The Igbo Landing

Scholarly interpretations of the flying Africans folktale have traditionally focused on sources relating to the rich cultural heritage of Black people from the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, once the region with the highest concentration of enslaved Africans in mainland North America. These sources first appeared in the same volume of the Georgia Writers’ Project, Drums and Shadows, published in 1940, as that of the famous “I(g)bo Landing,” which influenced the way they came to be understood. The latter story about a mass suicide of enslaved Igbos who chose death over submission to slavery likely developed out of a tragic event that took place in 1803 on St. Simons Island, where Major Pierce Butler owned a large plantation. In the Butler Papers, a letter can be found from William Mein, a slave trader, about a shipment of Igbos that was to be delivered to the owners of Butler's neighboring plantation, John Couper and Thomas Spalding. In his letter, Mein explains that, shortly before arrival, “the Negroes rose by being confined in a small vessel.” The overseer “was frightened and in swimming ashore he with two sailors were drowned,” while the Igbos jumped out of the vessel and “took to the marsh.” Eventually, Couper and Spalding “lost at least ten or twelve in recovering them.”Footnote ⁸

When, in the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) Savannah unit interviewed people in the Georgia coastal area, Floyd White remembered the “I(g)bo Landing” as a story of Africans who, upon arrival in America, rejected a life in slavery and “mahch right down in duh ribbuh thu mahch back tuh Africa, but dey ain abel tuh git deah. Dey gits drown.”Footnote ⁹ Mary Granger, who supervised the unit, included White's tale in the anthology Drums and Shadows, together with other stories Black people from the Sea Islands recalled about their ancestors. As the volume's title indicates, Granger displayed a strong interest in “African survivals,” particularly in rituals and beliefs relating to magic, conjuring, and the spiritual realm of “shadows.”Footnote ¹⁰ Hence, Granger developed a fascination for stories about enslaved Africans who could fly and used salt as a form of protection against witches and evil spirits.Footnote ¹¹

However, unlike what has been suggested by Peter Rutkoff and William Scott in Fly Away, published in 2010, there are no “frequent accounts of ‘flying Igbo’” in these FWP interviews.Footnote ¹² A close reading of the original sources reveals that there are, indeed, frequent references to Igbos as well as to enslaved Africans flying home, but theories connecting both are built on weak foundations. As Melissa Cooper has argued in Making Gullah, published in 2017, “[W]hile Granger and her staff may have asked residents about ‘Ibo Landing’ . . . only one St. Simons resident, Floyd White, talked about Ibo Landing.”Footnote ¹³ Although White did, in fact, refer to Igbos wanting to return to Africa, he did not make any reference to flying.

Scholars who claim Igbo origin of the folktale, therefore, tend to prefer a different interview from Drums and Shadows, that with Wallace Quarterman. Although Quarterman did not arrive on St. Simons Island until late in his life—he used to live on Skidaway Island, some eighty miles north of St. Simons—he knew about the Igbo Landing. When the FWP interviewer asked him about it, he confirmed that he was familiar with the story and even recalled the name of the overseer on the Butler plantation: Alexander Blue. A close reading of his interview reveals, however, that his statement is ambiguous. When Quarterman was first asked if he remembered any “real Africans,” he recalled that “one boatload uh seben aw eight wut come down frum Savannah” and that these people spoke a different language—“dey caahn unduhstan yo talk an you caahn unduhstan dey talk. Dey go ‘quack, quack, quack,’ jus as fas as a hawse kin run.” He was then interrupted by the interviewer, who wanted to know if he meant “the Ibos on St. Simons who walked into the water?” Quarterman explicitly denied this—“No, ma'am, I ain mean dem. Ain yuh heah bout um?”—and thereupon continued his story. While it is unclear whether he was now speaking about the Igbos or the ones he had been speaking about before being interrupted, the fact that he repeated that “dey gabble, gabble, gabble, an nobody couldn unduhstan um,” and even reproduced the exact same “quack, quack, quack” sounds, makes it much more credible that those who were mistreated by Blue and “riz up in duh sky an . . . fly right back tuh Africa” were not the Africans involved in the Igbo Landing but rather those he denied to have anything to do with this.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, Blue only became the overseer on Butler's plantation in 1847, whereas the Igbo Landing took place in 1803, which strengthens the assumption that Quarterman was telling a story about a different, unidentified, group of Africans.Footnote ¹⁵ While they may have been Igbos, these people could just as well have originated from other parts of Africa.

The only other tale in Drums and Shadows that somewhat recalls the Igbo Landing is that of Shad Hall of Sapelo Island, who told a story about enslaved Africans fleeing an overseer by running into a river and then “riz up in duh eah an fly away.”Footnote ¹⁶ Although Hall did not make a connection to Igbos, Gomez interpreted the fact that the enslaved ran into the river before flying away as a “reference to a signal event, possibly the story of Ibo Landing” and, on this basis, assumed that the Africans in Hall's account were “presumably Igbo.”Footnote ¹⁷

Since the accounts of Quaterman, Hall, and White can, at best, be classified as inconclusive with regard to the alleged Igbo origin of the legend, there are good reasons to be skeptical about Gomez's decision to characterize them as “potentially corroborative evidence” and, subsequently, relate the flying Africans folktale to the topic of suicide in Igbo culture.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite this weak evidence, the relationship between these stories and Igbo culture has meanwhile been firmly set in American historiography: Rutkoff and Scott claimed that “the Igbo were the most distraught and the most likely to fly away,” Lorna McDaniel characterized the “Igbo Landing” as “a Georgian variant of ‘The flying Africans,’” Ras Michael Brown argued that “the reputation of captive Igbos as being especially inclined toward suicide . . . informed the narratives of flying Africans,” and Terri Snyder assumed that “the flying slave folktale probably has its historical roots in an 1803 collective suicide by . . . a group of Igbo.”Footnote ¹⁹

This focus on Igbo culture is all the more regrettable considering that a large percentage of the enslaved population in the region had roots in other parts of Africa. Significantly, in Mein's letter to Butler on the incident, we also read that he had sold “a great many Ibo and Angolas.”Footnote ²⁰ This reference to Angola raises the question of whether a stronger case could be made by tracing the tale's origin to West-Central Africa.

West-Central Africa

Until the early 1740s, the vast majority of enslaved Africans arriving in Charleston, the main port of entrance for Africans destined to work on the Sea Islands, originated from West-Central Africa and were commonly known as Angolans, Golas, or Gulas. Recurrent attempts by these “Angolans” to flee to Spanish Florida, culminating in the 1739 Stono Revolt, made the South Carolina Assembly decide in April 1740 to place a prohibitive duty on African imports and to stimulate the settlement of European Protestants. After this duty was repealed in 1752, slaveholders avoided West-Central Africans and gave preference to West Africans, who, as Henry Laurens explained in a letter from 1756, were “better esteemed by our people than Angolas.”Footnote ²¹ This change in policy accounts for the sharp increase in Igbos and other West Africans arriving in the Lowcountry.Footnote ²²

