The two stories further illustrate the unease, even hostility, that blacks have tended to feel about their folklore, and about black history  In That I Had the Wings, Riley, a young black boy Ellison uses in several stories, hates his Aunt Kate and wishes she had died back in slavery times; in Flying Home, the black pilot who seeks escape hates the black farmer who rescued him after his crash.
In the two stories, two black men, Riley and Ellison, experience tragedies that take place in black History