"Wade in the Water, Children"
Posted: Saturday, February 19, 2011
by Walter Rhett
Charleston Perlo
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- Harriet Tubman
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- African-American Refugee Train Crossing the Rappannock River, at the Second Battle of Bull Run, VA, 1862
I liked the music–it was a big jukebox hit for Ramsey Lewis–and I loved what Alvin Ailey did with it in his famous dance choreography, but I always secretly thought that the advice offered by the spiritual, “Wade in the Water,” was not very smart. Why jump into waters that God stirred up—described in the Bible as “troubled?” It didn’t make any sense. It took me 50 years of darkness in the wilderness of my own self-made blindness before I found out what the slaves who sang the song knew.
People think the song is about Moses and Exodus, but the troubled waters refer to a New Testament verse. The conventional wisdom of history contends the song sent a signal to runaway slaves. Use the river so the hounds can’t trace you. Tonight is the moment for flight; move swiftly; the reaction wil be fierce. but my first memories of the passsage were of bodies tellling a story; moving like the currents of the Atlantic’s Middle Passage, pulled against the tide, unable to reach back, torn from home, cast over in death, as ethereal as spirits–in Alvin Ailey’s wordless dramatic choreography.
Alvin Ailey captured the noted Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad’ reappraisal of space and suffering, linking it to living.
My whole being is a dark chant
which will carry you
perpetuating you
to the dawn of eternal growths and
blossoming
. . .
my gaze destroys itself in the pupil of your
eyes
she says in another poem:
No one will introduce me to the sunlight
It is common to believe the traditional space of the slave was roiled with fear and flight. But the slaves exercised a separate reality. The Africans who made it through the troubled waters of the Middle Passage and then found more trouble in their new home didn’t pass the chance to keep their mental skills sharp and learn about a new god. They weren’t so much searching for answers as they were looking for help, protection, comfort. Especially with those millions of friends and kin strung across the Atlantic floor in a garland of dry bones.
In the greatest religious conversion ever–certainly the most startling–the Africans appropriated the god of the slaveholder and planter. They found Jesus not only saved, he delivered. A Charleston Methodist minister thought to be on his death bed received a visit by an African in his congregation, After his prayer, the ailing minister said, “I feel better,” and surprised many when he got out of bed by the third day.
Mainly not taught to read or write, these Africans learned the word of god by hearing. The often memorized scripture and discerned its meaning upon first reading. In their own style, they added flesh to the word, and made it into song. They strengthened the influence of divine power because god was personal and to know his power you had to relate to him.
From the old days, this story telling in song, expressed in the poetry of natural symbols was right up their alley. The idea of a god who entered the world and stirred things up, the power of a god to conquer death, change form, and make round trips between heaven and earth while still being divine, and then leaving behind a little of that spirit for everybody was also a god whose light and mercy and love were present in the midst of trouble.
Mississippi Woman born before the Civil War, 1934.So on close listening, this was a god who not only saved and protected, who made the wished-for immortal eternal. He provided strength for the journey and made his own kind of trouble.
I didn’t know that back then. Sunday after Sunday, nobody talked why anybody with good sense would wade into troubled waters. I thought maybe it was a temptation or a dare.
All I knew back then was Ramsey’s rhythm of the troubled waters and the haunting elegance of Ailey’s ballet. The dance was a thing of beauty in the midst of sorrow and hope. I had my own doubts about following the path of trouble. You can’t imagine my surprise. When I found out what following that trouble meant.
(Cont’d in the next column, pt. 2; click title to view it on its own web page. Click pictures to enlarge.)
Ruins on the site of the Bethesda Pool
Jesus heals the paralyzed man at Jerusalem's Bethesda pool on the day of the FeastOne day there it was in John, chapter 5. the whole story laid out at the end of a web search.
It’s best if I quote it.
Some time later, Jesus went to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. In Jerusalem near the sheep gate, there is a pool called Bethesda, surounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie–the blind, the lame, those paralyzed. An angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and troubled the water; whoever, after the troubling of the water, was the first to step in the water was healed, made whole from disease or affliction.
One who was there had been an invalid for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. The day on which this took place was a Sabbath; the Jewish leaders said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.” But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, “Pick up your mat and walk.” So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”
The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd. Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who had made him well.
So because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jewish leaders began to persecute him. In his defense, Jesus said to them, “My father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working.” For this reason they planned all the more to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal to God.
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- 1942 Philadelphia made Stained Glass for the Bethesda Presybertarian Church
Just think, the man was cured and Jesus got into trouble for helping him out! What a God! People were mad at him for working a miracle, for using his spernatural skills. In restoring the man’s health with only a spoken word, he broke all kinds of religious laws and rites because his saving grace didn’t rest on the day proclaimed by religious authorities.
The Africans immediately took a liking to what they heard about Jesus. A god-in-the-flesh, not far removed from their own ideas about how god intervenes in the world and assists and is known in the affairs of a community. They admired that he was a rebel and if there was something to do he did it. If it were right, he didn’t worry about pleasing anybody. They liked how he was soft spoken and took time for everyone, no matter their condition.
The Africans knew God shared his gifts. He might not cure everyone, but he touched enough lives for all to have faith in him, to have a sense of hope, and to remember his promise of big things to come. In their time, the slaves knew freedom and justice and wisdom were often tangled up with people trying to hold freedom back.
Here’s what some of the states of the South said in their Articles of Seccession when they left the Union.
Texas: “She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery–the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits–a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. . a provision founded in justice and wisdom . .”
Mississippi : “A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization . . It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.”
Georgia: “the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all .”
These states mistook slavery for a natural order.
Those who wanted to eliminate Jesus for works of faith also misunderstood. And many historians and scholars misunderstood the message of those who flew from bondage. South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi were deep South states far from freedon’s borders. It would have taken weeks and weeks of walking to find freedom and across the river. In the deep South states, runaways generally remained local. They moved freely and stayed close to home. Charleston newspapers are filled with ads of their sightings.
The ads suggest places and locations where the runaways might be found and returned for reward money. These places most often were neighboring plantations where the enslaved had family, the docks where work can be found, and hardscrabble neighbrhoods where status didn’t matter, and nobody asked or told. Here in Charleston, runaways gathered in communities along the edge of the plantations, living deep in the woods. Near the city, they gathered in the Neck, a narrow coastal thicket of forest, marsh, and swamp, just north of the city.
Slaves manned the boats at the ferry crossings, Mathias ferry, Bees ferry, Givhans ferry, Cainhoy. They worked in the vast rice fields planted near the swamp and rivers. Why would they need to be remained of how to escape the hounds? The historians missed the code. The code wasn’t about escape.
It was about Christ.
Louisana Women and Children Kneeling In The Church Graveyard, Being Blessed by Holy Water“Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.” Psalm 127: 1
The song, “Wade in the Water,” is most often associated with the freedom journeys of Harriet Tubman, known as “Moses” (who once had a $40,000 price tag on her head for “negro stealing”). She sung the song to alert those she guided to freedom, but she was a deeply religious woman, and never denied the song’s spiritual witness.
About her freedom’s jouneys, she told a writer: “Twan’t me, ’twas de Lord! Jes’ so long as he wanted to use me, he would take keer of me, an’ when he didn’t want me no longer, I was ready to go; I always tole him, I’m gwine to hole stiddy on to you, an’ you’ve got see me trou.”
By the time Harriet Tubman made it to SC the war was on. She traveled here by steam ship. She was a nurse healing dysentery with an herbal cure and commanding troops clearing the mines on the river for US naval ships. She freed 900 enslaved on a single raid, the largest action of freedom during the war. When she left, she had a South Carolina husband.
Make no mistake, the song is about freedom, but it’s more about inner freedon than it is legal or physical freedom. Its journey is about breaking through to find that immutable place in you.
The slaves didn’t just dream of returning to Africa on chariots, “coming to carry me home.” “Way up in the middle of the air,” they saw a beatific vision just like Ezekiel did. The spiritual, “Plenty Good Room,” wasn’t just a parody about the planter’s house, his material possessions, or his faith. The song described the abundance and virtues of god’s gifts for all. Its mansions celebrate the greatness of his unmerited love, and the joy open for eternity. It sung about a home with a place already prepared. Grander than what man built–because it would last for all eternity.
The fourth verse in John 5 that describes how the angel stirred the waters of the pool is left out of several early Bible manuscripts. A debate rages about whether it was actually in the original manuscript written by John. The word, “troubled” or “stirred” in the original Greek refers to “an uncertain affinity.” In other words, the angel brings forth a power whose source was unknown by observation or sensory means. This affinity’s ability to heal transferred to the waters; its blessing received by the first one in. Christ transfers this blessing, by word and deed, to all who believe by faith. But the benefits of God’s gracee only come in certain seasons.
“Wade in the Water,” re-orders the Bible story. The song stresses faith; it urges those who would be blessed to step into the waters before the angel of god comes. Gather now, and get ready, healing is promised. Gather now. So that all will be among the first received and given deliverance by the gifts of grace.
While only a few of the enslaved in the deep South escaped, nearly all converted. Those who write history who never attended a country sermon or a prayer meeting in a praise house or who never had to seek will argue the conversion was forced or naive. I think the slaves made an independent assessment. Their praise is tied to the Bible by their own view and their petitions reflect their own conditions.
Taken on their own terms, the songs celebrate the powers and witness and instructions of the god they embraced. In a shorthand, the song admonished the community not to be like the paralyzed man who seemed unable to seize opportunity.
Who that dressed in blue?
It must be the ones who made it through
And in the description of baptism, a hinted memory of those lost in the Middle Passage:
The Waters chilled by body but not my soul
So in the legacy we know, dramatic change can come to our lives–just as John, the youngest of the disciples, records the dramatic witness of Christ in only 22 days of his life. The miracle John describes in Jerusalem at the waters of the Bethesda pool is not recored in any of the other three gospels.
So “Wade in the Water” is more than instructions for running away, which only a small number of border state slaves were able to do. It is a song text of a dramatic story of God’s ability to restore and redeem. The spirituals are witness and memory, a text for the inner heart of history.
So, in the legacy of “Wade in the Water,” there are coded instructions. Here’s some of what we know.
Good is often spoken of as evil.
Legal ordinances are powerless before God.
There is no power in us without the grace of God.
Walk by faith, not by sight.
We profit by faith.
The faithful must be steadfast.
God does not rest in the midst of misery.
The misery of our daily conditiion tells us to believe!
Despite evil, temptation, desire, and fear, God’s gifts restore us physically, socially, and spiritually.
Stay devoted, attend God’s word.
Do not miss an opportunity for good.
Give God time to operate.
Never forget what God has done.
“Wade in the Water, Children . .”
Lift every voice and sing
Let our rejoicing rise
Let it resound as loud as the rolling sea
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