While the number of enslaved Africans arriving in the Sea Islands declined considerably by the end of the eighteenth century, the production of staple cotton created a renewed demand in the early nineteenth century. This time, the largest group again originated from West-Central Africa.Footnote ²³ Although all West-Central Africans arriving in the Lowcountry tended to be labeled as “Angolans,” the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database shows that virtually all Central-African ports of departure for Charleston-bound ships after 1800 were located in “Congo River” and “Congo North” or, more specifically, the ports of Loango, Malembo, and Cabinda.Footnote ²⁴ All these places were situated far north of Angola, in Kikongo-speaking areas along the coast of West-Central Africa. The term “Angolans” is, thus, misleading. Even the term “West-Central Africans” is imprecise. Despite the geographical proximity, research revealed that enslaved Africans who arrived before 1740 originated predominantly from the Kingdom of Kongo, whereas those who arrived after 1800 came primarily from areas to the north of this kingdom.Footnote ²⁵

Scholars have attempted to learn more about the Lowcountry's West-Central African cultural heritage through the linguistic analysis of original sources. An intriguing case is the testimonial provided by Price Sneed in Drums and Shadows, according to whom Africans had spoken the words “kum buba yali kum buba tambe / kum kunka yali kum kunka tambe” before flying away.Footnote ²⁶ Variants of the phrase—such as “wa kum munin / kum baba yano / lai tambe,” “rockah mh moomba / cum bo-ba yonda / lil-aye tambe,” “A wohu mu mone / kambei ya le / li lei tombe,” and “cum bul-le al-le / lilli-quam-be / i wok om a mo-na / cum bul-le al-le / lilli-quank”—appear in other tales and songs that were recorded in the region and may have served as inspiration to John Bennett's collection of tales from “old Charleston,” where a member of a group of “native Africans just brought into the country” flew away while crying “kuli-ba,” as well as to Marvin Frey's spiritual song “kum ba yah” that enjoyed broad popularity during the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ²⁷

There exist several theories on the origin and meaning of these words, one of which was presented by Winifred Kellersberger Vass, a former missionary worker for the American Presbyterian Congo Mission. Vass claimed the phrase to be of “Congolese Luba” [Cilubà] origin, meaning “He is tricky, so I will win by being tricky, too! / He asks clever questions, so I will win by using clever questions too!”Footnote ²⁸ Building on this translation, Powell speculated that Sneed wanted to fool the FWP fieldworkers into believing that these were “secret code words,” while Young interpreted it as a sign that “flying Africans met the clever trickiness of slave capture, sale, and labor with their own brand of tricky behavior.”Footnote ²⁹

The problem with these interpretations is that Sneed's phrase is not of Cilubà origin. While some words point in the direction of Central Africa—tambe may be derived from the Kikongo (n)tambi, meaning “foot(print),” whereas yali means a “pair of something” in Chokwe—the exact origin, let alone the meaning, of the mysterious phrase remains unknown. This does not mean that attempts to trace some of the non-English terms recorded in Drums and Shadows back to indigenous African languages are necessarily futile. For instance, when Tonie Houston was asked by a FWP fieldworker to identify some “Golla words,” he mentioned “musungo tobacco, mulafo whiskey, and sisure chicken. A cow was called gombay and a hog gulluh.”Footnote ³⁰ Every single one of these words corresponds to Kikongo terms, with musungo corresponding to (n)sung(a) (tobacco/perfume), mulafo to (ma)lafu or malavu (alcohol), sisure to (n)sus(s)u (chicken), gombay to ngombe (cow), and gulluh to ngulu(bu) (hog).Footnote ³¹

The continuous use of these words, albeit in a creolized form, by their descendants proves that, by the 1930s, not all traces of West-Central African culture had vanished in the Lowcountry. Of particular interest in this respect is the interview in Drums and Shadows with Shad Hall, who recalled that “duh ole folks” used to “call du missus maduba” and that “doze folks . . . fly right back toh Africa.”Footnote ³² The word maduba derives from the Kikongo ndumb(a) (young lady).

If we add Caribbean sources to our analysis, the connections to West-Central Africa grow even stronger. In Curaçao, for instance, stories about flying Africans are consistently associated with people from Loango.Footnote ³³ As Rose Mary Allen confirms, “the Luango's [had] wings that allowed them to fly back to Africa if they did not eat salt. The ability would be lost once salt was consumed.”Footnote ³⁴ In his autobiography, edited by Miguel Barnet in 1966, the Cuban maroon Esteban Montejo argued that “the Musundi Congolese were the ones that flew the most,” a likely reference to people originating from the Nsundi province in the northeastern part of Kongo.Footnote ³⁵ When Lydia Cabrera asked one of her Afro-Cuban informants about flying Africans in the 1930s, he answered her that “those who fly are almost all Kongolese sorcerers.” She was also told the story of Mariwanga, who allegedly warned the overseer that “the day he would make the musinga touch her ribs,” he would no longer see her and when that day arrived, “returned to Africa, flying.”Footnote ³⁶ Musinga is the Kikongo word for “whip.”

In Jamaica, Kenneth Bilby and Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau recorded in the 1970s the story of a man who “hear that everybody a fly a go way, and him eat the salt . . . him dia (eat) the munga (salt). Him want fe fly. And him climb a coconut tree, and him said ‘goo bye, everybody!’ and when him do so (gestures as if jumping off) him drop.”Footnote ³⁷ In Alas, Alas, Kongo, published in 1980, Monica Schuler published a series of interviews with descendants of contract laborers, mostly from the Kongo region, who had arrived in Jamaica between 1841 and 1865. One man recalled about his ancestors that “some fly. They fly a'wing—like a dove—and they fly from Jamaica back to Africa,” whereas others lost their ability to fly because “when we eat they put a whole lot of salt thing in-a the food—mungwa—salt—and they couldn't go back.”Footnote ³⁸ The informants’ use of the Kikongo mungwa (salt) and dia mungwa (to eat salt) indisputably confirms West-Central African origin. Schuler also reported on a 1985 meeting in Guyana with men who “reminisced about the old Kongo,” and mentioned that “they packed like sardine in the ship . . . and some of them just fly away and they go right back. . . . [T]hey didn't eat salt yet.”Footnote ³⁹

These sources consistently point to Kikongo-speaking areas in West-Central Africa as the tale's geographical place of origin, which calls for an analysis of historical documents and ethnographic studies to acquire a better understanding of references to the eating of salt in connection to flying.

Kongo/Loango

The late-nineteenth-century ethnographic study by Paul Güssfeldt, Julius Falkenstein, and Eduard Pechüel-Loesche provides important information on the metaphorical meaning of flying and salt in Kakongo, Ngoyo, and Loango, the northwestern area of Kikongo-speaking Africa, where the largest group of enslaved people to arrive in the Lowcountry after 1800 embarked. The report's third volume, prepared by Pechüel-Loesche, reveals that there was a widespread belief in the region that one could see spirits “walking on paths, flying in the air, or sitting on trees.” Equally important, he explains, are the souls who easily separate themselves from the human body. They do that, for instance, when somebody is dreaming and the soul leaves the body to “fly around, just like a bird.” “Even more remarkable,” Pechüel-Loesche writes, “is what happens when somebody dies abroad and isn't given a proper grave. Then, the soul wants to return to his homeland, and does that in the shape of a bird.” People who stayed behind then suddenly “see a bird in a place, where before one would never see one, and . . . acts as if it is familiar with the people and the place.” One such bird is the núni mkíssi, which Pechüel-Loesche translates as “enchanted bird.” It appears in songs, such as the following: “Núni mkíssi I sing, in the forest, in my land / Núni mkíssi I fly, in the forest, in my land / Listen to me. I'm flying away / Search for me. I'm flying away / Catch me. I'm flying away / Tie me up. I'm flying away / Pluck me. I'm flying away / Cook me. I'm flying away / Eat me. I'm flying away.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Although other African societies also held the belief that the souls of the deceased returned to one's homeland upon death, Pechüel-Loesche's study shows that in Kikongo-speaking areas north of the Congo River, transmigration was specifically associated with the metaphor of flying, like a bird. Moreover, the German ethnographer demonstrated that virtually all strategies to control evil spirits involved the use of salt. Pechüel-Loesche explains that “ghosts can be blinded with salt,” and that it was common practice for people to rub salt and wet sea sand along the walls of a new dwelling before living there.Footnote ⁴¹ When a village was terrorized by an evil spirit, the nganga (spiritual healer) traditionally started his work by strewing salt. According to Pechüel-Loesche, ghosts also typically disliked salted food, and, because of their dislike of salty water, relatively few of them were found in coastal areas.Footnote ⁴²

