“I’ve Known Rivers” – Who was the composer Margaret Bonds?

In 1929, a 16-year-old Margaret Bonds left her South Side nest in Chicago to pursue a bachelor’s degree in music at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

She hailed from a geography that was known as the Black Belt due to the ways in which discriminatory housing practices restricted where African Americans could live. Yet, this geography thrived as a Black Metropolis because of how those within it dared to dream bigger. There, the Black populace fostered a stimulating intellectual and creative climate, one that fueled the gospel innovations of Mahalia Jackson, the visual masterpieces of Margaret Burroughs, the literary gems of Lorraine Hansberry, and the symphonic triumphs of Florence Price.

Within this dynamic, the Bonds family home served as an important hub for all kinds of artists and activists, ranging from Price and fellow composer William Dawson to international tenor Roland Hayes and other African American luminaries. Northwestern University, however, was a culture shock for the young Bonds. It was a “prejudiced university, terribly prejudiced,” she recalled. Northwestern reproduced the segregationist practices of the American South, dispelling ideas that the urban north and west were naturally more progressive than the southward states. Homesick, Bonds’ new environment was worlds away from the life she had known before.

Perhaps it was this sense of belonging that Bonds was looking to recreate when she ventured down to the basement of the Evanston Public Library. As fate would have it, she came across a poem by Langston Hughes, titled The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921).

“I’ve known rivers,” the poem begins, spoken by the wise, comforting voice of Hughes’s mythical protagonist, who has existed since the dawn of time. The voice speaks of spending time in the rivers of the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile and the Mississippi. Its stories draw together biblical antiquity, the African continent, and the Black experience in the United States. As Bonds knew all too well, it was through the passage of water that Africans were forcibly trafficked to the New World. Yet, it was also through the passage of water that the enslaved sought their freedom, wading up the Mississippi and determining their own exodus. Hughes’s poetic narrative resonated deeply with Bonds because it connected the pasts, presents and futures of African-descended people. “It helped my feelings of security, you see, because in that poem he tells of how great the Black man is… I know that poem saved me,” she said of this first encounter with Hughes, who would later become a lifelong friend and collaborator.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers arose from the early 20^th-century New Negro Movement, which bore witness to the arrival of what the Harlem Renaissance thinker Alain Locke called a “New Negro for a New Century”. This new, Black Renaissance generation was “vibrant with a new psychology,” as Locke put it, to combat the terrors of racial prejudice and discrimination. Flowing through this era were various forms of artistry and activism that brought together transatlantic geographies, biblical parables, Afro-futurist visions and cultural crossovers. Growing up, this was what Bonds had witnessed in a geography that spurred its own Black Chicago Renaissance; and in Hughes’s poem, she found a sense of home and belonging.

Bonds’ desire to belong was felt by numerous African Americans looking to articulate a sense of self at a time where, despite the abolition of slavery, people of African descent were still not granted the full rights of American citizenship in the only land they had ever known as home. Across African American communities, music became an important way to navigate these social dissonances and find resolution amidst the chaos of it all. Harlem Renaissance giants Duke Ellington and William Grant Still, not to mention Bonds as a daughter of the Black Chicago Renaissance, used their craft to proudly assert their identities and celebrate their New Negro modernities.

Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing (1931) explored liberatory futures with swinging rhythms and experimental improvisations that ushered in a new jazz era, while Still’s Symphony No. 1 (1930), also titled ‘Afro-American’, rocked the classical world as he used the Black folk and blues flavour of African American life to animate this traditionally European form. In The Negro Speaks of Rivers, which Bonds set soon after her encounter with the poem at Northwestern, she infused the art song genre with a global Black heritage. These works, along with the great breadth of early 20th-century African American artistry, absorbed and reflected the renaissance spirit of the era. They signalled Black identities reborn amid the anti-Black hostilities of the world – identities that looked for beauty in a painful past and emphasised pride over shame in the history of African America.

The Black Renaissance had long ended when Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed in his stirring 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, “Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York… Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California… Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.” When Bonds heard the words of Dr King, she was no longer an insecure teenager working in the quiet corners of Evanston Library. The rivers of which she had read all those years ago had set her on a new, uplifting path. She was now a critically acclaimed composer and civil rights activist, galvanised by Dr King’s charismatic leadership. However, she would have heard parallels in the way Dr King similarly evoked connections across vast geographies and articulated a vision of Black belonging and empowerment just like Hughes’s protagonist in The Negro Speaks of Rivers.

Indeed, the Black Renaissance had given way to a new era, but through it all, artists and activists continued to reckon with the ideals of freedom, democracy, home and belonging. Just as Hughes’s poem had done for Bonds, the Black Renaissance would inspire new generations to seize the liberatory futures that were their inheritance and embrace the manifold streams of African culture that were their heritage.

By Dr Samantha Ege

Dr Samantha Ege is a musicologist and concert pianist, as well as a research fellow at the University of Southampton. She is the author of the forthcoming “South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene”. She has recorded several albums, featuring piano music by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Her next album highlights piano concertos by women who composed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Margaret Bonds features in our concert on Thursday 23 November, tickets from £15.