River Lullaby

Langston Hughes’ poetry uses words like musical instruments. Themes leak out of every line. Images grow out of every stanza.

When Langston was eighteen and on his way to live with his father in Mexico, he was sitting on a train that crossed the great and almighty Mississippi River. 

He turned over his father’s letter and wrote this poem on the back:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:

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.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

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.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

By virtue of being a human being with hopes, dreams, and a history, anyone can understand this poem. Even though Langston writes about the African American, this human being represents the humanity of each and every one of us. 

While thinking about these beautiful words, I decided that the best way to relate to this poem is on a soul level, a level of feelings, creativity, and emotion.  Here is what my soul created while I mused.

My hair is black and long with tight curls.  I sit in a kitchen chair, and my sister takes tiny strands of my hair and twists them into braids with beads: red, yellow, orange, pink, and green.  She braids hour after hour until my whole head is a bouquet, braids fanning out like spokes in a parasol. 

We take a break and stretch our bodies into yoga positions.  Downward dog. Plank.
Warriors that we are, our bodies strong and lithe.  We are women with poise. 

Then back to the chair.  Sister gathers my braids and turns them into a sweeping updo, the beads popping out like happy jewels.  After she is done, I smile into the mirror and love my vision.

 My braids represent our heritage.  We are from a long, line of female warriors.  Our grandmothers once lived beside great rivers.  They gathered wheat beside the Euphrates to feed their families, and ground this wheat into brown flour, and with this flour made bread.  We sat with our husbands and children and shared the bread and talked to each other with joy.

Our grandmothers picked fruit from boughs beside the Congo River.  With this fruit, they made curries for their families and communities, carried the curries to their neighbors’ huts for sharing, and built relationships of mutual trust.

Their daughters and grand-daughters built pyramids to help the Egyptians bury their dead.  They did not eat with the Egyptians, but they watched reverently as the Egyptians wrapped their loved ones in swaddling cloths and laid them into stone tombs. 

Their great-great granddaughters picked cotton beside the Mississippi River.  They tanned their backs during the day, and served their Masters’ families meals in the evenings.  They smiled at them even when they were tired.  They sang to their children when they took them to bed.

Our grandmothers, their daughters, their grand daughters, their great-great granddaughters and we are nurturers.  We care for our families and our communities and help those whom we know, but do not fully understand.  We love. 

We learned how to love by watching the great rivers.  The great rivers drift and stream and flurry—their waters continuing downriver over stones, rocks, cliffs, logs, fish, and beavers.  That is what great love is—it builds and flows and washes over insults, prejudice, judgment, ignorance, anger, and sickness.  Keeps going.  Nothing stops it reach a greater body of water—the ocean of humanity where we are all connected like pearls knotted together.  In our communion, we are even more beautiful. 

All human beings can learn how to love like the great rivers, even those who don’t have braids, those who have never seen a river, those who have never picked wheat, plucked fruit, quarried stone, or sung a lullaby. 

Langston’s river poem is a lullaby about the love and connection of all humanity.