In Haitian Vodou, Guinée is the ancestral home. The place of origin. The eternal dwelling of the lwa. Guinée is Africa. It is where the souls of the dead return to rest, the deep waters of the abyss. And it is the place from which the strength and blessings of the ancestors are repossessed for the benefit of their descendants in a ceremony known as retirer d’en bas d’leau. “A year and a day following the death of a person, the family undertakes to reclaim his soul from the waters of the abyss below the earth and to lodge it in a govi [a specially consecrated container] where it may henceforth be invoked and consulted in the event of illness or other difficulties and so may participate in all the decisions that normally unite the members of the family in counsel.”³⁶ Anthropologist, initiate and scholar of Vodou Maya Deren describes the ritual, directed by a houngan (high priest) or manbo (high priestess) who shakes a consecrated rattle rhythmically, steadily, for a long time. Sometimes insistently, sometimes with a gentle, ringing murmur, the ritual leader uses the instrument and her voice to call les invisibles, the family dead, to the surface of the water.

This ceremony, in which the spirits of the deceased are coaxed with song back into active participation in the lives of their living family members, is a way of insuring that the blessings and help of ancestors are acknowledged and available to their kin. The spirits of the dead are asked to come and reside in special vessels where they can be kept close and cared for by their descendants. Once all the ceremonial rites have been completed, the reclaimed ancestors “are treated as tutelary spirits, a kind of minor loa, who look after their relations and who, in return for sacrifices offered them, attend to the prayers of kith and kin and respond to their appeals for advice or protection.”³⁷

Theologian Yolanda Smith talks about the spirituals as an especially apt means by which African Americans recognize and maintain historical/religious connections to ancestors. The songs are, in her words, representative of the “triple heritage” of Blacks in North America: African origins, American experience, and Christianity.³⁸ Indeed, as African Americans sing these songs today, they are, in a sense, performing rites of reclamation that link them to the experiences and gifts of their forbearers. Ruby Sales, a Washington D.C.-based community organizer, Episcopal theologian and former member of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), explains how spirituals connect her to ancestors and to history. In a 1998 interview, Sales describes growing up in the Black church in Alabama in the 1950s and hearing old songs like Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray. In that moment, as she was surrounded by the music, Sales says, “I was no longer an eight-year-old child, I felt really connected to my grandmother; so even today when I sing that song, I don’t just sing it in my voice. There is a rattle in my throat as deep and old as my grandmother’s voice. It connects me. It allows me to move from one historical period to the next to really get to the souls of where Black people were. It is in that moment, through song, that I am able to feel something other than myself. I become part of a community. I become part of a struggle.”³⁹

Later in the interview, Ruby recounts an experience during the southern freedom movement when a dear friend of hers was murdered. The friend had put himself, intentionally, in the line of fire of the gun, taking a bullet that was meant for Ruby. In the face of profound disorientation and grief Ruby became mute for a time and says she was only able to find her voice (and the courage to testify against her friend’s killer before an all-White jury) through the enduring support of her loved-ones and, especially, through Black religious music. Ruby says, even when she could not speak she would sing songs like We’ve Come This Far By Faith and Tell Me How Did You Feel When You Come Out the Wilderness? and she would hear the voices of her grandmothers accompanying her own and those voices would strengthen her. “That’s what really got me through…what has always gotten me through, black song,” Ruby says; “singing those songs and hearing those voices.”⁴⁰

As Sales implies, the songs are repositories of resilience that each generation accesses and renews, adding their own voices and their own battles to the reservoir. The spirituals, like the Vodou ceremony of retirer d’en bas de l’eau, become a way to connect with the resources of spirit and struggle created by the ancestors so that the descendants may benefit from what the preceding generations knew and lived. Deren says of the Haitian rite, “[It] is the procedure by which the race reincorporates the fruit of previous life-processes into the contemporary moment, and so retains the past as a ground gained, upon and from which it moves forward into the future.”⁴¹ The wisdoms, loves, skills, and disciplines of those who have passed on are reclaimed to be of service to those who remain.

IX. Final Thoughts