Over the years, water has held potent but conflicting symbolic meanings in Black history and culture. In antebellum years, it represented a place of refuge where the enslaved swam to freedom in America’s raging rivers during slavery, or where women in bondage went to escape the sexual abuse of their slave masters. Rivers also used to be sites of religious gathering and social activity. To this day the theme of the river is a frequent motif in the lyrics of Negro spirituals, as a result of Biblical imagery. However, as a result of the events of the Reconstruction era, water does not have the same safe connotation. Jim Crow race riots drove African Americans out of beach towns and river towns, and rivers often became the final resting place for lynched Black bodies. Bodies of water, especially the Atlantic Ocean over which the Middle Passage in the trans-Atlantic slave trade took place, hold traumatic memories for African Americans.
Despite this history, Langston Hughes centers bodies of water in much of his work, portraying them as vessels for transnational cultural formation and sites of kinship creation for the African diaspora. The beginning of his autobiography titled The Big Sea details the moment Hughes took to the water at the age of 21 to sail for Africa. The sea journey represents growth for Hughes, marking a moment when he considers himself a grown man for the first time. In this way, the sea is a place for his Black identity for formation. It is a place of freedom and cultural production that is shared between all people of African descent, and it departs from relying on nation-states or land-based social constructs as places of identity formation. Even before The Big Sea, Hughes’ first collection of poetry The Weary Blues already tied his ideas of water to identity formation.
“Aunt Sue’s Stories” was a part of this renowned collection. While the reference to a “mighty river” (the Mississippi River) is made in the second stanza of the poem as a symbol of the strength of Black heritage being passed down through time, the poems that accompanied “Aunt Sue’s Stories” in The Weary Blues have even more explicit references to water. Namely, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Port Town,” “Sea Calm,” “Sea Charm,” “Seascape,” and “Fog.” The “mighty river” in “Aunt Sue’s Stories” is personified such that in the poem it has the agency to shape the lives of African Americans and form bonds between them. Water is personified in similar ways in the other poems of The Weary Blues, but the most parallel depiction to that of “Aunt Sue’s Stories” is in “The Negro Speaks in Rivers.” In both of these poems, the river is a force that carries Black identity through time.
Water is a crucial space in the history of the African diaspora where culture is created, but more importantly it is where kinship bonds are formed. However, these kinship bonds are not those of Western culture. In his article “Taken by the sea wind: Langston Hughes and the currents of Black identity”, Joshua M. Murrary cites Kevin Dawson’s book Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora to illuminate the differences between Western and Black kinship bonds. The Western notion of a family involves a vertical transfer of bloodlines. These linear kinship links are freely given to the next generation. Families have agency in that they choose to form connections with their progeny and blood kin. On the other hand, Black notions of family as a result of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade are comprised of forced patterns of dispersal. Murrary calls this “horizontal” kinship by means of enslavement. Enslaved nuclear families were often forced apart, so Black notions of family expanded to include those enslaved on the same plantation, and even those across the Atlantic. The ambiguity of heredity and heritage made it such that the shared experience of slavery and colonialism created kinship bonds over the Middle Passage that do not exist in Western family structures. Murray elaborates:
Writing in the American milieu of the twentieth century, then, Hughes’s affinity for incorporating water into his writings runs counter to contemporary conceptions of Black identity, yet his connection of water to diasporic kinship provides a refreshing alternative to strict, hegemonic definitions of familial links.
The Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi River, or any body of water in which Black people have shared experiences (traumatic or otherwise) are places of kinship formation for Hughes. In this way, Hughes reclaims the images of terror that water evokes for the African diaspora and presents water in his poetry as a unifying force that binds together all people of African descent. For this reason, the relationship between Aunt Sue and the child to whom she tells stories in the poem may not be a blood relationship. To this day, familial titles such as aunt/auntie and uncle are bestowed upon members of Black communities regardless of whether or not the relation is that of blood. The titles "sister" and "brother," especially in religious settings, are also common for those outside of Black nuclear families. The use of these familial titles in this way is unique to the African diaspora, though it has since been taken up by other cultures. While the child in “Aunt Sue’s Stories” is likely a portrayal of Hughes himself, this aunt figure may or may not be this character’s aunt by blood. Instead, this “Aunt Sue” may be an aunt by the kinship bestowed upon the African diaspora in the Middle Passage. The interpretation of the poem remains mostly intact regardless of whether or not this is a blood relation. However, this understanding of the role of water in uniting African Americans sheds new light on the importance of the stories that Aunt Sue tells. She tells more than oral history. Aunt Sue tells the history of her horizontal family that is united in the water of the Middle Passage.