Further anthropological research by Bilby and Fu-Kiau in the 1980s revealed that, in the Bas-Congo region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, one could still find signs of a popular belief that the ancestral dead, from whom the living derive their spiritual powers, did not eat salt. Since salt repelled the spirits of the dead, they claim, it weakened those who were engaged in spiritual matters. Thus, when people were undergoing initiations, they were supposed to avoid salt so as to build up strength.Footnote ⁴³

Of crucial importance to the understanding of the folktale is that salt acquired an additional symbolic meaning when the Portuguese introduced Christianity in the Kongo region in the late fifteenth century. This happened in the context of the baptism ritual, where a grain of salt used to be placed on the newborn's tongue. Unlike what some have suggested, this was not a Portuguese adaptation of Catholic liturgy to cater to a Kongolese request.Footnote ⁴⁴ In early modern Portugal, it was common practice to baptize with salt in reference to Christ's words to His followers emphasizing His expectation for them to be “the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). It also had a spiritual meaning. Based on the biblical comment that “no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:7–8), it was considered a symbolic gesture against evil, in the sense that the newborn might be safeguarded against pollution of the soul. In an era characterized by a high child mortality rate, the days leading up to baptism were riddled with practices to protect the newborn against the mau olhado (evil eye). During baptism, the placing of a grain of salt on the tongue of the baptized was therefore understood as a gesture of protection, in the sense that the child might be safeguarded against evil. For this reason, priests in late medieval Portugal would first blow at the newborn to expel the evil spirits and then place a grain of salt on the child's tongue.Footnote ⁴⁵

In Kongo, the use of salt during baptism was understood as a form of protection against evil spirits. According to Wyatt MacGaffey, people who let themselves be baptized in the early decades of Portuguese missionary activities “were seen as having joined a purifactory or anti-witchcraft movement.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Reporting from seventeenth-century Cartagena, the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval confirmed that Kongolese had typically “been baptized with salt” and that some of them believed that “this had been part of some form of witchcraft.”Footnote ⁴⁷ According to John Thornton, “it was the salt rather than the water that conferred the blessing of baptism, in line with the general belief that evil people or spirits did not like salt and would thus avoid a baptized person.”Footnote ⁴⁸

To the Kongolese, the importance of salt was such that baptism in Kikongo came to be known as curia mungua (or, in contemporary Kikongo, [ku]dia mungwa), meaning “to eat salt.” The same occurred in Kimbundu, as is revealed in Francisco Pacconio's seventeenth-century bilingual catechism, where the phrase “Negros de Angola que não receberão o bautismo” (“Blacks from Angola who did not receive baptism”) is translated as “Ambundo narià móngoa iia Nzambi” (“Mbundus who did not eat the salt of God”).Footnote ⁴⁹ Moreover, as the Portuguese soldier António Cadornega observed in seventeenth-century Angola, a priest who had baptized someone was known as the person's pai do sal (salt-father).Footnote ⁵⁰

The importance of salt in the baptismal ritual can also be seen in the seventeenth-century diary from the Capuchin Merolla da Sorrento, who wrote that “the holy baptism in their dialect or language is called minemungù, which is as much as to say, to savor the blessed salt. If anyone should ask whether this or that person is a Christian or a pagan, they would answer: ‘Yes, he is a Christian, for he has tasted of the salt that has been blessed by the priest.’” Merolla concluded that if “any of these had been baptized with water alone, he and his parents would not have been very well satisfied.”Footnote ⁵¹

The expression “to eat salt” in reference to baptism was used at a far distance from the coast. In seventeenth-century Matamba, for instance, it was observed by the Capuchin Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, who felt unease about this translation. Based on a scene described in Antonio de Teruel's Descripción Narrativa about a Kongolese village leader who claimed to have saved the soul of a dying child by placing salt in its mouth and saying a Catholic prayer, Cavazzi suggested a different translation, lusù culù languìsi (sacred bath), and insisted on more religious instruction before proceeding to baptism. He noted, however, that “some impatient ones” wanted to be baptized without receiving any instruction.Footnote ⁵²

Secular priests were often accused by Capuchins of skipping instruction and going for the money only. In the 1730s, Giuseppe da Modena wrote that there were some who “only baptized with salt” and said “that water was not necessary.”Footnote ⁵³ One such case even led to an investigation by the Lisbon Inquisition. In the 1590s, Father Manuel da Silveira had been accused of being “less Christian than a horse,” because once “he was playing cards, when a group of people approached him who wanted to be baptized. To whom he said: ‘Give me the money.’” While continuing his game, he allegedly said, “‘[O]pen with all the devils this mouth of you,’ and then put some salt in it and without using any water and saying the words of baptism, he told them: ‘Now go away, you have eaten salt.’”Footnote ⁵⁴

Luca da Caltanisetta confirmed that “if they are not given salt, people don't consider themselves baptized.” He recalled how in 1693, he had started baptizing people in Mbata and, after giving them salt, it started to rain, so he looked for shelter. Although they had promised to return, people didn't show up anymore “because they already considered themselves baptized.” He decided to henceforth “wait to give salt until the very end of the ceremony.” He also expressed skepticism about people's motives to request baptism. Many of them, he claimed, “only wanted it so that they could use the [Portuguese honorific] title ‘Dom’ and would no longer be considered heretics.” Caltanesetta also argued that “women didn't care for baptism, and argued that baptism was only for men; for women, salt was enough, and they ate that with their vegetables anyway.” He then tried to convince them that “the salt that the priests give them to eat would allow them to heaven after their death,” which made them raise the question of whether eating salt would “prevent them from dying?” to which Caltanisetta replied that “the salt of the priest of God did not prevent the corpse from dying but allowed the spirit to live eternally in heaven.” They remained skeptical, however, because “they had never seen anyone returning after death.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Similar frustrations of Capuchins with baptismal practices in Kongo continued in the eighteenth century. According to Raimundo da Dicomano, “a multitude of people would run towards the priest, present their children for baptism, and demand in loud voice anamungoa, baptism.” However, if the priests first wanted “to teach them the catechism . . . they do not want to listen . . . and if the priest is not paying attention, they make off as soon as they received the salt.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Of particular importance to understanding the references to eating salt in the flying Africans folktale is that, in their daily conversations about baptism, Kongolese did not necessarily distinguish between the metaphorical and literal meaning of the words curia mungua. Significantly, Merolla observed that his interpreter's enslaved assistant refused baptism with the argument that “elephants do not eat salt and yet they become fat and large and live a long life.”Footnote ⁵⁷ It reveals that those who resisted conversion to Christianity in the Kongo region did so by saying that they refrained from eating salt, which suggests that the tale may have originated in the context of discussions, or even tensions, among Africans over Christianization.

