"Flying Home" and Other Stories Literary Elements

Short story collection/African American fiction

Various locations throughout American during the first half of the 20th century.

Various. “A Party Down at the Square” features first-person narration by a young white boy from north visiting the south. A young black boy is the titular first-person narrator of “Boy on a Train.” “King of the Bingo Game” is told from the objective perspective of a third-person point of view.

Various. “A Party Down at the Square” features a tone of increasing disgust amid a story of intensifying horrors. “Mister Toussan” features a lighthearted tone that matches the exuberant mood of a great discovery by its two characters.

Protagonist: African American tenacity and survival. Antagonist: Systemic American racism.

The primary and dominant conflict in every story that created by expectations and prejudices serving to maintain and sustain racial division in American.

Various. Most memorable: a near-crash by a plane resulting in the electrocution of a white spectator at the lynching of a black man in “A Party Down at the Square” and the protagonist of “King of the Bingo Game” beating the odds to become a jackpot winner while at the very same moment becoming the latest loser in the ongoing game of “what innocent black man can police kill without facing consequence.”

Early in “King of the Bingo Game” the protagonist thinks to himself “But they had it all fixed. Everything was fixed.” This is philosophical foreshadowing referring to the system of racism in which even when a black man wins he winds up losing.

The conflation of the name of Toussaint L’Ouverture with a famous movie character by one of the black kids in “Mister Toussan” is an understated way of suggesting the erasure of black history in the American educational system as the only heroic “African” one of them can come up with is “Toozan. Just like Tarzan…”

The same two black kids are used to illuminate the way that white heroes penetrate into the everyday discourse of black society during a baseball game in “Afternoon” with an allusion to the famous New York Yankee player: “Throw it here, and watch how ole Lou Gehrig snags ‘em on first base.”

The dominant imagery which pervades almost every single story in this collection is that of an outsider’s perspective looking in at a social system efficiently operating, but not necessarily as designed. The collection opens with the most starkly defined example of this imagery with its narration by a white boy from the north telling a story about a black lynching in the south. “Boy on a Train” is the most visually distinct of this mode of imagery with its visual of outside constrained by the limitations of framing in the form of a train window. “King of the Bingo Game” is the most shocking of the examples with its story of the outsider from the south being consumed alive by the system operating in the north.

The definitive paradox of the collection is the protagonist of “King of the Bingo Game” simultaneously defying the incredible odds against winning the jackpot only to still wind up losing.

The white townswoman who has come to the watch the lynching as evening’s entertainment during “A Party the Square” winds up being electrocuted to death as a result of the near-crash of the plane. As a result, she winds up “almost as black as the” lynching victim himself, creating a parallel between the perpetrators and the man they lynch as both being victimized by the irrationality of racism.

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From “Flying High”: “Irony danced within like the gnats circling the old man’s head.”