The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales

Content Warning: This section describes depictions of slavery and the relationships between enslaved people and their enslavers.

A woman asks a nameless enslaved man to row an enslaved girl across the river to a place named Ripley. The enslaved man’s enslaver trusts him and lets him do what he wants, so long as he doesn’t try to write or read. The enslaved man thinks the other side of the river might be like his side—full of violent enslavers. Scared, the enslaved man rows the enslaved girl across until he reaches the light, and two men grab the girl and offer him food.

The enslaved man makes three to four trips a month, and aside from the enslaved girl, he doesn’t see the people he takes in his boat. It happens in the dark, and all they must do is say the password, “Menare.” In Ripley, there’s a man named John Rankins who turns his house into a station for Black people fleeing slavery. Ripley is in Ohio, a free state that has abolished slavery, and Rankins shines a big light so the enslaved man and the people escaping slavery know where to go.

One night, the enslaved man must row 12 people across the river, and when the enslaved man returns to Kentucky, a state that upholds chattel slavery, slave catchers wait for him.