The case presented by Merolla also indicates that, despite the prestige of Catholicism, there was even in the heartland of the Kongo kingdom resistance against conversion. In remote areas and, especially, in regions east and north of the kingdom, where the Portuguese presence was weak, Catholicism developed roots that were much weaker or even nonexistent. For instance, an eighteenth-century French mission in Kakongo found no signs of Catholicism, with the exception of a handful of villages composed of immigrants from Soyo, south of the Congo River.Footnote ⁵⁸

Historically, resistance to Christianization had been strongest in Loango, the region north of Kakongo, where people were known as Muvili, Mubiri, or Mobili (singular) and Bavili (plural), in reference to their local (West-)Kikongo language, called Vili. Sixteenth-century Portuguese missionary efforts in the region had been weak and failed to take root. In 1663, the baptism of the Bavili ruler by the Capuchin Bernardino Ungaro seemed at first to ignite a wave of conversion, but shortly afterward, a civil war erupted, and the Christian party was defeated. As a result, missionaries did not establish a permanent base in Loango until the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁹ When visiting the region in the 1880s, José Silva still observed tensions between “those who believe in God” and those who “believe in feitiços,” a Portuguese derogatory term for indigenous rituals.Footnote ⁶⁰

Taking advantage of the fact that Portuguese resources primarily targeted the maintenance of political influence in Kongo and the strengthening of their own stronghold of Luanda in Angola, the Dutch West India Company became Loango's most important European trading partner by the early seventeenth century. Despite Dutch pressure, however, Loango rulers remained reluctant to sell enslaved people. Only by the late 1670s, Loango developed into a transatlantic slave-trading center, not only for the Dutch, but also for the English and the French.Footnote ⁶¹

While it is likely that, in earlier decades, most enslaved Africans shipped from Loango Bay effectively originated from the region of Loango itself, it is generally assumed that the majority of those who embarked in the late seventeenth century originated from increasingly distant areas to the east and south.Footnote ⁶² Nathaniel Uring confirmed in 1726 that “the greatest part of their slaves were brought 8 or 9 hundred miles out of the country,” from a place “which they call Poembo” [Mpumbu, later known as Stanley Pool and today as Pool Malebo]. However, he also highlighted that Bavili slavers continued to make “excursions nearer home in strong parties, and where they found any people settled by themselves . . . they seized them” and that even local “towns-people [were] sold for slaves . . . in cases of adultery, or when their great men sell some of their servants for disobedience.”Footnote ⁶³ This implies that a substantial minority of those shipped from Loango Bay continued to come from the kingdom itself or neighboring areas. Based on sociolinguistic research, Christina Mobley even claims that in Haiti “most of the captives sold on the Loango Coast came from the Loango Coast kingdoms themselves and Mayombe rainforest.”Footnote ⁶⁴

It would, in any case, be wrong to assume that the designation Loango, as it was used in the Americas, was merely a label imposed by Europeans in reference to the place where Africans had embarked. Gabriel Stedman, for instance, observed that some Africans in eighteenth-century Suriname were known as “Loangos” and “Congos,” but others as “Pombos,” which shows that enslaved Africans from places in the interior such as Mpumbu were not necessarily identified by the place where they had embarked.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, if the designator Loango had no importance for Africans, it is hard to imagine that runaways would have kept using it. The fact that some of the maroons who founded Saramaka called themselves and their clan “Lángu” confirms an emotional connection to this specific part of Africa.Footnote ⁶⁶

Those who designated themselves as “Loangos” in the American diaspora also embraced certain identity markers that set their group apart from others. As examples, we could refer to “Loango-dancing” in Suriname that, according to Stedman, was “performed by the Loango-Negroes . . . and not by any others” or to the woman depicted in the engraving of a “Family of Negro Slaves from Loango” in his Narrative, published in 1796, who carries a muteta basket that is a recognizable attribute of Loango culture.Footnote ⁶⁷ Despite the fact that many of those designated as “Loangos” may have originated from elsewhere, there can, thus, be no doubt that at least some northern Kongolese beliefs and customs transited to the Americas in the context of the slave trade. A possible example of this can be found in Richard Price's Travels with Tooy, published in 2008, where his informant on Saramaka culture connected a tale on flying back to Africa with the crash of a canoe and accompanied this with the words “malúngu loángo.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Tooy's use of the Kikongo term nlungu (large canoe) and reference to Loango reinforces the theory that the roots of the flying Africans folktale are to be traced to Kikongo-speaking areas in West-Central Africa.

Loango's long history of resistance against both Kongolese and Portuguese political and religious influences allows for a better understanding of recurrent references to “eating salt” in these tales. Since they originated from the extreme periphery of the Kikongo-speaking area and spoke a West-Kikongo variant that was difficult to understand south of the Congo River, the Bavili tended to be perceived as provincial by the Kongolese. This reputation was strengthened by the virtual absence of Catholicism. “Before conversion,” Thornton writes, “Kongo's religious structure was like that of its neighbors in Loango.” However, “Christianity set true Kongolese aside from their neighbors, and in their view made them superior to the ‘heathens,’ even those to the north and east who spoke dialects of the same Kikongo language.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This attitude can be confirmed with reference to the previously mentioned Kongolese immigrant community in eighteenth-century Kakongo, who, according to French missionaries, were eager “to have their children baptized because they consider those who are baptized superior to others. They dispraise the heathen who surround them to the point that they hardly consider them human beings.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Since many of the beliefs and customs in Loango were recognizable to Catholic Kongolese, but reminded them of a past they had moved away from, the Bavili to them epitomized backwardness.Footnote ⁷¹

However, this tendency to look down upon the Bavili was accompanied with awe and even fear. After all, the Bavili had remained much more familiar with rituals to control the spiritual world. Despite the status and prestige of Catholicism in Kongo, traditional practices and beliefs in the power of spirits had continued to exist. This was not only the case among those who had resisted conversion, but also among many of those who identified as Catholic. As Phyllis Martin has shown, the Bavili were feared in the Kongo kingdom for “the degree of magical powers which they were believed to possess.”Footnote ⁷² This is confirmed by Thornton, according to whom “merchants from the Kingdom of Loango . . . were often regarded as witches by the common people of Kongo.”Footnote ⁷³ Significantly, Cadornega claimed that “when one says that something belongs to a Mubiri, nobody touches it.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The fact that, in the course of the eighteenth century, Loango slavers operating in Kongo became increasingly aggressive and didn't hesitate to kidnap freeborn (Catholic) Kongolese can only have increased such fears.Footnote ⁷⁵

Based on this information, the recurrent references to eating salt in tales about flying suggest that this Kikongo/Kimbundu expression continued to be used in discussions about Christianization among enslaved Africans in the Americas. It would imply that references to salt did originally not relate to actual eating, but, rather, to the Christian baptismal ritual and the consequences baptism had for one's conception of spiritual afterlife. It would also imply that the original meaning of flying in these tales was not the physical moving through the air using wings but, rather, the transmigration of one's soul. If we equate the expression of “eating salt” with “being baptized,” it suggests an awareness that souls were no longer able or willing to fly back to Africa once a person was Christianized. This is understandable, considering that a Christian baptism ignites a process of reimaging spiritual afterlife and implies that a person's ultimate ambition is to have one's soul rise up to heaven after death rather than “fly back” to one's homeland. As Daniel Walker confirms, once Christianized, “transmigration to Africa” was “no longer functional for the African American and transferred from the realm of reality and conscious religious belief to the arena of folklore.”Footnote ⁷⁶

This interpretation of the tale requires a more profound analysis of the African reaction to Christianization in the Americas, with a specific focus on communities with roots in Kikongo-speaking Africa.

