The Water Dancer
“‘For memory is the chariot, and memory is the way, and memory is bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom’”
-Harriet Tubman, The Water Dancer
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019) certainly deserves the critical and cultural acclaim it has garnered upon publication last month. Oprah’s Bookclub is doing a fantastic job (through Apple TV, Instagram, and other platforms) facilitating a discussion of this narrative-shifting book by hosting a readalong and interviewing Coates himself. From its first sentence—the rambling, fluid 100-word sentence/paragraph—Coates establishes The Water Dancer (both in diction and style) as a story about memory and one closely tied to water. This novel eloquently re-frames the Underground Railroad story, placing it in the intimate and profoundly personal experience of his protagonist, Hiram Walker. Hi, the son of landed Virginia gentry, Howell Walker, and the water-dancing slave, Rose, sets himself apart early as a child capable of remembering every detail of a thing. He remembers everything with near photographic recall, everything, that is, except his mother with whom he is parted as a young boy. Throughout The Water Dancer, Coates employs a powerful vocabulary of slavery (“the Task”), in which slaves are “the Tasked,” landed whites are “Quality,” and poor whites are “Low.” Slave quarters become “the Street” or “the Warren” (under the big house). Having visited Monticello previously, I could easily picture the Warren of passages below Big House and the Street down the hill a bit, as I read Coates’ descriptive prose. Through Hiram’s stirring storytelling, Coates guides his reader through pain, trauma, love of life, and self-discovery among the Tasked, as well as the many reasons folks fought for abolition and toiled on the Underground.
Boiled down, Hiram’s story is that of a child seeking to rebuild his disjointed memory in the wake of the family-wrecking that is the Task. Hiram’s grandmother, Santi Bess, was African-born. His mother, Rose, and his aunt, Emma, were born to the Task; and both sent “Natchez-way.” As the Virginia soil gave way after generations of over-farming tobacco, plantation owners increasingly relied on the capital of human flesh. The Quality sold their slaves south to the Deep South (“Natchez-way”) where they were deeper in “the coffin” of slavery. In Hi’s lifetime, his family’s plantation (Lockless) dwindles from its glory days when it was populated by many families of Tasked on the Street and in the Warren, to a small handful remaining in service in his father’s final years. The ghosts of those souls sold south and torn from loved ones, haunt the place. Hiram’s coming-of-age parallels the diminishment of his father’s plantation. As Hi comes to know himself and his story—bound to both the Tasked and their Quality Taskmasters and reaches back across the Atlantic to the birthplace of his grandmother—his father’s empire crumbles into the spent Virginia soil and he must choose his own path. At the moment that Hiram comes to fully know himself, and place himself in the story of the Task and the Underground, he also recognizes and harnesses the power of his story and his blood: the magical realism of Conduction.
Reading Hiram’s story takes 21st-century readers back to nineteenth-century Philadelphia and New York, as well as antebellum Virginia. In addition to “Ryland” and his hounds who hunt runaways across the South and into northern cities, Coates’s novel introduces readers to abolitionists—white, black and mixed race—on both sides of what will come to be known as the Mason-Dixon line. The Southern belle, Corrine Quincy, and the northern abolitionist fighter who first taught Hi to read (Mr. Fields/Micajah Bland) both play important roles in Hiram’s story as he unravels the aims and power motivating white folks to take up the abolitionist cause. I sense a slight cautionary note in Coates’ description of Corrine and her control of the Virginia Underground:
“All these [Underground] fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watches as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave” (371).
Might Hiram’s observation of Corrine not also describe the zealous work of privileged, radical progressives of today? I appreciated the many gentle mirrors with which Coates’ novel provides all of us a chance to witness our own reflections in the guise of historical fiction.
