The Legend of the Flying Africans

In May 1803 a group of Igbo captives, sold near Savannah and shipped towards St. Simons Island, rose against the crew of the small vessel carrying them. After it ran aground in Dunbar Creek they walked into the water and drowned. Two letters written within weeks — one by the plantation overseer Roswell King, one by the Savannah slave dealer William Mein on 24 May — survive in the Butler Family Papers in Philadelphia, and the creek has been called Ebos Landing ever since. Georgia's 2022 marker says only that at least ten died. Separately, and across the whole Georgia coast, Gullah Geechee families kept telling of Africans who took wing and flew home; Drums and Shadows, the Works Progress Administration field record published in 1940, has sixteen named people telling it, from Savannah down to Sapelo. Not one of them sets it at Igbo Landing. Asked directly whether he meant the Igbo who walked into the water, Wallace Quarterman answered: "No, ma'am, I ain mean dem."

Two things happened on the Georgia coast, and they are not the same thing. Keeping them apart is the whole point of this entry. The first is documented. In May 1803 a group of Igbo captives who had survived the Middle Passage were sold near Savannah to agents acting for the planters John Couper and Thomas Spalding, and put aboard a small vessel bound for St. Simons Island. Two letters written within weeks of the event survive in the Butler Family Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Roswell King, overseer of Pierce Butler's neighbouring plantation, reported the deaths to his employer; William Mein, a Savannah slave dealer, wrote to Butler on 24 May 1803. Read together by the historian Terri L. Snyder, they say that the captives had "suffered much by mismanagement", that they "rose" against the crew and forced them into the water, where the crewmen drowned, and that after the vessel ran aground the Igbo "took to the marsh" and drowned themselves. King recovered the bodies. A written account names the ship's captain only by the surname Patterson. The stretch of Dunbar Creek where it happened took the name Ebos Landing, and has kept it for more than two centuries. What the 1803 letters do not give is almost as important. They do not give the ship's name, a reliable count, or any words spoken. The details that circulate hardest online — a schooner called the York, exactly seventy-five captives, and an Igbo chant beginning "Orimiri Omambala bu anyi bia" — do not come from those letters. Their traceable source in circulation is a short account by H. A. Sieber, a North Carolina writer who lived on St. Simons between 1987 and 1989 and copyrighted his text in 1989; the archival basis for his additions is not stated there and could not be checked here. Georgia's own historical marker, erected in 2022, commits itself only to this: "It is believed that at least ten Igbo drowned, choosing death over enslavement." The second thing is the flying Africans, and it is a body of oral narrative, not an account of 1803. The fullest record of it was made between roughly 1936 and 1939 by the Savannah Unit of the Georgia Writers' Project, a Works Progress Administration programme supervised by Mary Granger, and published in 1940 as Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes. Read straight through, that book contains the motif in the words of some sixteen named people across nine communities, from Old Fort in Savannah down to Sapelo Island — and their names are the part every summary throws away. Jack Wilson, Paul Singleton, James Moore, Thomas Smith, Carrie Hamilton, George W. Little, Florence Postell, Prince Sneed, Serina Hall, Jack Tattnall, Rosa Grant, Wallace Quarterman, William Rogers, Priscilla McCullough, Lawrence Baker, Shad Hall. Some of what they said. Prince Sneed, of White Bluff, had it from his grandfather: on Jacob Waldburg's place on St. Catherines two men were resting in the shade while their hoes went on working alone, and when the driver challenged them they answered "Kum buba yali kuni buba tambe, Kum kunka yali kum kunka tambe", quick like, and rose off the ground and flew away. Priscilla McCullough, near Darien, described a ring that turned faster and faster in the field until, one by one, the dancers "riz up an take wing an fly lak a bud", and an overseer who caught the last one by the foot. Rosa Grant, of Possum Point, told the plainest version of all: her great-grandmother Theresa flew home to Africa, her grandmother Ryna was standing right there when it happened, and Ryna "alluz wish dat uh mothuh had teach uh how tuh fly. She try an try doin duh same way but she ain nebuh fly." And now the passage that decides this entry. In Darien the interviewers sat with Wallace Quarterman, born 14 July 1844 at South Hampton, Liberty County, who died in the autumn of 1938. He told them there were Africans on the place who never stayed. They asked him, in so many words, whether he meant the Igbo on St. Simons who walked into the water. He answered: "No, ma'am, I ain mean dem." He then told a different story, of an overseer called Mr. Blue who whipped a group of newly landed Africans until they stuck their hoes in the field, said "quack, quack, quack", and "riz up in duh sky an tun hesef intuh buzzuds an fly right back tuh Africa". Snyder identifies Mr. Blue as Alexander Blue, manager of the Butler estate from 1848 to 1859 — within Quarterman's own lifetime, and at least forty-five years after 1803. Igbo Landing does appear in the same book, twice, and both times as a drowning. The interviewers use it as a question on page 143; and on St. Simons itself Floyd White gave it in his own words: "Heahd bout duh Ibo's Landing? Das duh place weah dey bring duh Ibos obuh in a slabe ship an wen dey git yuh, dey ain lak it an so dey all staht singin an dey mahch right down in duh ribbuh tuh mahch back tuh Africa, but dey ain able tuh git deah. Dey gits drown." Not one of the sixteen flight tellings in the book is set at Igbo Landing. The two strands were welded together later, and largely by editors, encyclopaedists and artists rather than by the people interviewed. The book's own endnote on page 149 glosses the interviewers' question with a summary of the 1803 drowning; from there the identification passes into reference works and into a superb literary tradition that owes the coast a debt and never pretended otherwise: Zora Neale Hurston recorded a Jamaican version in Tell My Horse (1938); Toni Morrison closed Song of Solomon with it in 1977; Paule Marshall built Praisesong for the Widow on it in 1983; Virginia Hamilton gave it its best-known children's telling in The People Could Fly (1985); and Julie Dash filmed the coast itself in Daughters of the Dust (1991).

