Wade in the Water

Smith’s “Wade in the Water” is a one-stanza exploration of art, history, faith, and love. The poem’s title is an allusion to the African American spiritual (same title), which emphasizes faith in God during times of desperation. That spiritual is itself an allusion to the biblical story told in the book of Exodus, where the Israelites escaped from the Egyptians who had enslaved them by wading into the water of the Red Sea. But the spiritual also works on a deeper, more practical subtext, as the phrase “wade in the water” directed enslaved African American men, women, and children in how to escape from bondage by going into the water to elude the dogs used to hunt them.

Smith skillfully weaves these allusions in her poem to both create and collapse the distance between the present and the past, allowing the reader to “wade” into the many layers of history. Her dedication states “for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters.” The Gullah Geechee lived for generations isolated from the mainland due to their geography on remote coastal islands. Until the late 20th century, this isolation has served to preserve their heritage, which retains much of the language, ritual, and worship of their African ancestors who had been enslaved. The Ring Shouters now travel the country, sharing their culture with a broader audience. They want to expand their “ring,” bridging the distance between spectator and performer.

Smith, like the ring shouters, also seeks to broaden her audience. She is eager to expand the reach of poetry, hoping that art can heal some of the divisions in society. In her poem, one of the performers walks up to the members of the audience and expresses her love for each of them. The experience of bringing a room full of strangers together through art and love powerfully moves the speaker.

In discussing what happens and how she feels, the speaker uses a series of realistic, accessible images with few modifiers. The short enjambed lines stripped of embellishment (and even quotation marks) force an emphasis on each of the images:

One of the women greeted me.

I love you, she said. She didn’t

Know me, but I believed her,

And a terrible new ache

Rolled over in my chest,

Like in a room where the drapes

Have been swept back (Lines 1-7).

The images roll from one to the next, as the speaker compares a “terrible new ache” (Line 4) to the pain of light flooding into a dark room once someone pulls back the drapes. This suggests how learning about the past can be similarly uncomfortable and disorienting.

This metaphor of light used to describe the speaker’s painful experience of the past extends throughout the poem as each spectator feels “pierced suddenly / By pillars of heavy light” (Lines 10-11). The light is like a harsh spotlight as it shines on America’s “blood-deep” history (Line 22). The metaphor of light continues to the end: “The swirling dust motes / In those beams of light” (Lines 27-28). The use of “dust” suggests the collection of years that separate the speaker from the past has not diminished the pain of history.

But the tone of the poem, while mournful with the weight of history, is also full of compassion. “I love you” is repeated seven times in this poem, as the performer’s words echo throughout the poem. This gift of love is an invitation for the spectator to step inside the ring and become a participant. The speaker is no longer an Outsider. Art allows a spectator, an audience member, an observer, a reader to enter the experience of the Other, even an Other that is separated by time and by chains. She along with the rest of the audience has been invited inside the ring and they feel free to transport themselves into the past, feeling the desperation and panic and doubt but also faith as they too wade into the water, trusting in God to heal their trouble.

The introduction of the personal pronoun “us” marks the speaker’s sense of belonging:

I love you in the water

Where they pretended to wade

Singing that old blood-deep song

That dragged us to those banks

And cast us in (Lines 20-24).

The use of “us” is a dramatic shift that the speaker has entered the ring of love, also the ring of painful understanding.

In choosing the Gullah Geechee for her focus, Smith’s poem is a type of ekphrastic poem, as it uses one art form to describe another art form. In describing the ring shout, Smith uses plain speech, often monosyllabic, which creates a momentum that pulls along the reader, much like the percussive “handclap” and “stomp” (Line 14) of the ring shout. The lack of stanza breaks also helps to create this rhythm.

By the end, the speaker’s reduces diction to a series of apostrophes, with “O” followed by a noun. “O Woods—O Dogs— / O Tree—O Gun—O girl, run—” (Lines 31-32).  Language loses sentence structure, constricting once the speaker has been transported to the past, alert to the danger in the “woods” and the “dogs” as the “girl” escapes from enslavement. The repetition of the “O” creates a constant cry O, O, O. The numbers of O’s on the page also work as a visual reminder of the ring that is created around the audience and readers as they embody the drama of the escape. And finally, the O’s work to remind the reader of the chains mentioned earlier:

I love you in the rusted iron

Chains someone was made

To drag until love let them be

Unclasped and left empty

In the center of the ring (Lines 15-19).

The sight of the O’s scattered on the page resembles empty chains released from the burden of the past.