The black-and-white illustrations had the feel of carefully crafted 19th-century woodcuts, some somber or foreboding, others lighthearted or comical. It was a collection of two dozen African-American folktales, ranging from fanciful animal stories to encounters with the supernatural to narratives of runaway slaves, all told in the vernacular of traditional black storytellers. The original "People Could Fly," written by Hamilton and illustrated by the Dillons, was published nearly 20 years ago. Leo and Diane Dillon have taken what could have easily been a retread and instead created something fresh, something transcendent. Not with all these evocative images, vivid, bright and moving, leading us on a new journey through territory we thought we knew. Never seems to lose its power, no matter how many times it is told.Īnd yet, familiar as it is, we have never seen the story like this. Heard it so many times that we can almost join in with the storyteller herself. Familiar because we know the story "The People Could Fly" already. In this coda of a storybook, two more words come to mind: the familiar and the transcendent. Virginia Hamilton sometimes described her writing as a triad of the known, the remembered and the imagined.
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