Wade in the Water

Water is an important image in African American spirituals. Deep River finds hope on the other side of the river. Go Down, Moses is a spiritual of deliverance in which Pharaoh’s armies were drowned in the Red Sea, and Harriet Tubman is said to have sung Wade in the Water to remind her Underground Railroad passengers how to evade the slave catchers’ dogs.

Water was an inescapable aspect of the slave experience. Africans began their horrifying journey by traveling across the Atlantic Ocean, crammed like cattle in the holds of slave ships.

If they survived the voyage, they were shipped upriver and down to plantations and farms where they would spend the rest of their lives in bondage.

• The Ohio River was a dividing line between enslavement and freedom.
• Escape via the Underground Railroad sometimes began with refuge in watery southern swamps.
• And a century later, police infamously used water as a weapon, turning high-powered fire hoses against demonstrators demanding the right to vote.
• Most recently, Georgia made it illegal for anyone (other than a poll worker) to give a bottle of water to people standing in line to vote.

Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children
Wade in the water
God’s gonna trouble the water.