"They Bad Luck all right. Teddy's got  name for 'em, calls 'em jimcrows," the old man laughed.
"It's a damned good name."
"They are the damnedest birds. Once I seen a hoss all strtched out like he was sick, you know.So i hollers, 'Gid up from there, suh!' Just to make sho! An doggone, son, if i don't see two ole jimcrows come flying right up outaa that hoss's insides! Yessuh! The sun was shinin' on 'em and they couldn't a been no greasier if they'd been eating barbecue."

Two recurring images in "Flying Home" are that of a buzzard and of a horse. The horse is first mentioned in a letter from Todd's girlfriend, describing the way "they," which we can assume to mean those whites "in charge" of drafting pilots to fight, continue to "beat that dead horse because they don't want to say why you boys are not yet fighting." Todd's girlfriend is talking about the way white air force officials (?) continue to cite ("beat that dead horse") black pilots' lack of bravery or skill when denying them their qualifying "papers," even though this excuse is clearly a guise for their unjustifiable racial prejudice against black pilots because of their supposed inferiority to white pilots. We see the horse image again in Jefferson's anecdote quoted above; this time the significance of the horse is revealed in its entirety to us by its relationship to the buzzard. For Jefferson and Teddy, the buzzard is directly implied to be of racial significance; Teddy has nicknamed the birds "jimcrows," after the laws put in place during reconstruction to assure the continued privilege of whites over blacks. The buzzards, symbols of white oppression, are said to be "after dead things"(212) like the horse, which symbolizes the supposed inferiority of blacks to whites. Just as a buzzard would die in the lack of dead things to eat, so too would the instruments of white oppression be rendered useless without the pretense of black inferiority.

The struggle of our protagonist is mirrored in this image of a buzzard feeding on a dead horse. Todd recognizes this need to overcome the notion of black inferiority, to debase the very notion on which his oppressors feed; he attempts to do this by becoming a skilled pilot. Even so, as we have seen in the letter from his girlfriend, he is denied the papers needed to bring his skills to fruition. For Todd, the admiration of "ignorant black men" is not enough; his success as a pilot lay in navigating "the cloudy terrain of white men's regard" to attain the approval of his "white officers" (209). Only when "the enemy" could come to recognize his skill "would he assume his deepest meaning" (210), having overturned the assumed order of  the racial hierarchy and cutting off the nourishing supply of presumed superiority which has fed white supremacy for so long.

Lauren Gore

Discussion: What else could the horse signify? What about the buzzard?