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Rivers

The various rivers of which the “Negro” in the title “speaks” play a complex symbolic role in the poem. Perhaps most important to note is that rivers make civilization possible by enabling trade and irrigation. The speaker implies as much by the mention of rivers that provided the lifeblood for famous civilizations. The Euphrates helped make the settlement of the Fertile Crescent possible, just as the Nile sustained ancient Egypt, and the Congo gave rise to the precolonial African kingdom, Kongo. The speaker further reflects the life-giving symbolism of rivers in the phrase “human blood in human veins” (line 2). The veins that run through the human body constitute something like a primordial river system that conveys literal lifeblood throughout the organism and keeps it alive. In addition to their life-sustaining power, rivers are also conduits that enable movement. In this way, rivers symbolically mirror the patterns of migration—both chosen and forced—that have conditioned the global movements of Black populations. The speaker reflects this movement through implied historical narrative, which migrates from the Middle East to Africa to North America. Rivers are thus a metaphor for the long history that has profoundly conditioned the collective Black experience.

The Mississippi’s “Muddy Bosom”

In line 7, the speaker adds the Mississippi to the list of other major rivers that have inflected Black culture and experience:

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

At 37 syllables, this line is by far the longest in the poem. This fact alone lends it special significance. Yet even more important than its length is the historical allusion embedded in the line. The speaker is referencing the trip a teenaged Abraham Lincoln took down the Mississippi into the South in 1828. In New Orleans, he saw plantation culture firsthand and likely witnessed the violence of a slave auction. This experience no doubt informed Lincoln’s later decision to officially abolish slavery in the United States and introduce the promise of freedom to the formerly enslaved. Both the horror of slavery and the promise of freedom are captured in the second half of the line, where the speaker announces: “I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sun.” The Mississippi’s “muddy bosom” symbolizes all that is morally repugnant about the dirty business of slavery. Yet however metaphorically turbid the water might be, the speaker also sees how the sun illuminates the river’s surface, causing this otherwise “muddy bosom” to “turn all golden in the sunset.”

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