Wade in the water.

Wade in the water children.

Wade in the water.

God's gonna trouble the water.

Growing up in the church, hymns like this one never fail to lift the spirit.

But there's more to the song than just the beauty of the music.

Like many spirituals, the lyrics and melody have layers of meaning hidden beneath the surface.

Here we are reminded of the transformational power of water and black spirituality.

Mahalia Jackson, the New Orleans Queen of gospel, was baptized in her youth in the waters of the Mississippi River.

Mahalia, in her white gown, processed with her congregation from the church down to the river.

Singing as they reached the banks, she was eased underwater by the gentle hands of the ministers, and she emerged reborn.

Today, I'm going to dive deep into the ritual of river baptisms.

I'll be exploring what this ritual symbolizes for Black Americans and the historic role it played in the long journey to justice.

I'm Tarriona "Tank" Ball" and this is a Ritual.

Every society understands the power of water in different ways.

In the U.S., that power has most often been harnessed to support production and industry.

Like the way the Mississippi River made it possible to transport cash crops grown in the rich soil of the Delta.

But in other cultures, it is the spiritual power of water that takes precedent.

Centuries ago, in the Kingdom of the Congo, water was seen as a boundary between the physical and the spirit worlds, and a sacred vehicle of transformation in the cycle of life and death.

When enslaved people were brought to plantations, often by riverboat, they carried African water rituals with them.

The full water immersion of the Christian baptism resonated with people who understood water in terms of spirit, and they hope that the ritual of transformation would help bring an end to their oppression.

Today I'm talking with Ambre Dromgoole, a musician and religious scholar, to understand how this ritual fits into the bigger picture.

I am sitting here with the most amazing scholar beautiful, brilliant, smart woman, and soon to be Yale graduate.

Singer!

You going to sing a little bit today?

Maybe a little bit.

Just a little bit, right?

But I am so interested in your and what you've learned over these past years and your studies.

What is a river baptism?

So a river baptism is a ritual that began in the late 19th, early 20th century, where a Black church congregations, again, particularly Black Southern church congregations, would take their new converts to a river and baptize them by immersion so that they could become a part of the church and also a part of the body of Christ.

What are the roots of this ritual?

The roots of this ritual tend to come down two different lines.

The first is references to West African spirituality.

Here we have a deep reverence for the power and the rejuvenation of the water as a place of birth, life, death, danger.

The water is just a powerful spiritual essence in and of itself.

It can also come down to references to Jesus being baptized in the River Jordan and Matthew Mark and Luke.

So that's a natural synergy between the reverence of the water in West African cosmologies and the water as a space of transformation, both bodily and spiritually in the gospels of Jesus.

When it comes to using the symbolism and metaphor of the water as a space of possibility, as a space of liminality to remind us that the water we took charge of it at one point in our history, there were black swimmers, black seafarers, black divers, black people who saved people in the water.

Mermaids now!

Mermaids now, but actually mermaids now there's also a whole historical idea of the Black Mermaid in folklore as well.

So we often use the water as a way to move forward and to see forward in the midst of very trying times.

In that way, it's connected to both resistance as well as trials.

How is this ritual transformative?

There were debates about whether enslaved people should be allowed to convert to Christianity because they couldn't decide whether or not they could say that somebody that was bound in their body was free in spirit.

So you would have histories of enslaved people, stories of enslaved people that are actually pursuing baptism, pursuing conversion as a really stretch toward citizenship, as a stretch toward being free from bondage.

So it can be seen as a form of resistance for at least 100 years prior to it being said that one could in fact be bound in the body and free in the spirit.

So if we start there, we have a legacy of resistance that's attached to the ritual of baptism.

We move up to, of course, the turbulent transformation that's found in civil rights across civil rights with water, turbulent relationships with water.

When you think about the fire hoses, when you think about segregated pools and segregated navies.

But we also have the stories of the spirituals that were sung that reminded people that while water was both a place of trauma, it can also be a place of triumph.

It can also be a place of liminality and possibility.

What's the legacy of the baptism ritual today?

So unfortunately, the ritual isn't as common today as it was in the late 19th and early 20th century.

For a couple of reasons.

One, now we have more internal baptismal pools in churches, so you don't necessarily have the practical angle of doing the ritual in a river.

There's also ecological ideas around water, whether the water is safe enough to still perform these rituals.

And then we have gentrification.

Whether or not we are close enough to these bodies of water, to these rivers that were so important to us to continue doing this.

Now, there are still churches, particularly in the Black South, that uphold these rituals that do it maybe five times a year.

They might still do it once every couple of weeks.

They might do it once a month, but that still finds significance in it and still find it important to continue portraying this ritual, to continue performing it as a space of resistance and conversion.

In small towns like Cheraw, South Carolina, spirituality helps keep people together.

Each denomination varies in the way they worship.

But no matter where you went to church on Sunday, Black Southerners have always been connected by the hardships inflicted by a hostile world.