The landing itself cannot really be visited, and that is the first thing to say. Ebos Landing is a stretch of Dunbar Creek on the west side of St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. There is no park, no path and no viewpoint. The official Golden Isles visitors' bureau puts it in one sentence: "Street access to this site is limited." The general area is on private land, and immediately beside it stands a wastewater treatment plant built in the 1940s over the objections of local African American residents — a fact recorded in the New Georgia Encyclopedia and worth knowing before anyone drives out expecting a memorial. Local fishermen are reported to avoid casting lines in the creek out of respect for the dead. Whatever else this is, it is a place where people drowned, and it should not be treated as a photo stop. What can be visited, since 24 May 2022, is the marker. Georgia Historical Society marker 63-11, "Ibo Landing: The Legacy of Resisting Enslavement", stands on the St. Simons Land Trust's Old Stables Corner, at the northwest corner of Frederica Road and Sea Island Road, at 31° 11.066' N, 81° 22.706' W. It is outdoors, free, publicly accessible and reachable by car with roadside parking. It was placed there precisely because the creek itself is not accessible; its own closing line points the visitor west: "A portion of Dunbar Creek, west of this location, is still referred to as Igbo or Ibo Landing." The marker exists because students asked for it. The application was driven by the Ethnology Club of Glynn Academy, the public high school in Brunswick, which raised roughly $2,500 towards the cost; the Coastal Georgia Historical Society contributed a further $2,500, and the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition and the Georgia Historical Society sponsored it. It belongs to the Georgia Civil Rights Trail, and the Georgia Historical Society describes it as the first of its markers to address the role of oral tradition in remembering an event. One earlier act of commemoration is worth planning around. On 30 and 31 August 2002, the St. Simons African American Heritage Coalition held a two-day gathering at which Chukwuemeka Onyesoh, invited from Nigeria, designated Ebos Landing holy ground and performed rites for the dead; those present had travelled from Nigeria, Haiti, Belize, Canada, New York and Mississippi. Anniversary and heritage events on the island are organised by that coalition rather than by the county, so their calendar, not a tourist office, is the place to look before travelling. For context on the coast itself, Fort Frederica National Monument on the north end of the island is where Wallace Quarterman was recorded in June 1935 by Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle; the discs are held by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and can be heard online.