Deep River | November 23, 2025 | Rev. Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey

Deep River, my home is over Jordan, Deep River,

Lord, I want to cross over into camp ground…

According to a monograph by Miles Fisher:

QUAKERS in North Carolina bought numerous slaves and, through their Manumission Society, which was established on July 19, 1816, sent them to other countries. The North Carolina Yearly Meeting, co-operating in this work, reported on June 9, 1825, that their agents endeavored “collectively to confer with the people of color under Friends’ care respecting their willingness to go to other governments.” Africa was one of the places to which American Negroes desired to go. In a song called “Deep River” that originated in Guilford County, North Carolina (where it was the name both of a body of water and of a meetinghouse of Quakers), a conservative slave told his Quaker benefactor that he wanted to “cross over” to Africa, the home of camp meetings.

According to the American Rivers website:

The Deep River, translated from the native people’s name “sapponah,” refers to the steepness of the banks and not the depth of the water. The watershed is characterized by rocky shoals, riffles and outcrops of bedrock and flows within the Carolina Slate Belt. Huge natural rock formations can be seen poking up from the riverbeds at different points along the river creating scenic natural falls.

            The River has seen its share of inhabitants over the years. The history of this region is complex. Several eastern Siouan tribes, including the Eno, Occaneechi, Shakori, Sissipahaw and Sara had established communities in the watershed prior to European colonization. Artifacts, and the presence of fish weirs, or structures in the river thought to direct fish to be caught, indicate the presence of the Siouan tribes and their connection with the Deep River. Early European settlers colonized the area in the mid-1700s and used the land for agriculture, logging and mining. Native American presence had a marked decline during this time period and much of their history was lost.

            The Deep was historically a ‘working river’ and is dotted throughout the watershed with former mill dams. The mills that were powered by these dams helped to form communities along the river and drive the economy and culture of the region. The manufacturing backbone of the region is still present and active but no longer depends on the dams. Many mill dams have since been altered from their original use to serve as hydroelectric power.

            Today, this largely rural part of North Carolina is developing rapidly, and there is a renewed focus on the Deep River and its watershed as an asset for people and nature.

“It is the nature of the river to flow; it is always moving, always in process always on its way,” Howard Thurman wrote:

Long ago Heraclitus reminded us that “no man bathes twice in the same stream.” There seems to be an infinite urgency that keeps the waters on business bent. They may be caught here and there in swirling pools, or temporarily stilled behind a sudden dam, but not for long. Once again they take up their march to fulfill their destiny, to keep their tryst with the sea.

“Life is like that!” Thurman exclaims:

Life on this planet—so the scientists tell us—began its long trek across the aeons, in a simple gelatinous form in far-off ages in some primeval ocean bed. It increased in complexity, in breadth, in turbulence, through myriad forms and combinations down to the latest times. Your life and my life began as a simple form, moving through various stages of prenatal fulfillment, until by a great climactic spasm you and I were born. Then once again, in simple beginning, increasing in anxiety, in turbulence, sometimes in depth, often in breadth, we make our way across the broad expanse of the years….

“We are never able to do anything in quite the way we want to do it,” Thurman continues.

No single experience, however great, is quite able to represent us adequately. Life is essentially dynamic and alive. It’s this aliveness that guarantees and sustains all the particular manifestations of life by which we are surrounded and of which we are a part. With reference to no experience are we able to write “Q.E.D.”; life is essentially unfinished. All judgements concerning experience are limited and partial. It is for this reason that in the last analysis judgement belongs with God. Even our self-judgements are limited, because we can never quite get our hands on all the materials, all the facts in each case. In any total sense we must act on the basis of evidence that is never quite conclusive.

Sounds to me like shopping at a Farmers’ Market, which is the way that I and a lot of people I know prefer to shop.

“Farmers Markets” by Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey

In a farmers’ market, there is no corporate standard to rely on. It is very much a matter of individual to individual, or family to family. And even though there is no corporate bureaucracy to ensure product quality, there is essentially a special relationship established between consumer and producer, a oneness even, that is supremely valuable in and of itself. On top of that, the product quality and originality often far exceeds that of its corporate cousin. But that, of course, is a purely subjective judgement.

            The fact is that such judgement, regardless of whether you shop farmers’ markets or corporate, is what matters. It’s like a river meeting the sea. Thurman writes:

The goal of the river is the sea. The river is ever on its way to the sea, whose far off call “all waters hear.” All the waters, in all the earth, are en route to the sea. Nothing can keep them from getting there. Men may build huge dams, there may be profound disturbances of the earth’s surface that throw the river out of its course and force it to cut a new channel across a bed of granite, but at last the river will get to the sea. It may twist and turn, fall back on itself and start again, stumble over an infinite series of hindering rocks, but at last the river must answer the call of the sea. It is restless till it finds its rest in the sea.

But rivers also come from the sea. Thurman writes:

All the waters of all the earth come from the sea. Paradox of paradoxes: that out of which the river comes is that into which the river goes. The goal and source of the river are the same! [he exclaims] From gurgling spring to giant waterfall; from morning dew to torrential downpour; from simple creeks to mighty river—the source and the goal are the same: the sea.

            Life is like that! The goal of life is God! The source of life is God! [he exclaims again] That out of which life comes is that into which life goes. … out of whom life comes is … into whom life goes. God is the goal of … life, the end of all … seeking, the meaning of all … striving. God is the guarantor of all values, the ultimate meaning—the timeless frame of reference. That which sustains the flower of the field, the circling series of stars in the heavens, the structure of dependability in the world of nature everywhere, the stirring of the [human] will … to action, the dream of humanity, developed and free, for which myriad people, sometimes in solitariness in lonely places or in great throngs milling in crowded squares—all this and infinitely more in richness and variety and value is God. [People] may be thrown from their courses—they may wander for a million years in desert and waste land, through sin and degradation, war and pestilence, hate and love—at last they must find their rest in [God].

As I’ve written previously, a river gradually sheds both its elegantly slim physique and its sparkling fresh-water ego upon returning to its source and goal in the sea—from which all life emerges. Thurman observed that for many of the African cultures that came together to create and sing spirituals, true human identity came from an extended family that included both ancestors buried in the earth and the Earth itself. Heaven was not up in the sky, but in the deep rivers of a healthy, fertile, and unpolluted Earth from which new generations must still spring forth.

            In singing this “Deep River” spiritual, it seems also as if the awakened spiritual genius of the community is ferrying the awakened spiritual genius of a departing individual into the collective sacred, referred to in some traditions as the ancestral spirits that have now taken up residence in the natural world.

            Thurman offers a sweepingly metaphorical interpretation of this spiritual, grounded in African and African American imaginations of sacred rivers through the Harlem Renaissance poetry of Langston Hughes’ “I’ve Known Rivers.” He effectively associates the water cycle with the human life cycle. Both the historical and metaphorical interpretations of this spiritual, as well as the mood of the spiritual itself, evoke a profound sense of peace.

“The One Behind All Sacred Names” by Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey