That Song: Over the River and through the Wood

The original title was “A New-England Boy's Song about Thanksgiving Day” but it has become known as "Over the River and through the Wood” because that resonant phrase, repeated in every verse of the song, is symbolic, the language of dreams and myth and “fairy tale.”

The image of crossing the river to the other side has such associations as to the promised land, the world of spirit, the unknown depths. We know, for example, that vampires can not catch you if you can get across running water. And the woods, dark and deep, like the unconscious mind, is full of things that we have to learn, to discover. Children get it - grandfather's house, the animals, and joy and all that - and have sung the song continually since Maria Child wrote it in 1844.

It upsets me greatly that I knew nothing about Maria Child until I was over the age of seventy. I first read a couple of sentences in her introduction to one of her books on women and I immediately knew that here was a priceless jewel, right from my own background, of whom I knew nothing at all. 

...there really is such a thing as constant, disinterested love, which failure cannot intimidate or time diminish...mistaken votary of ambition...prevent one young heart from becoming selfish and world-worn...
 

I could tell immediately that here was a person after my own soul. She was born in “Meffed,” that is to say, Medford, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life in the neighborhood of Boston, and then when I saw that she was well into Swedenborg by the time she was twenty although she was Unitarian, I knew why all the bells rang. She personally knew the New England literati of that era like Margaret Fuller, Whittier, and the Concord people like Emerson, and wrote for the The Dial.

Lydia Maria Child

Then there were her books, articles, letters and talks on slavery and the spirit of collusion with it. She wrote the first book in the USA against slavery, “An appeal in favor of that class of Americans called Africans.” She pulled together and edited Harriet Jacobs' “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.” The Jacobs book, which I had also not known, is absolutely harrowing – having one's children sold, for instance – and you see that the USA was fundamentally the same, spiritually speaking, prior to 1860, as it is today.

You read the travel accounts by Charles Dickens or by Harriet Martineau of their visits to the USA during Child's era, and are struck by how embarrassed they felt when being waited upon by slaves. It's the same feeling of embarrassment and anguish that I feel today when ever I am waited upon by someone at Macdonald's or Burger King or WalMart or any of those stores over there in the Mall of Dayton.

I hear her cry against such things as not being allowed to vote, not being able to vote on the issue of slavery or anything else, even as it was in my own mother's lifetime, or not being able to open a bank account in one's own name. She saw the essence of the USA early on, suffered, endured, flourished, and wrote many things (most of them available online), among them the words to that New England boy's Thanksgiving Day song.

Here are a few quotes that have struck me from my reading of Maria Child thus far:

“[The aristocracy], unable to act openly, disguises itself and sends its poison from under a mask. What is the root of the difficulty on the great question of abolition? It is not with the farmers, it is not with the mechanics..No, no! It is not those who are to blame for the persecution suffered by abolitionists. Manufacturers who supply the South, merchants who trade with the South, ministers settled at the South, and editors patronized by the South, are the ones who really promote mobs.”

“True wisdom consists in being satisfied with the pleasures we can derive from the common and simple things of life.”

“The United States is not a beacon, not a light of freedom. She is a warning, rather than an example to the world.”

“Nothing on earth has such effect on the popular heart as songs...”