Christianization in the Americas

It is well known that Christianization could be a cause of tensions in enslaved communities. Speaking about the eighteenth-century Virgin Islands, Jon Sensbach argued that “some slaves ridiculed and even attacked those who professed Christianity” and that violence was “only the most visceral sign of intense debates running through slave quarters across the island about the theological and practical value of the Scriptures and their political meaning in everyday life.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Reporting from eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry confirmed tensions between enslaved Africans who identified as Christian—including Kongolese, who “have some knowledge of Catholicism . . . which they obtained through the Portuguese”—and others. He noticed that the former, “due to the baptism they received,” tended “to feel superior to newly arrived bozals.” For this reason, unbaptized newcomers, who were nicknamed “chevaux” (horses) by others, were “eager to get baptized . . . often without any preparation, and without any other concern than getting a godfather and godmother . . . and protecting themselves from the insults directed against the non-baptized.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Similar tensions have been observed in Curaçao, where historian Han Jordaan found evidence that Black Catholics not only looked down upon but sometimes bluntly refused to bury unbaptized bozals or, as they used to call them condescendingly, bouriques (asses). These divisions were also visible in the 1750 uprising that was, according to Dutch sources, exclusively organized by “Amiense negers,” Akan-speaking Africans named after Fortress Elmina and known in English sources as (A)minas. This uprising was crushed by the authorities with the help of the Catholic members composing the island's free Black militia. According to Jordaan, the militia received broad support by fellow Black Catholics on the island, who assisted them by denouncing the Minas. He explained this lack of solidarity as the result of the deep social and cultural divide between Black Catholics and unbaptized newcomers.Footnote ⁷⁹

These examples confer credibility to Heywood and Thornton's theory that there were important differences in the Americas between “Kongolese and Angolans who . . . were likely to be familiar with aspects of European culture . . . willingly participated in Christianity, had their children baptized and used their Christian background as a means to gain freedom” and, in contrast, “West Africans who . . . came from areas whose leaders were less accepting of European culture [and] were more likely to develop autonomous communities.”Footnote ⁸⁰ It would, however, be wrong to generalize different attitudes vis-à-vis Christianity to West Africans versus Central Africans. As an example, we could refer again to Sandoval, who confirmed that many of the enslaved Africans arriving in seventeenth-century Cartagena from the Kongo region had already been “properly baptized” in their homelands but clarified that this was not the case with all Central Africans. He singled out those arriving from Loango, whom he perceived as “very different from the Kongolese and Angolans” and classified as “heathen.”Footnote ⁸¹ This perceived difference may also explain why enslaved Africans identified as “Loangos” were not allowed membership to Havana's prestigious confraternity of the Congo Reales. The latter was reserved to those with roots in the heartland of the Kongo kingdom, whereas others had to form their own brotherhoods, such as that of the Congo Macamba and the Congo Loango. Whenever there was a procession, the Congo Reales marched in the front.Footnote ⁸²

That tensions over Christianization could just as well develop among Central Africans can also be illustrated with Montejo, who spoke of frictions between “Kongolese Christians” and what he called the Congo judío (literally Kongolese Jews), meaning Kongolese who resisted conversion to Christianity. According to Montejo, each of them thought that “they were good and the others were evil.”Footnote ⁸³ In a similar vein, the Moravian missionary Christian Oldendorp noted that, among Central Africans in the eighteenth-century Danish Virgin Islands, some “pretended to have the ability to make it rain,” but clarified that “those had to hide themselves from the Catholics.”Footnote ⁸⁴

In Curaçao, the Catholic, Papiamentu-speaking community typically used the term Luango in reference to unbaptized Africans. Brenneker's definition of the term as either “slave from Loango” or “slave not yet adapted to the island” suggests that those originating from Loango were once considered the quintessential bozals, those who most visibly, and perhaps also most defiantly, remained attached to their indigenous African customs.Footnote ⁸⁵ Brenneker did, in fact, explain that Black Catholics “considered Luangos uncivilized,” because “they were the ones who most firmly remained attached to the old customs and ideas. They were often the last slaves to arrive on the island.”Footnote ⁸⁶ A reflection of this attitude lives on in denigrating expressions in the Papiamentu language involving “Luangos,” such as papia luango (to say stupid things), hasi kos di luango (to do stupid things), hende luango (weird people), or bisti luango (to dress ridiculously).Footnote ⁸⁷

Similar to what we observed in Kongo, however, people known as “Luangos” in Curaçao had a reputation for being dangerous because of their familiarity with brua—as derived from the Spanish brujería or the Portuguese bruxaria (witchcraft). According to Brenneker, nobody dared to steal from “Luangos” because they were believed to be conjurers.Footnote ⁸⁸ This reputation also sheds light on the Surinamese expression that “Loango si pop'ki, a taki, da Gado” (a Loango who sees a doll says: that's God) and on Governor Jan Nepveu's observation that, of all the Africans living in eighteenth-century Suriname, “no nation is more superstitious than the Luangos.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Most importantly, however, “Luangos” in Curaçao had the reputation of being able to fly back home for as long as they refrained from eating salt. Allen confirmed that “the Luango's . . . were portrayed as a supernatural people [with] wings that allowed them to fly back to Africa if they did not eat salt. The ability would be lost once salt was consumed.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Brenneker also highlighted the importance of salt as a source of protection against evil spirits, such as in the tradition to wash the walls of a new house with salt water before taking residence, similar to what Pechüel-Loesche observed in Loango. He also pointed at a connection with Christianity by explaining that people used to place a little bag with salt on top of their doors during Lent and paid even closer attention to this custom on Good Friday, because it was believed that evil spirits were especially powerful on the day of Christ's death. Salt also used to play an important role in baptismal procedures, where it was called, like in Kongo, salu di Dios (salt of God). According to Brenneker, parents used to protect newborns against attacks by mal spiritus or zumbis in the first days of life leading up to baptism by sprinkling them with salt and whenever they “ta jora bautismo” (cry because they are anxious to get baptized), parents appeased their babies by placing salt under the pillow.Footnote ⁹¹ His use of the Papiamentu term zumbi, as derived from the Kikongo nzambi or nzumbu, again points in the direction of West-Central Africa.

