Deep River

"I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than

the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers." —Langston Hughes

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Songs of summer cicadas rolled across the swaying fields of sugar cane, their whispering stalks bending in the sweeping breeze. The bellowing note of a metal church bell broke over the hushed landscape and swung the doors open of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic church. Voices rose up to the open sky with songs of praise blooming from the members as they marched across railroad tracks and through open pastures. The women in their white gloves flicked their braided swamp grass fans like butterfly wings in the sweltering Louisiana heat. At the front of the procession, a priest led a young man through stretches of grassy fields filled with grazing cows, and towards a cattle pond. The waters were still. Swarms of dragonflies fluttered amongst cattails only to disperse with the approaching crowd. With sweat slicked brows, the two men stepped down into the cool water while the others surrounded the perimeter, voices diluted to a mere hum. The reflected sky rippled out around them as they waded to the center of the pond. (Add more about the baptism)

Far from the river Jordan, this cattle pond was the site of many baptisms for Black Americans in Maringouin, Louisiana. 

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I listened to my grandfather, Albert Toussant III, as he drove us past white shiplap churches and explained how black congregations often rented land from white cattle pasture owners to build their churches. From weddings to funerals, Black men and women would gather in their finest clothes to celebrate and mourn alongside livestock. 

While my grandfather spoke, Aretha Franklin's voice whispered from the radio. Even with the volume turned down low, the power of her 1971 rendition of "Amazing Grace" brought goosebumps to my skin. I grew up hearing this album alongside the silken voice of Mahalia Jackson on Sunday's. Songs that carried the many joys and sorrows of life would fill my childhood home with a soft warmth that shook through my growing spirit. Amongst their lyrics of Christian worship, many referenced natural landmarks such as mountains, and rivers as places of renewal and salvation. I would sing and dance to these songs not knowing what was moving me, but feeling inexplicably that there something to be joyful about. 

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The impact and significance of the Black Church within the structures of Black culture cannot be understated as not only a vital source of spiritual rejuvenation, but also a pentacle of communal life. From the era of slavery to the spiritual warfare of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Church has stood firm in its rooted connection to the people. While some may argue that the Black Church is devoid of African spiritual traditions, I see a direct reflection of African spiritual practices in the Black American church through its continued respect and recognition of natural landscapes as sacred and cleansing. In Yoruba based religious practices of southwest Nigeria, the significance of bodies of water as a living spirits with the power to heal and destroy. 

Michael Battle's work, The Black Church in America: African American Christian Spirituality, also contends that the connection to African spiritual traditions managed to survive threats of erasure during enslavement and is represented through the emphasis on community rather than individualism within the Black Church. The author notes that "I propose a holistic treatment of African American spirituality in light of the particularity of communal sensibilities surviving from African cultures," and points to the survival of cultural ideals and religion based principles of morality and conduct. 

​With the acceptance of the survival of African influence in the Black American practice of Christianity through its correlating reverence for nature as a source of spiritual connection or healing, I arrived at the location of potential uprooting. Because European based Christianity, specifically during the era of the Enlightenment, condemned the conjoining of humanity and nature, and perpetuated notions of anti-blackness by associating the supposed closeness Africans had with nature through their spiritual practices with primitivism, those who adopted Christianity within the diaspora would be subject to these associations. Stefanie K. Dunning's work Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, also draws this conclusion through the lines, "For the Enlightenment European, anyone who lived in harmony with nature, or who did not live as they did, was always already a "thing," the same kind of "thing" that nature was seen to be."   This dehumanization of the Black body was also the justification for the systematic enslavement of Africans as Battle recognized when he noted, "As slavery increasingly became normalized it amounted to a worldview for whites in which what was really occurring was the importation of unsaved heathens to a Christian land where they could hear the gospel and be saved."   He then goes on to express how the prevalence of this world view bled over into the teachings of black religious leaders as internalized anti-blackness and associations of blackness with primitivism.    With this historical and cultural context, the severance of Black Americans from nature due to internalized teachings of condemnation of nature by European Christianity becomes clear. 

With the additional attention to the necessity of having a source spiritual connection while enduring the brutalities of slavery, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era, and relying on the community that Black Church creates, the stray from nature as a spiritual source clarifies further. However, I would argue that the distance these traumas created was not a severance. The significance of nature as a spiritual entity, whether as a symbol of the Christian God, or a reflection of remaining ties to African spirituality, the act of rerooting is arguably unnecessary as our connection to the earth through religion remains intact. 

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As my grandfather and I continued driving, I considered the symbolism hidden within the cattle pond baptisms, in which a community would leave a rigid manmade structure, a symbol of civilization, to seek out a body of water, regardless of the perceived cleanliness of that body of water, to be purged of sin. There was a beauty within the isolation of these baptisms, on display only for the congregation and the eyes of nature and God. 

My grandfather stopped the truck in a weather worn parking lot of a church. A cemetery of neat rows lay tucked behind the church and shaded with great oak trees. The previous night had dragged in heavy rains that filled the church yards with lake sized puddles. Rain soaked Spanish moss poured from the branches and swung like gray rags in the heavy weather. Mahalia Jackson's "Deep River" began its slow procession through the radio speaker, and my grandfather reached to turn the volume up. Gentle sighs of rain continued to shower the windshield and all along the opposite side of the road, men in Saint's ball caps and raincoats waded through channels of ditches to catch crawfish. As the lyrics rode the rhythm of rainfall, I felt something within me bloom. As sweet as the scent of summer wisteria and as warming as the sun, I found my home not over the Jordan, but the Mississippi. 

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