Flying Home (1944). Summary and Description

A young black pilot in training named Todd crash-lands his military aircraft in a field owned by a white farmer after the plane collides with a buzzard in the skies above Alabama; when Todd regains consciousness, he is helped by an old black man named Jefferson and a young black boy named Teddy. As Teddy runs off to seek help, Todd and Jefferson talk; during their conversation, Jefferson relates a comic tale about visiting heaven and speeding around as an angel with just one wing. Todd, offended by Jefferson’s story, verbally attacks the old man; he then remembers his own lifelong fascination with planes, before the belligerent and racist white farmer who owns the field shows up and orders him off his land.

In this story Ellison adopts a different strategy from the one he employed in his exceptionally powerful tale “A Party Down the Square.” Both texts deal explicitly with racial themes, but whereas in “A Party” Ellison had condemned racism through irony and indirection, here he adopts the overtly moralizing perspective of a young black man who has grown up in a racist society and whose entire life has been warped by racist pressures. We are taken inside his thoughts and feelings and allowed to perceive the world as he does, but we are also given the added perspective of Jefferson, the old man who has spent his entire life in a region controlled by hostile or indifferent whites.

The story suggests why Todd cannot be satisfied by the compromises Jefferson has had to endure; at the same time, it also presents Jefferson in a largely sympathetic and attractive light. The old man exhibits kindness, compassion, humor, and thoughtfulness in ways that are less characteristic of Todd. Thus Ellison (in a manner that contributes to the complexity of the story) does not simply present Todd in altogether admirable ways: We glimpse his condescension, his bitterness, and his temper, but we are also led to see how those traits are partly the result of the frustrations he has been forced to suffer in a culture that denies him the opportunities to achieve his deepest goals or feel any genuine self-respect. In one of the most explicit thematic statements in the text, Ellison has Todd reflect as follows:

Between ignorant black men and condescending whites, his course of flight seemed mapped by the nature of things away from all needed and natural landmarks. Under some sealed orders, couched in ever more technical and mysterious terms, his path curved swiftly away from both the shame the old man symbolized and the cloudy terrain of white man’s regard. Flying blind, he knew but one point of landing and there he would receive his wings. After that the enemy would appreciate his skill and he would assume his deepest meaning, he thought sadly, neither from those who condescended nor from those who praised without understanding, but from the enemy who would recognize his manhood and skill in terms of hate. (Flying Home 152)

Here as elsewhere in the story, Ellison runs the risk of pontificating: The symbolism seems a bit heavy-handed, the extended metaphor is perhaps too extended, the character’s feelings are explained rather than dramatized, and the passage veers toward a tone that is preachy and propagandist!:. “Flying Home” sometimes seems sentimental and overwritten in ways that are never true of “A Party Down the Square,” and such flaws are particularly evident when Todd is reminiscing about his childhood. At one point, for instance, Ellison writes, “It was as though an endless series of hangars had been shaken ajar in the airbase of his memory and from each, like a young wasp emerging from its cell, arose the memory of a plane” (Flying Home 162).

At another point, in an italicized reminiscence, Todd recalls that “Blossoms hung from the thorny black locust trees like clusters of fragrant white grapes. Butterflies flickered in the sunlight above the short new dew-wet grass” (Flying Home 164). Passages such as these can unfortunately seem overripe; luckily, they are counterbalanced by other segments (such as the long sentence beginning “He was going mysteriously with his mother.” [Flying Home 169] or the humorous ending of Jefferson’s story about flying in heaven) that prevent the work from sounding excessively contrived. If “Flying Home” lacks the harrowing, unforgettable power of “A Party Down the Square,” it nonetheless spells out, about as explicitly as one could wish, many of the central themes and attitudes expressed in Ellison’s fiction as well as his fundamental diagnosis of the pervasive ills caused by white American racism.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Read W. E. B. DuBois’s essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” and then discuss this story in relation to the ideas expressed there. Would DuBois have been satisfied with Ellison’s story? Does the story meet the demands DuBois makes of art? To what degree and in what ways is Ellison’s story an example of the kind of art as propaganda that DuBois commends?

2. In what ways does the protagonist of “Flying Home” resemble and/or differ from the title character of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? How and why do both men feel alienated, lonely, and uncertain? How do their responses to their predicaments differ? How are their personalities and temperaments distinct?