Similar practices were observed in the 1930s by Meville Herskovits in the Haitian Valley of Mirebelais, a region with a historically strong Kongolese presence, where families used to bury the newborn's placenta after birth and added some salt to it “so that the evil eye cannot take it.”Footnote ⁹² In early twentieth-century Jamaica, Zora Neale Hurston recorded a scene where an evil spirit had taken possession of a Black girl, whereupon her father “gave her salt to eat and made a cross on her forehead with chalk,” which again connects the practice of “eating salt” to Christianity, as a means to ward off evil spirits.Footnote ⁹³

The belief in salt-baptism as a form of protection may also explain the observation by the Dominican Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre in the seventeenth-century French Antilles that nothing excited the enslaved more than “the baptism of their children” to which ceremony they used to invite “all the Blacks of their country.” Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Le Pers further noted that the enslaved in early eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue often expressed a desire “to be baptized multiple times.”Footnote ⁹⁴

Montejo explicitly linked flying away to the topic of Christianity when informing Barnet that “the Indians did not want to become Christians and hanged themselves from trees. But the Blacks did not do that, because they left by flying; they flew through the sky and returned to their land.” He clarified that by “flying,” he meant that “the spirit left the body and wandered about over the sea and through space.”Footnote ⁹⁵

The connection between the flying Africans’ tale and baptism becomes stronger if we link it to Vincent Brown's observation that Christianized Africans often “served as the key interpreters of missionary doctrine to other slaves.”Footnote ⁹⁶ This can be confirmed with reference to Sue Peabody's research on the island of St. Christopher (today's St. Kitts), which revealed that Guillaume Moreau, Jesuit superior of the Guadeloupe mission from 1706 to 1710, noted that Christianized Africans would typically “teach” unbaptized newcomers “the prayers . . . take them to church and to catechism, make them attend Mass, make them observe the ceremonies, and try to give them the most dedicated religion possible, often repeating to them that, having been brutes as they are, they have become children of God.” It was, thus, enslaved Africans themselves who, “by dint of laying siege to them, telling them so by reason, by example, and by invitations . . . persuade them to ask for baptism.”Footnote ⁹⁷

It is important to stress that such actions also occurred outside of the control of Church authorities by Africans who took Christianization into their own hands. Significantly, the French authorities in Saint-Domingue issued an ordinance in 1761 referring to the Black community in Cap Français, who had not only “constituted distinct congregations” and established their “own choir leaders, beadles, and church wardens,” but also “catechize[d] and preach[ed]” and went “into the suburbs to catechize in the houses and dwellings without having authorization to do so.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In his 1843 report about Jamaica, the Baptist missionary James Phillippo reported about Afro-Christian “fraternities” that clandestinely organized missionary activities by sending out disciples, who traveled “by night to avoid apprehension” and “communicated their instructions from house to house.” In case of illness, “the minister, or father, as he was usually called, anointed them with oil in imitation of the anointing of the Saviour by Mary Magdalene, before his crucifixion.” The usual method of its application was “by pouring it into the palm of the hand, and rubbing it on the head of the patient; the tata, or father, singing some ditty during the operation, being joined in loud chorus by all who assembled.” Phillippo specified that “these infatuated men professed a firm belief in purgatory, and, like the Romish priests, pretended an acquaintance with the destinies of the deceased.”Footnote ⁹⁹ His reference to the Kikongo term tata (father) confirms a Kongolese connection.

In the eighteenth-century Virgin Islands, Oldendorp noted that it was common, “among Blacks who came from Portuguese countries . . . particularly those from the Congo,” to perform “a kind of baptism,” characterized by “pouring water over the head of the baptized, placing some salt in his mouth, and praying to God in the Congo language.” Oldendorp's observations not only show that Catholic Kongolese built their own congregations, but also confirm the importance of salt in their baptismal rituals. He even claimed that the origin of the synonym “salt-water Negro” for bozal related to the fact that “some of them were upon arrival baptized by another Black person who used salt to initiate them.” Oldendorp also informed that the Kongolese proselytized among newly arrived Africans and that, before being baptized, a bozal typically received “five to six lashes from the baptizer, for the sins he had committed in Africa.” Once baptized, newcomers were welcome to join the Afro-Catholic community with “a Negro celebration,” while their godparents adopted “those whom they have baptized as their children and look after them as best they can, in particular, when they pass away, because then they provide them with a coffin and burial clothing.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ According to Sensbach, these Kongolese burial societies had characteristics in common with Latin America confraternities.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The fact that Kongolese catechists catered to the needs of newly arrived Africans and organized baptisms and funerals does, indeed, suggest that they operated in the context of a brotherhood and, as Maureen Warner-Lewis suggested, used rituals that “may have derived from practices within the Catholic fraternity in Koongo [sic].”Footnote ¹⁰²

Similar to what happened in the Virgin Islands, the catechization of enslaved people in rural parts of Curaçao is believed to have occurred through Black laypersons known as sacristans, which Brenneker translated as “a type of catechists.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Research by Armando Lampe confirmed that Black laypeople in Curaçao not only taught unbaptized newcomers the catechism and the rosary, but also organized their baptism. Lampe is, therefore, convinced that “the oppressed” (i.e., the enslaved) were “evangelized by the oppressed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In spite of the fact that Curaçao was ruled by Dutch Protestants, the Black population managed to develop a network of Catholic confraternities that, as was shown by Linda Rupert, had ties to “religious brotherhoods (cofradías) in Coro [Venezuela].” In the mid-eighteenth century, “one such society in Coro, the Cofradía del Carmen, even sent a delegation to collect alms from their brothers on the island.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ To this day, Afro-Catholic sociedads di caha (coffin societies) guarantee a decent funeral to their members. “Every neighborhood has one,” Brenneker explained, “and people are often member of more than one.” Every month, people pay a fee because these societies are “considered a basic necessity in order to avoid a poor-people's-funeral.” Like brotherhoods, their names refer to a Catholic patron saint, such as San Pedro, La Birgen Nos Mama, San Hosé, or Santa Lucia.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

These societies are known for their hour-long prayer sessions in call-and-response form and the singing of dumve (corrupted versions of Gregorian prayer songs), which may explain the origins of the Papiamentu saying “si bo fòrsa busá, busá ta papia latin” (If you force the bozal, the bozal will [even learn to] speak Latin).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ As the use of the verb fòrsa (to force) reveals, missionary activities by Black Catholics among unbaptized newcomers could involve pressure. A possible relic of this can be found in Panama, where brotherhoods known as congadas or grupos de Congos perform in the days leading up to Lent a mock fight between “devils” and “angels” that ends with the former's capture and forced baptism by the “padre Congo.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Such pressure from within the Black community on newcomers to submit oneself to a Christian baptism may well explain the many references in popular culture to stories about newcomers who refused to eat salt and flew back to Africa. After all, these stories consistently deal with newcomers who stubbornly refused to accommodate to the norms and customs of the slave society. In Curaçao, the epitome of such an African was the “Luango,” who spoke differently, dressed differently, behaved differently, and insisted on flying back to Africa. As the reference to the Nsundi in Montejo's autobiography indicates, however, it would be wrong to associate resistance to baptism and accommodation to the Bavili community only. As we have seen, Merolla showed that even in the heartland of the Kongo kingdom, some people refused to “eat salt.” Yet, more than any other region in West-Central Africa, Loango had a history of militant rejection of Portuguese and Kongolese influences and, more than any other community, the Bavili represented, in the eyes of Catholic Kongolese, people who stubbornly remained attached to dangerous spiritual practices. This could well explain why they, in particular, became known as the ones who most defiantly held on to their indigenous traditions, symbolized by a refusal to “eat salt” and a determination to “fly home.” The fact that they originated from a region in Africa where the slave trade set in at a relatively late stage, and where Dutch and English slavers dominated the market, provides a credible explanation for the fact that stories about flying Africans became so prominent in parts of the Americas with a Protestant colonial history.

Once such stories came to be adopted by Black people with roots in other parts of Africa, however, it is likely that the metaphorical meanings of salt and flying got lost or were no longer understood. James Sweet even suspects that since “the Kongolese easily could have interpreted the baptismal salt as the essence of European witchcraft and spiritual power,” they may already in Africa have understood “eating salt” as to be “like the other whites.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In the increasingly diverse Black community in the Americas, a similar interpretation may have occurred so that, over time, the recollection of resistance against baptism came to be replaced by a recollection of resistance against accommodation. What remained as a shared Black cultural heritage were stories about newly arrived Africans who refused to accommodate to a life in slavery and therefore flew back to Africa.

