27 Introduction to Deep Like A River
There is no way we can give even the slightest justice to the contributions of African American writers to our national literature, but this particular module was inspired in part by a fairly recent book: The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother by James McBride, published in 1995. In this memoir, McBride recounts with honesty and dignity the challenges his twice widowed Jewish mother had raising 12 children from two different black fathers. The title of the book comes from a conversation he had with his mother one day after a service at their primarily black baptist church. James noticed that his mother was often in tears in church, and he wondered why.
Does God prefer black people, he asked her. No, she told him. But he persisted. “What color is God?” He asked. God isn’t black or white, she replied; God is a spirit and spirits don’t have color. “God is the color of water,” she told him.
Langston Hughes’ powerful poem speaks to the role that rivers have played for Africans and African Americans, from the Tigris and Euphrates, to the Nile, to the mighty Mississippi that could deliver a black person from slavery once it joined the Ohio river or condemn them to the worst of its excesses in Louisiana. We often say that still waters run deep, and this poem is truly deep like the depths of a river.
Our readings this week all deal with the depth of symbolism around ethnicity—even species—and water. If you are a scholar of the Bible, you might remember that in Genesis it is the Holy Spirit who “broods” over the waters to bring forth all life. In the Christian New Testament, Jesus is baptized (symbolically drowned and reborn) by John the Baptist, and as he comes out of the water the Holy Spirit alights on him in the form of a dove:
Matthew 3: 13–17: “Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented. As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”
If you are a fan of Guillermo del Toro you might have already seen his most unconventional love story, The Shape of Water, told in the pre-civil rights era of the cold war (1950s-1960s). The heroine of the story is Elsa, but woven into the narrative are references to prejudice against homosexuals and African Americans. Some say that the title of the movie comes from Plato’s idea that water in its purest form takes the shape of an icosahedron, a 20-sided polyhedron, evoking the idea that beauty, and humanity, has many faces.
But in Del Toro’s words the title arose from his desire “to make it about a thing that is stronger than anything, which is water or love,” he says. “The strongest element is water, because it is malleable. And it has no shape. And love is the same. Love takes the shape it needs to take. No matter what the shape is, you fall in love madly. I do believe it.”
The passage you will read from W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folks is powerful in message and literary genius. It might remind you of the passage from Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography. Even though they came decades and even a century after the United States was formed, I think we can consider them Founding Fathers in the sense that their intelligence, character, actions, and words have been pivotal in moving the nation forward towards realizing Thomas Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. . .” On the subject of civil rights and inclusion, our reach has exceeded our grasp, but if it did not, we would not have made what progress we have: per aspera ad astra—through difficulties to the stars.
Note that DuBois’s chapter is titled “Of our Spiritual Strivings,” but the poem he places at the beginning of that chapter is by Arthur Symons, a contemporary English poet who was a darling of the literati (meaning that he was highly respected in important literary circles). The actual title of the poem is “The Crying Water.” Quoting Symons was a brilliant move, because it was a work that would only be known by individuals who were extremely well educated and cultured. One of the frustrations that Du Bois faced was the assumption on the part of many people that blacks just didn’t have the intellectual capacities of whites—something we’ve seen before in our reading. Du Bois himself earned his bachelors, masters and doctorate at Harvard, and the only reason he didn’t finish up a degree in economics in Germany is that the residency requirements changed and he had to leave the country.
Symons’s poem is not the only place in the passage, however, where Du Bois references water both literally and figuratively, so look for other examples as well.
Although it is slightly off this module’s topic, I do think it is important to let you know that Du Bois would have preferred to spend his life as an academic, as a cultural anthropologist and social scientist. But on April 24, 1899 as he was on his way to meet Joel Chandler Harris, he saw a most grisly sight: the lynched remains of Sam Hose in the window of a butcher. Du Bois turned around and went home. He never did connect with Harris, and from then on he dedicated his life to the fight for civil rights, dignity and liberty in the United States and Africa.
