Fly Away: The Great African American Migrations. By Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott

Abstract

FLY AWAY: The Great African American Migrations. By PETER M. RUTKOFF and WILLIAM B. SCOTT. xv and 408 pp.; maps, ills., notes, index. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780801894770. John Lee Hooker, a blues musician from the Mississippi Delta, played guitar and sang in a manner eerily similar to that of All Farka Toure a traditional guitarist from Mali. Restaurants in Chicago serve succulent, southern-style collard greens, cooked with just the right amount of pork fat. Mardi Gras Indian tribes in New Orleans wear fabulously ornate handmade costumes that are nearly identical to those worn by certain groups of carnival revelers in Trinidad and Tobago. Each of these mysterious spatial patterns results from the movements and cultural creations of the African Diaspora. These kinds of cultural journeys and exchanges are the subject of Fly Away: The Great African American Cultural Migrations, a compelling book by Peter Rutkoff and William Scott. Rutkoff and Scott analyze and trace these dynamic cultural processes across the American landscape. They focus on several locations to support their argument that West African traditions survive in the African American community in places as different as the South Carolina Sea Islands and South Central Los Angeles. Throughout their book the authors combine cultural observations with historical narrative. At the core of the text is a (perhaps overly) concentrated analysis of Atlantic Coast Gullah culture. The Gullah people, who have lived for more than 300 years in the Low Country of South Carolina--as well as on the Barrier Islands of both North Carolina and Georgia--are, according to Rutkoff and Scott, the taproot of African American culture throughout the Lower South, a claim I find to be overstated. White Americans have long been interested in African American culture. Early in American history, this interest became manifest in ways that were usually racist and generally trivial. Joel Chandler Harris's tales of Uncle Remus (which recent anthropologists have found to contain elements of academic insight) were wildly popular in the nineteenth century. These tales eventually became the basis for a popular Disney film, Song of the South, in 1946. In the 1840s, blackface minstrelsy became immensely popular in the Northeast, as many Americans gawked at the ludicrously racist portrayal of plantation life in the U.S. South. In more staid quarters, such as the shaded walkways of Harvard and Yale universities, scholars became increasingly interested in documenting black culture in the U.S. South, yet most clung to the flawed notion that slavery on southern plantations was so oppressive and violent that no vestige of African culture survived. A national myth emerged stating that black southerners were empty cultural vessels who simply drew from white culture, adapting the new manners in their own ways. Beginning in the first half of the twentieth century, and gaining full validation in the 1970s, was the notion that African culture survived the Middle Passage and remained alive in such places as the marshes of South Carolina, the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta, and in the soul-food restaurants of Chicago's South Side. This is the area in which Fly Away seeks to make a contribution. The Sea Island Gullah culture emerges in their narrative (the book begins and ends with chapters set in coastal South Carolina) as the most significant of all such American repositories of African culture. This, I believe, is where Fly Away seems to be rather unbalanced in its historical geography. To be sure, no scholar of American studies should deny the uniqueness of Gullah culture. This culture is perhaps the most striking example of African cultural retention in North America. The numbers of slaves who arrived in the U.S. South were very large. This fact, combined with the geographical isolation of coastal South Carolina, helped establish a truly African American space in which African slaves and their descendants created a performative, place-based culture of powerful, self-conscious identity. …