It would, nevertheless, be wrong to explain the diverging conceptions of heaven between those who desired a Christian baptism and those who rejected it as a matter of “trying to be like the Whites” versus “being proud of one's African heritage.” After all, the king of Kongo converted to Christianity before Columbus started his first voyage to America. Considering this century-old history, it is questionable whether Kongolese in the Americas considered Christianity a “White religion.” As Thornton has argued, “a Kongo peasant living in the mid-eighteenth century might have been unaware that knowledge about some of the beings he worshiped—as the Virgin Mary, so often invoked in times of danger or emergency—actually originated outside his country.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is, therefore, legitimate to argue, as did Marina de Mello e Souza, that to many Kongolese in the Americas, Christianity may have “represented a link to their native Africa.”Footnote ¹¹¹

This assumption that Christianity is also an African religion and that it was perceived as such by many of the enslaved corresponds to the decision by those who founded the earliest Black evangelical congregations in the Lowcountry to call their churches “African.” It reveals a conviction that there is no contradiction in being Christian and being proud of one's African heritage. As the article's final section will show, several other characteristics of these churches become clearer if analyzed in connection to Kongolese Christianity.

Christianity in the Lowcountry

In the context of his late-nineteenth-century research on “superstitions from Georgia,” Ruby Andrews Moore discovered how a “cargo from Congo, numbering 600” was brought “to Liberty County, Georgia, only a few years before abolition.” These newcomers were “placed upon Ossaba[w] Island off the Georgia Coast to cultivate Sea Island cotton” and lived there “almost in their native style, practicing many of their native superstitious customs,” while “domesticated slaves” were “watching the performance.” Soon, Moore claims, “their stories, fables, traditions, etc. began to be circulated among the other[s].”Footnote ¹¹²

Since they arrived shortly before abolition, these people most likely originated from areas north of the Kongo kingdom and did not identify as Christian. In this respect, they were different from an earlier generation of West-Central Africans. In fact, at least 60 percent of the Africans arriving in Charleston before 1740 originated from Kongo/Angola.Footnote ¹¹³ According to Thornton, the majority of them “were probably from Kongo” and were “proud of their Christian and Catholic heritage, which they believed made them a distinctive people.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ This assumption can be strengthened with late-seventeenth-century records from South Carolina that contain dozens of references to Africans with Iberian baptismal names such as Antonio [António], Mattheias [Mateus], Salvidore [Salvador], [Do]mingo, Maria, Francisco, Emanuel, Isabel, and Jossee [José].Footnote ¹¹⁵ Many of these people, Annette Laing has argued, “did not first encounter Christian ideas and practices in South Carolina” because they had “been raised in the Kingdom of Kongo.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Their Catholic identity is confirmed in the anonymous “Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,” published in 1739. The anonymous account of the insurrection, which became known as the Stono Rebellion, revealed how “amongst the Negroe slaves there are a people brought from the Kingdom of Angola in Africa, many of these speak Portugueze . . . and . . . profess the Roman Catholic religion.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ It is likely that those involved in the Stono Rebellion had the ambition to reach St. Augustine, the Spanish border town in Florida, where enslaved Catholics were granted freedom. Research by Jane Landers confirmed that several of those who managed to flee from South Carolina to Spanish Florida were, indeed, Kongolese who identified as Catholic.Footnote ¹¹⁸

We also find a reference to Catholics among the enslaved population in a report from a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) missionary, Francis Le Jau. During his 1710 campaign in Goose Creek, Le Jau learned that some Africans “were born and baptized among the Portuguese” and “express a great desire to receive the H. communion amongst us.” This prompted him to establish that they would only be admitted to communion upon “abjuring the errors of the Romish Church . . . the chief of which is praying to the saints.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

There are also reports about frictions in the Lowcountry Black community over Christianization. In 1710, the SPG minister James Gignilliat observed that when people joined the Anglican Church “other slaves do laugh at them and render them worse and worse.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Moreover, when James Barclay visited the Lowcountry in the mid-eighteenth century, he noticed “a violent antipathy” between “those of Gulli or Gully” (Angolans) and “Iba” (Igbos).Footnote ¹²¹

Such tensions can only have increased when, in the final years of the slave trade, large groups of unbaptized newcomers from areas north of the Congo River began to arrive in the Sea Islands. For example, the anonymous report “Samuel Elliotts’ Funeral Sermon” in the Charleston Observer from October 1838 shows that a man, standing in what Erskine Clarke called “a tradition of conjuring,” confronted a certain Sam, who was “part of a rapidly developing African American Christianity among the Gullah people.”Footnote ¹²² Unlike what Clarke suggests, it is far from certain that the man attached to indigenous African traditions represented an older generation. There had, after all, been a strong Catholic presence in the Lowcountry's Kongolese charter generation, whereas those who arrived later mainly originated from West Africa or regions north of the Kongo kingdom, where Christianity had historically been met with hostility.

It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that, already at an early stage, there were opposing views within the Lowcountry Black community on spiritual afterlife and where one's spirit was supposed to “fly” after one's death. That afterlife was of great importance is visible in Julia Mood Peterkin's observation in the 1930s that, in spite of their poverty, people painstakingly paid their monthly dues to burial societies out of a “sincere desire for an elaborate and respectable funeral.”Footnote ¹²³ As Mason Crum confirmed in the 1940s, Black people on the islands of Edisto and St. Helena were very attached to funerals in great style, to which “the secret societies turn out in force with all members in full regalia.”Footnote ¹²⁴

Much has been written about the role of these secret societies in the development of African American Christianity in the Sea Islands. As Richard Wade explained, these organizations were “religious in impulse,” yet “usually existed outside of church supervision. White ministers knew they existed and worried about their influence.”Footnote ¹²⁵ In her classic study A Peculiar People (1988), Margaret Washington Creel argued that it was in secret societies that “Gullahs practiced their own version of Christianity, and created their religious folk-culture.”Footnote ¹²⁶ While Creel traced their origin to West-African initiation societies, Jason Young and Ras Michael Brown pointed to secret societies from West-Central Africa, such as Lemba, Nkimba, Ndembo, and Kimpasi.Footnote ¹²⁷

Young also argued that the “prior . . . exposure . . . to Christianity in Kongo undoubtedly colored their interactions with Protestant missionaries,” yet believed that the development of Black Baptist Churches in the Lowcountry allowed the integration of indigenous African beliefs and rituals, a phenomenon that Brown labeled as the “kalunga,” the “all-encompassing physical and conceptual world inhabited by African-descended people.”Footnote ¹²⁸

The new interpretation of the flying Africans’ folktale presented in this paper questions this assumption. One wonders why Catholic Kongolese communities in the Sea Islands would have displayed a welcoming, all-encompassing “kalunga” attitude vis-à-vis indigenous African rituals and beliefs, whereas in Curaçao and Haiti, they disdained unbaptized newcomers as “asses” or “horses,” and in the Virgin Islands even submitted them to a humiliating whipping ritual. While it cannot be denied that, similar to what occurred elsewhere, the variant of Catholicism that developed in Kongo built on pre-Christian traditions, it is questionable to deduce from this that it was characterized, as Young suggested, “by a notable fluidity and adaptability of belief” to the point that Catholic Kongolese in the Lowcountry would have embraced rituals from indigenous African initiation societies.Footnote ¹²⁹

Certainly, examples can be found in seventeenth-century Kongo of people who identified as Catholic yet also resorted to indigenous practices or mixed elements of both, but this does not necessarily reflect an “all-encompassing” religious mindset. After all, similar phenomena occurred just as well in Portugal, to the point that George Brooks has argued that, in the early modern period, Portuguese and Africans “shared similar beliefs concerning the causes and cures of disease, and in the efficacy of amulets.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In early modern Portugal, we also find organizations that had much in common with the Lowcountry secret societies: brotherhoods or confraternities.

