteen children and three women to show for his concupiscence. He is a radical in politics with his vision of communal help and the revolutionary idea that people should stay home in Barbados to make a living rather than fly to America or Britain, that is the white world, to seek wealth. The uncharitable Mr. Watford is secretly happy that Mr. Goodman may soon die from obesity. He will learn that as a mortal he is as vulnerable as others. Where Mr. Goodman has fourteen children to survive him, Mr. Watford is sterile. The irony is emphasized by the boy's political badge, “The Old Order Shall Pass.” It rattles Mr. Watford because it predicts his demise. In seeing the relationship between the boy and girl as “nastiness,” he denies experience. The concupiscent boy and girl will, willy-nilly, survive him and ensure a future as “the girl held life within her” (p. 322). She is an earth goddess, placid, black. Her rootedness, shown in “her bare feet like strong dark roots amid the jagged stones” (p. 316), contrasts with Mr. Watford's rootlessness as a cultural mulatto, who has frittered away fifty years of his life amassing wealth meaninglessly.

For all these people Mr. Watford feels “shame,” “impatience,” and, occasionally, “admiration.” His undoing is his inability to see more to admire. He therefore fails to communicate with the girl who could have helped to bridge for him the cultural and generation gap. She could have offered him love—love for a new father who could replace the one she had lost. The asocial Mr. Watford, unlike the more balanced Jefferson, rejects the offered child.

Since he does not identify with the new Barbados with her radical politics and earthy morality, he is lost. The girl, our guide in this matter, pointedly remarks that Mr. Watford “ain't people” (p. 323). He learns from her that to be without roots is to court death. He, who had rejected her as he was afraid “to share a little of himself,” arrives at the moment of truth when “his inner eye was suddenly clear. For the first time it gazed mutely upon the waste and pretense which had spanned his years” (p. 323). His loss becomes her gain. The old order shall indeed pass away for Mr. Watford, in returning to Barbados, has received a final home call.

The story can then be viewed as a danse macabre to celebrate the passing away of the old order. The moaning of the mourning doves and the persistent sound of the ebb and flow of the sea provide dolorous, background music. In contrast, the throbbing rhythms of the distant, invisible, steel band proclaim, defiantly, the vitality of new Barbados. To conform with the deathlike atmosphere, Marshall carefully employs images of death: the moths dying by the lamp (p. 311), the beetles flinging themselves drunkenly in front of Watford, for example. He opens the action, solo, with stylized movements. He is severally partnered by the boy, Mr. Goodman, and the girl. With each action he moves closer to the end. In the most important incident, he watches the boy and the girl in a frenzied dance, celebrating creation. Inexplicably, as they dance with all vitality, his strength wanes correspondingly. Then “an obscure belief which, like rare china, he had stored on a high shelf in his mind began to tilt. He sensed the familiar specter which hovered in the night reaching out to embrace him, just as the two in the yard were embracing. Utterly unstrung, incapable of either speech or action, he stumbled into the house” (p. 321). The victim of a voodoo spell, in seeing them he has encountered death. He becomes so enervated that the girl easily deals him the decisive blow when he attempts to connect with her. Accompanied by his doves, he moans, a lament of death. In this scene Marshall successfully incorporates African mysticism in her presentation.

Mr. Watford is associated with death in the entire story. The dominant strain of death is introduced with the information that he is the only surviving child out of the ten born to his mother. He is fond of wearing the medical doctor's white uniform, a reminder of illness and death. Vampiric, he watches the young couple dance as if he could regain his waning strength through them. The dance temporarily arouses him sexually. He descends to the girl later, hoping that he can receive some strength from her for “He knew that he would have to wrest from her the strength needed to sustain him” (p. 323). The girl's talisman against him is the political pin which reminds him boldly that “the old shall pass.” He is afraid of the night air with the figure of death, but at last, “He sensed that dark but unsubstantial figure which roamed the nights searching for him wind him in its chill embrace. He struggled against it, his hands clutching the air with the spastic eloquence of a drowning man” (p. 324). Like the mongoose, the carnivorous intruder that had come into his yard, the human “intruders”—the young boy and girl—are the unwitting agents of Mr. Watford's death. He must die so that they can live. The young couple return to the village, to Barbados proper, to life.

Paule Marshall maintains symmetry in the story. The girl first “intrudes” on Mr. Watford and he too “intrudes” on her later. She expects kindness from him but is denied it, an act that is balanced when she spurns him as he gropes towards her. Her eyes clear (p. 318) as she understands Mr. Watford's nature; on his side, his “inner eye” becomes suddenly clear (p. 323) when he knows that he has come to the end of the road. Thus the couple's dance marks the parting of the ways. As he moves towards a cessation of life, they move towards a renewal of life.

The resolution of the story shows a marked departure from Ellison's. Marshall with her feminist disposition gives a woman a vital role to play in the new, black, emergent Barbados. In exploring the African dimension with its supernaturalism, in portraying a new Barbados impressionistically and through contrasts, Marshall displays a certain virtuosity. One readily agrees with Margaret Walker, who is not too liberal with praise, that “A person like Paule Marshall … that's not ordinary writing that she does. It's exceptionally good writing.”⁹

Considering the technical versatility displayed in “Barbados,” one can safely conclude that Marshall is the female answer to Ellison. Both writers have graphically captured the psychological change that has become noticeable in blacks in different parts of the world as they move towards blackhood, away from the double consciousness that has plagued and incapacitated them culturally and socially. Theirs is a progressive, affirmative though not definitive statement on the issue.¹⁰ By not overtly exploring the protest tradition, by not being overly concerned with whites and their attitudes while telling a black story, Ellison and Marshall have managed to create two timeless stories about modern, black people.

Notes

1. See Joseph F. Trimmer, “Ralph Ellison's ‘Flying Home,’” Studies in Short Fiction, 9, (Spring 1972), 176-177.

2. It is significant that Jefferson employs the familiar term “son” twenty times in the twenty-page story.

3. Such characters as Bigger Thomas, Ajax (A. Jacks) in Toni Morrison's Sula, and Solomon in her Song of Solomon are obvious examples. Todd, like Solomon, actualizes his dream, but he flies away from home whereas Solomon flies back home to Africa. Mr. Watford in “Barbados” flies from Barbados to Boston only to fly back fifty years later unfulfilled. These characters are fictional realizations of a painful reality demonstrable in the Garvey Movement, the exile of W. E. B. Dubois, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, and in the cognitive dissonance in Frank Yerby's writings and Jean Toomer's life.

4. Ralph Ellison, “Flying Home,” in The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, ed. Langston Hughes (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967), p. 154. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.

5. Trimmer, p. 181.

6. Paule Marshall, “Barbados,” in The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, p. 313. All other references are to this edition and appear in the text.

7. Leela Kapai, “Dominant Themes and Technique in Paule Marshall's Fiction,” CLA Journal, 16, (Sept., 1972), 58.

8. Ibid.

9. Margaret Walker speaking in A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (Washington, D. C.: Howard University Press, 1974), p. 77.

10. The question of double consciousness comes up in Margaret Walker's conversation with Nikki Giovanni. Walker, of the old school of thought, like her father and W. E. B. Dubois, believes in a double consciousness which she prefers to a racial “schism” whereas the more radical Giovanni sees that for the black race to become strong, black people from mixed social, educational, and racial backgrounds have to choose to be black. See pp. 4-5 of their Conversations.