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So, there was a time, from about 1619 to 1865, when the rivers and the streams were just about the only things free to Africans in America that were in reach … the land they worked on without pay and all the things that grew around them were considered the property of those who dared to say they owned even human bodies and souls.
But water runs free, everywhere … a river can of course be dammed, but not all can be or too much will die … so water ran free for Africans in America, and crossing certain rivers was both a way toward freedom because dogs could no longer track scent once feet passed through water, and a sign of freedom … get across the Ohio River, and that for a long time was far enough.
Even before that, the history of African peoples, in Egypt and Ethiopia, has many headwaters around the great Nile River … the civilizations of Cush and Kemet held water as sacred, and that idea has passed to all human civilizations that have followed these pioneers.
So, to be taken to the water … that was a big deal even before a virgin girl named Mary brought the Lord Jesus Christ into the world … in ancient Jewish life, being ceremonially washed was a prerequisite for worship, and John the Baptist was baptizing when the Lord came along because those being baptized were signifying that they had sinned and identified with those who believed the Messiah would cleanse them from their sin (per Isaiah 63).
“Let righteousness run down like water, and justice roll down like a mighty stream” – so wrote the prophet Amos, and generations of Black preachers, when they were free to say so after slavery, echoed it – for there was much justice needed from the days when the enslaved sometimes had to secretly baptized those who had come to Christ to identify them as such. Sometimes, the enslaved were even denied the right to marry, bury, or be identified as Christians.
As the 19th century dawned, many enslavers considered Christianity a way to pacify the enslaved, but quietly, references to crossing rivers and going to the water in Negro Spirituals still had a double meaning. However, baptism retained the same meaning it did when John the Baptist had been at work and when in Acts 8, an Ethiopian official asked the deacon Phillip, “There is water – what hinders me from being baptized?” and Phillip answered him, “If you believe [on Christ as Savior], you can.”
The enslaved who chose to become Christians made their way to the water to identify with Christ – they were not crossing to escape, but identifying with Christ as their “Good Master,” the One they believed would free them in many ways. A listen to the Negro Spirituals show the sorrow of the enslaved, but also that Christ brought to them what He promises everyone: love, joy, peace, faith, and hope for the day, and for eternity. The Negro Spiritual also shows that human dignity also was retained … the enslaved used this music to feel all of their feelings and achieve the things they needed in this life … including guiding each other to escape!
Only 12 years separate the end of slavery and the imposition of Black Codes (commonly known as “Jim Crow” laws) to place the surviving enslaved and their descendants as close to back into slavery as the Southern states who had participated in the Confederate sedition against the United States could bring them. The northern and western states that had been in the Union had discriminatory laws, but not to the same extent … so Black people began to move, and as they did, their music began to move with them.
By the 1880s, the blues had developed out of the Negro Spiritual, and also Black people had begun in Louisiana to perform classical music as well in large groups. Hymns were also filtering through from European Christians as they had been through the slavery period, and this combination was soon to produce the “gospel song” as Ira Sankey would phrase it and Charles Tindley would write them. The stage was set, and we think “Take Me to the Water” developed between here and about 1920.
In this recording, I sing the song somewhere between the way my elders have sung it (back to my grandmother in El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church of San Francisco, CA and down to the present day) and the famous recording of this song by Nina Simone in 1966 … both my grandmother and Ms. Simone were singing this song during the civil rights period when Black people were on the move in the United States, obtaining and making the most of their long, long, LONG-delayed civil rights.
One of the great leaders of the civil rights movement was of course Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., born on January 15, 1934, coming out of the powerful Black church tradition that sprang up after emancipation. Churches were bombed for a reason by white supremacist domestic terrorists, the oldest of which groups is the KKK (despite their non-profit status today): these churches were where Black people came together, encouraged themselves in retaining their human dignity, organized necessary day-to-day survival resources, and planned resistance and offensive actions against their oppressors.
The tragedy: the people bombing churches thought of themselves as Christians, as did their enslaving ancestors … and so, down to the civil rights period, there was a risk for Black people to identify themselves with Christ and the church … and yet, my grandmother and others kept coming, and kept coming, kept coming to Christ, kept coming for the human rights that belonged to them – and got it ALL!
Today, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a federal holiday, Grandmother and her generation have gone on, and the struggle has nearly been forgotten in the mainstream of the United States … but not quite, since on January 6, 2021, the Confederate flag was carried through the U.S. Capitol, and voting rights are again a source of struggle. The Black church is growing again, and so are Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), growth noted since the beginning of the administration of former president Donald J. Trump.
I belong to the new generation that notes the resurgence of racism in the United States, and I live in a city that had the KKK actually rally for members in 2016. I know, as an African American woman, that the struggle to retain freedom will continue from generation to generation because there are some racists who think African Americans stole something from their ancestors and them by merely being free, and not free labor in perpetuity for others to live on.
And yet and still … getting baptized is something separate from the racial struggles of this world .. it is about identifying as a human who has put faith in Christ as Savior from sin and taking Him as their Leader through the rest of life … identifying as a member of the family of God in Christ. That baptism, spiritually and physically, does not necessarily change one’s earthly state immediately; the march of time and progress (and regress, as the case may be) is an unavoidable earthly process for human beings. However, those who are still singing “Take Me to the Water” sing it because of the value they see in coming to Christ that is greater than the attainment of things and status in the world … and that is why I sing it.
There is one traditional verse I am not including in my performance of this song: “I know I got religion … I been baptized.” In the days in which this song was written, not too long after slavery, there was only ONE religion to even be considered in the United States: Christianity. This is no longer the case, and specificity is important.
Water baptism is not synonymous and never was with coming to Christ; it is common now to say that there are a lot of “wet sinners” who have no evidence of any love, joy, peace, faith, love, gentleness, goodness, self-control in their life. Water baptism is properly an outward expression of an INWARD change toward Christ … but it cannot be assumed, and so I have chosen to omit one verse that is not specific enough for today’s times.
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