While it would go too far to speak of a cult of the dead, Portuguese brotherhoods dedicated exceptional attention to funerals. Membership represented a form of “funeral insurance,” in the sense that the dutiful payment of fees guaranteed a decent funeral, burial space, and coffin, as well as spiritual attention after one's death. This dedication to the souls of the deceased corresponded to the doctrine of the purgatory as an intermediary place between hell and heaven for those who died in God's grace but were insufficiently purified to achieve eternal salvation. People believed that through manifestations of devotion, penance, and charity, the living could influence the redemption of the souls in purgatory. By assuming these tasks, brotherhoods functioned as intermediaries between the living and the dead.Footnote ¹³¹

At an early stage, mutual-aid and burial societies modeled upon Portuguese brotherhoods flourished in Kongo. A report from the Kongolese ambassador in Lisbon reveals that no less than six confraternities existed in the Kongolese capital by 1595—those of Our Lady of the Rosary, the Holy Sacrament, Saint Mary, the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Spirit, and St. Anthony—whose members gathered daily to celebrate “Masses for the souls of the dead people.”Footnote ¹³² Membership was initially the privilege of the kingdom's elite and therefore conferred great prestige. Those admitted to a confraternity enjoyed royal protection and could in theory not be sold into slavery. Starting in the early seventeenth century, King Álvaro II and his successors, assisted by Capuchins, stimulated the creation of confraternities all over Kongo.Footnote ¹³³ Bernardo da Gallo's 1710 report not only confirms the widespread dissemination of brotherhoods, but also reveals that the Kongolese were “very devoted to the souls of the purgatory, have Masses and prayers said to them, and recommend them in church.”Footnote ¹³⁴

Considering this concern, it is likely that the earliest Kongolese to arrive in the Lowcountry brought with them a form of Christianity that was characterized by a belief in purgatory and the need to observe a set of rituals to redeem the souls of the deceased. The most logical response to this need was the formation of brotherhoods, which provides an alternative interpretation for the dissemination of “secret societies” in the Lowcountry. Brotherhoods were known for their colorful parades, with banners and marching bands, similar to how Henry Benjamin Whipple described a Black society parade in St. Marys, near the Georgia Sea Islands, in 1843. According to the Episcopal bishop, it consisted of “a corps of staff officers with red sashes, mock epaulettes and goose quill feathers,” who were followed by “others, some dancing, some walking and some hopping, other singing . . . with flags flying and music enough to deafen one.”Footnote ¹³⁵ Another characteristic of Afro-Catholic brotherhoods was the election of a “king,” references to which can be found in Rosanna Williams's observation in an FWP interview that her “granpapa wuz ‘Golla’ Dennerson, King uh his tribe” or in the case of Sam Gadsden, a black man born on Edisto island in 1882, who recalled that “we had some black kings around here in the old days . . . and they really ruled the colored people.”Footnote ¹³⁶ We could also point to the observation, in 1833, by the Methodist missionary Thomas Turpin that the Black community in the Sea Islands “had societies organized among themselves” that “appeared to be very much under the influence of Roman Catholic principles.”Footnote ¹³⁷ The assumption that secret societies in the Lowcountry had Afro-Iberian roots also explains why one of them was called The Brother and Sister of the Weeping Mary.Footnote ¹³⁸

Connecting secret societies to brotherhoods also sheds new light on Thomas Howard's argument in 1888 that African Americans in the Lowcountry who were “united in church fellowship” were “usually banded for mutual assistance” and on William Francis Allen's observation in 1861 that “the Sea Islands had myriad societies” and that “to a great extent, every black church was a society.”Footnote ¹³⁹ These comments suggest that the region's earliest Black Baptist Churches developed out of mutual-aid and burial societies with roots in Iberian brotherhoods.

This theory sheds new light on John Giggie's observation that Black Baptist churches “appropriate[ed] many of the institutional resources and rituals of black fraternal culture.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ We find, in fact, striking parallels between Afro-Catholic brotherhoods and Black Baptist churches with regard to burial procedures and the combination of spirituality with forms of social and material support, including the purchase of a decent coffin for those in need. Significantly, a member of South Carolina's FWP unit related the popularity of secret societies to the fact that “coastal Negroes have . . . a horror of being buried in a plain pine box” and noted that they “may wear rags and tatters, eat most frugally and live in a tumbled-down shack while on earth, and they will do so willingly, if their departure therefrom be in a comparative blaze of glory.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ In one of the most touching scenes written about Black life on the Sea Islands, Peterkins showed the grief of a father who had postponed paying the dues for his baby son, and, upon the child's sudden death, couldn't count on the society. He was, therefore, forced to give his son a shameful burial “in a simple box of pine boards.” The carpenter consoled the weeping father by reassuring him that “the child was too young to have sin and was bound to reach heaven,” which recalls the Catholic folk belief that one should not cry over the death of innocent children because one's tears would make these little angels’ wings wet and thereby make their flight to heaven harder.Footnote ¹⁴²

These parallels could also be extended to cultural practices. The rhythmic singing in call-and-response form in gospel music, for instance, corresponds to the way Kongolese Catholics had been praying the rosary for centuries. As an example, we could cite from Merolla da Sorrento's report on a late-seventeenth-century journey up the Congo River, where he observed how on a market place in Lemba, a “large crowd, divided into two choirs” was singing “the rosary in the Kongolese tongue.” He also experienced how people reacted to his sermon with “a great clapping of hands and humming, which are tokens of great joy among these people,” and noted that “the rosary was being sung by women while they were working in the fields.”Footnote ¹⁴³

The fact that enslaved Africans in the Lowcountry acted in collective ways to secure mutual aid and an ascent to heaven reveals an underlying motivation to foster a common identity and build shared cultural and sacred spaces, which helps us to understand the persistence of folktales such as that of the flying Africans. After all, as Lawrence Levine has demonstrated, folklore has been a crucial means of African American identity building.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

This religious interpretation of the tale can also be sustained with reference to comments made by two of the interviewees in Drums and Shadows, who explicitly linked their story about flying Africans to Christianity, claiming that “doze Africans ain got no Christianity. Dey ain hab no regluh religion. Dey jis pray tuh duh son an moon an sometime tuh a big stah.” And after they finish praying, “dey come in an put deah han on duh frien and say goodbye. Den dey go home . . . One by one dey fly up in duh eah and all fly off an gone back tuh Africa.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

By the time these interviews were made, however, virtually all members of the Black community in the Sea Islands had long since joined the largely autonomously operating Black Baptist Churches. There, the notion of flying away after one's death had meanwhile been firmly set in a Christian context as the soul's ascent to heaven, as is reflected in the famous spiritual “Some glad morning / When this life is over / I'll fly away / Like a bird.”