The People Can Fly

Whiting award-winning poet and Distinguished Chair of Humanities at MIT, Dr. Joshua Bennett creates a masterful synthesis of personal narrative and history that illuminates the promises and perils of being labelled a Black prodigy.

If our gifts aren’t earned, but given, then what do they require of us? This question is especially charged, historically, within African American communities. In The People Can Fly, Dr. Joshua Bennett explores the complex position of black prodigies—ranging from the 18th century to the present—living in a society that has, all too often, defined blackness as absence; as lack of intellect, or interior life. He examines the question of what it means, costs, to be deemed exceptional given this state of affairs. Especially when such a distinction is framed as the key to individual success in an unfair world, and cause for separation from the people, and places, one cherishes.

In this hybrid work of memoir and cultural history, Dr. Bennett turns to the childhood archives of Malcolm X, Stevie Wonder, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, June Jordan and others to explore how an expansive array of cultural institutions—Motown Records, the Michigan School for the Blind, and Frederick Douglass Junior High School, for example—helped shape the lives of leading lights in African American culture. He presents this group as having emerged from spaces that were defined not solely by particular educational strategies, but by a shared sense of transcendent purpose.

For the first time, Dr. Bennett also shares the ways that his own academic journey mirrors the ebb and flow of being seen both as promising and as a problem. He bolsters this personal narrative by exploring his family history; how it inspired him to study the works of neurodivergent artists and performers like Thomas Wiggins, Oscar Moore, and Stephen Wiltshire. In threading these narratives together, Bennett lays out an astonishing portrait of a tradition within a tradition: a tale of legends and living savants whose work demands our attention, and defense against erasure.

With stunning prose and grace, The People Can Fly is an urgent reflection on what it can mean to not just be gifted, but 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 and build one too. Where ascension is only the beginning.