I Spread My Wings and I Fly
Synopsis
I Spread My Wings and I Fly is an historical novel set in the mid-1850s southern Louisiana. The novel focuses on the maroons (enslaved Africans who ran away, armed themselves, and lived free independent lives on the fringes of a chattel slavery system) in the United States, the psychological effects of slavery, and the dynamics of Black Culture, folklore, and philosophy. Based on historical documentation, folklore, myths, songs, slave narratives, and ethnographic studies, the novel attempts to illustrate through the epic narrative form, the rich, varied, and highly metaphysical culture of enslaved Africans, their militancy, self-expression, and persistent struggle for freedom.
The novel reveals the long suppressed historical facts of the role of voodoo and maroon guerrilla warfare in paving the road to Emancipation. In this way the novel will continue to expand the tradition set by authors of great slave literature such as The Slave Narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1789), The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Jubilee (1966), Roots (1976) , Dessa Rose (1986), The Known World (2003), The Book of Negroes (2007), and Wench (2010). I Spread My Wings and I Fly exposes a dimension of the slave experience that had previously been unexplored.
During the mid-nineteenth century when the slave narratives were popular, the authors of the narratives, for political reasons, were not able to expound on the practice of armed resistance against slavery, nor did they recognize the role of voodoo in anti-slavery resistance. There are several texts that discuss maroon communities in Jamaica, Guyana, Brazil, Surinam, Columbia and Haiti, but with the exception of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's Africans in Colonial Louisiana (1992) and Sylvianne Diouf's Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (2014), there are few literary or historical texts that focus on the maroon tradition in the United States.
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I Spread My Wings and I Fly opens in the year 1853 on L'amour, a 2,000 acre estate in southern Louisiana. The field hands are going to the sugarcane fields when Caleb, a repeated runaway and the son of a maroon, gets into a fight with his cabin mate. An overseer attempts to whip Caleb, but he fights back and flees the plantation.
The novel follows Caleb in odyssey fashion through many trials, tribulations, and astounding events, all of which enhance his knowledge, wisdom, and moral character. He encounters the constant dangers of a fugitive in flight, a powerful juju, a maroon camp, and enslaved woman with whom he falls in love. He is eventually captured and brought back to the L'amour Plantation.
By this time his love and pursuit of freedom is undaunted and tenacious. He plans with fellow captives an escape to the Indian Territory, but one week before the plan is to be executed, he is sold to a Greek ship captain and owner of a fleet of fishing schooners. A year later Caleb finally makes plans with other enslaved shipmates to mutiny and escape to northern Yucatan.
The esotoric meaning of the title, I Spread My Wings and I Fly (taken from the last stanza of the Negro Spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child") is revaled in the last scene. The rebel's struggle for freedom is spiritually and allegorically linked to the souls's struggle to unite with the Supreme Being.