Members of many Black churches performed baptisms in the same rivers and creeks while singing traditional songs like Wade in the Water, which was written to accompany a river baptism.

Joshuah Brian Campbell, the director of music and arts at Wake Forest University Divinity School, grew up in Cheraw, while full river baptisms are now rarely practiced.

Some members of his community still remember.

I am here with Joshuah Brian Campbell, educator, songwriter, Harvard graduate, all around amazing human being.

Thank you.

What is a baptism and why is it done in the water?

Baptism in rivers is significant because a river is sort of this natural resource that binds communities together.

And also we can understand both based upon Christian theologies and African religious cosmologies the ways in which the spirit enlivens the flow of the river.

And we're participating in that spiritual enlivening by going to the river and to the streams.

I will never forget that we had a mirror right above our choir stand and they would open up the floor and you can see everyone getting baptized.

It was such a magical experience.

I loved when anyone was ready to get baptized and we would sing, wade in the water.

Wade...

I know you're gonna finish this song for me right?

In the water children.

So how do you think music connects to baptisms?

As with a lot of Black Christian ritual, there's music, specifically spirituals, oftentimes tied to these moments that move us from one place to another, right?

So like, even when I was getting baptized inside this church, they still sang Take Me to the Water.

It's almost like this collapsing of time in space.

We went there even though we didn't go there musically, and I think a lot of what spirituals do is take us from one place to another spiritually.

And that's something that I'm always wrestling with and engage in, in my songwriting practice and my performance practice, my musical practice in general.

What is the significance of music and church to the black community at large?

I think that the gatherings, the Black religious gatherings that come to form the Black church have always not just been concerned about the religious or even the spiritual, but also the social and in some senses, the political as well.

And at the same time, the musical traditions, spirituals and gospel and all of the musical traditions that come out of Black church form are part of this rich, kaleidoscopic soundtrack of Black life, both for our ritual, for our mourning, for our joy, for our celebration, right?

So much of that is owing to the cultural machine and mechanism of Black religious spaces like the Black church.

That's beautiful.

It makes me think about how we all would also gather for safety, you know, to come here in meetings about Congress and government and things.

Because to the other community, we probably would just up in here just praising God when in fact we were also joining in and planning almost like your own little government.

Right.

Right.

And so the musical traditions that arise out of Black church also enfold into freedom songs and protest songs.

They become the soundtrack for our struggle against and our attempts to organize ourselves amidst a nation and a government that didn't want us to be a part of its organizations.

Yes, struggle and triumph.

Struggle and triumph.

And struggle and triumph.

How have black spirituals influenced music today?

If you listen for it, there's a sound that hearkens to the spirituals that pervade so much of music, both sacred and secular.

I think about Nina Simone's singing Taking Me to the Water right when I was taught this musical tradition, they were very clear about the fact that this is the music that your ancestors sang when they were picking cotton and working the fields that are right in the vicinity of here.

And so it's a living tradition for me.

It's a living memory for me.

I think that Black religious music animates so much of what we understand to be Black music now.

There's not too many artists out there, especially Black, that that that's not influenced by the church.

I even myself will say that I used to be in church every Sunday, and I feel as though I can bring church with me.

And we hear it all over the world, right?

So I think that's pretty cool.

And I love that you can you see it in that way.

The lifelong Cheraw resident, Mr. Ted Bradley, has watched rituals of Baptism evolve over the decades and remembers when going to the creeks and lakes close by was commonplace.

What was it like preparing, like for the country churches that went to the creeks like Goodwin Creek and Thompson Creek?

What was it like for them going down to those creeks?

First thing you do is, since the older deacons are the means of the church.

You go to these creeks, with a stick, and they were beat around in there to get snakes out.

Listen to me good.

The would get the snakes out, the bugs out, frogs out, whatevers in there that could harm you and they would clean it the creek and make it look pretty nice.

And they would cut the bushes around and that's how they would do it.

You went and bought a piece of cloth which was three cents a yard and you made a gown out of it.

And that gown was white.

Oh yes.

And that's the reason why they believed in that.

The white was the part that cleansing of you from your seeing.

They believe that and women would make a gown out of it.

Sew it with their hands and whatnot and you would put it on and go be baptized.

Would they sing a hymn as they walked?

Yeah.

They were sing a hymn, I'm going to the river, take me down, I'm going down to the river to be baptized and that type of stuff.

And they would go down and the preacher was standing there waiting for you to come in to the water.

I can remember so vividly.

Wow.

The baptismal pool may have taken the place of rivers and streams, but the music keeps the connection alive.

Songs like Wade in the Water and Let's go Down to Jordan carry memories of how Black churchgoers experienced the power of water, thought by many cultures to be the very source of life, water is a transformation element.

For centuries, Black churchgoers have understood that to wade in the water is to be reborn.

Baptisms offer a chance to be released from unhealthy cycles and start anew, even when the process is turbulent, transformation is seen as a blessing.

Singing the old baptismal songs remind us to seek that blessing everywhere it is needed.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Junior often said, "Justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream."