The People Can Fly
American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
What does it mean to be deemed promising in an unjust world? The award-winning poet and MIT Distinguished Chair of the Humanities interrogates this question—and offers a more expansive vision of giftedness—in this striking, original work.
"Remind[s] us there is power in the collective body of a people and their culture. There is power in pressing on in the face of obstacles and opposition." —The New York Times Book Review
“The People Can Fly will levitate your mind and enrich your soul." —Lena Waithe
What does promise cost in America? Especially when that promise is seen as grounds to separate us from the communities we cherish, and framed as the key to success, salvation, survival? In The People Can Fly, Dr. Joshua Bennett explores the complex position of black prodigies in a society that has, all too often, defined blackness as absence, as lack of intellect or inner life.
Through this hybrid work of memoir and cultural history, Dr. Bennett shares how his own academic journey reflected the ebb and flow of being seen as both promising and as a problem. He turns to the childhood archives of Malcolm X, Stevie Wonder, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, and others to further explore this theme: highlighting the role of cultural institutions, and loving communities, in shaping the lives of leading lights within African American culture. What’s more, Dr. Bennett clarifies how these spaces—these mentors, teachers, friends, and kin—helped defend young people from a world that sought to exclude them from its vision of promise and possibility.
With stunning prose and grace, The People Can Fly is an urgent reflection on what it means to be gifted, and to give one’s gifts away, in the present day. It is a praise song for generations of black dreamers who dared to imagine another world—where miracles abound, and ascension is only the beginning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and literature scholar Bennett (Spoken Word) offers a sprawling meditation on the history of African American child geniuses and prodigies. The author opens with recollections of his own upbringing by parents who saw him as a gifted child "destined for a path that would further the cause of our people's freedom." As he progressed through his studies, however, Bennett experienced the double-edged sword of such high expectations—"There was no middle ground: I was either an exemplar or a washout." From there, the author employs a unique assortment of history, criticism, disability studies, and memoir to explore what it means to have potential as a Black child, delving into the early lives of such luminaries as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as those of lesser-known figures like Thomas Fuller, an enslaved mathematical genius known as "The Virginia Calculator," and Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins, a late-19th-century pianist who could precisely replay any musical performance he heard. While Bennett's expansive analysis at times meanders, it abounds with insights, such as his perceptive deconstruction of the stereotype of the singular lone genius—the author carefully tracks how his subjects' success came down to the care and education provided by teachers, families, churches, communities, and artistic forebears. It adds up to a profound rumination on what is needed to foster children's promise.
