Flying Home

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a scholarship to Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, where he studied music until 1936(Busby 10). Later, to earn money for his education (after a mix-up regarding his scholarship), he traveled to New York, where he met Richard Wright and became involved in the Federal Writer’s Project. Encouraged to write a review for New Challenge, a publication edited by Wright, Ellison began composing essays and stories focusing on the strength of the human spirit and the necessity of racial pride. It was during this time that Ellison composed "." "", is the story of a young man who is one of a very small number of African-American pilots in World War II. The story begins as the young man, named Todd, crashes his trainer plane into a Southern crop field. Injured and unable to move, Todd is helped by one of the field workers, a black man named Jefferson. Todd, a man of the "white" world is overcome by feelings of disgust by the appearance and demeanor of Jefferson. Todd ...

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the field in which Todd crashed his plane. The buzzard is a common symbol in black folklore, representing sometimes the black person scrounging for survival, sometimes his predators, and always the precariousness of life in a predatory society. All these folk associations are active in the references of the buzzards in "". The birds are black; Jefferson says that his grandson Teddy calls them ‘jimcrows’. Representing not only the black man, Todd, but also the Jim Crow society, they symbolize the destructiveness of both(Bloom 84). Todd thinks of himself as a buzzard when he cries, "Can I help it if they won’t let us actually fly? Maybe we are a bunch of buzzards feeding on a ...

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