Additionally, strong feminist undercurrents flow through The Water Dancer in the characters of Harriet, Corrine, Sophia, Thena & Kessiah. Corrine reminds Hiram: “[S]ome of us have been down since the days of Rome. Some of us are born into society and told that knowledge is rightfully beyond us, and ornamental ignorance should be our whole aspiration” (166). Similarly, Sophia makes it clear to Hiram from the beginning: “Ain’t no freedom for a woman in trading a white man for a colored” (111). Hiram is enough of a man to be a feminist himself and embrace the powerful women around him, without needing to control them. In fact, with the exception of a limited few, the most important people in Hiram’s story are all women. It is, arguably, through his connection with these fierce women that Hi finds his power to Conduct and make his way in the world.
This is a book told as one man recalls his own story and Hiram’s tale bubbles with magic. The magical realism of Coates’ debut novel reminds me of the magic at work in many Native American novels, and I imagine (though I am less familiar) also at work in many African storytelling traditions. From what I’ve gaged in the reviews of the last month, many people are uncomfortable with the magic in the book and wish Coates would not have inserted it; these people seem to miss the point. Coates didn’t inject the Underground Railroad with magical realism, it has been there in the telling (in the first-hand accounts) since the nineteenth century. Conduction is perhaps a metaphor (I imagine the Western tradition will more comfortably read it as such), or perhaps it is real. There is, doubtless, a magic to liberating mass numbers of enslaved people, a magic described by countless runaway slaves and Coates’ novel simply tells their story, in their way, without massaging it into a linear, secular, rational, Western narrative. I loved the way The Water Dancer highlights the multiculturalism and melting pot world of the Tasked, and that the reader is left to reflect on the implications of these blended (often without consent) families, that were so often torn apart and the generational trauma those experiences (still) cause. This is, no doubt, the political side of Coates’ novel, which anyone familiar with his nonfiction works or his outspoken work on the subject of slavery reparations expected from his first novel. I encourage readers of The Water Dancer to consider the veracity of its magical realism and sit with that possibility before chalking it up to metaphor.
In addition to Hiram, I found myself captivated by the character of Harriet Tubman, herself the victim of a family divided from one another. Her story has always inspired me (and I realize I am not alone therein). I am eager to read She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (hitting bookstores today, Nov. 5, 2019). The fictional portrayal in Coates’ The Water Dancer will likely pair nicely with the nonfiction at work in She Came to Slay.
I was sadly unable to join the nearly 2,000 Boiseans who gathered last month at the Morrison Center to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates talk about his book, but one of the things he said summarizes so much of this novel: "Slavery is rape[. . .] Slavery is always rape. So when you talk about African American identity, you're talking about 450 years of rape” (Boise Weekly 10/8/19). The success of Coates’ book lies in its ability to make the reader feel the pain of separation, of betrayal, of rape experienced by enslaved people. This is our country’s history not too many generations back. This is our story, all of us: white, black, mixed race. The humanity at the heart of the story—Hiram’s recognition that the Task touches us all, and weighs us all down, regardless of our position in the machine, be we Tasked or Quality of Low—is the point. The Task destroys the land and the people, and it is when we can connect to our stories, truly connect, and see ourselves fully, that we are capable of magic, capable of Conduction. This is not simply a literary metaphor; stories when kept alive by both storyteller and audience, have the power to transform individuals, communities and cultures.
As I concluded the final paragraphs of The Water Dancer, I found myself wondering if our culture is ready to remember the most painful parts of our story. It took Hiram many years to recall the most acute pain of his life story, and only when he faces it is he capable of the magical transformation at work in this novel. Perhaps Hiram is metaphor here (not magic); until we, the people, can face the pain and trauma of our history, we will not be able to move on, it will continue to bind us in a blindness, even when we see sparks of the magic that lies within us. I believe, and it seems Coates does too, that when we can recognize and embrace the most painful parts of our past, we will be able to conduct ourselves to freedom.
A Few Great Passages:
“[…]Natchez-way was worse than death, was living death, an agony of knowing that somewhere in the vastness of America, the one whom you loved most was parted from you, never again to meet in this shackled, fallen world” (45-46).
“And as I mounted each step, I felt the terrible logic of the Task, my Task, snap into place. It was not just that I would never be heir to even one inch of Lockless. And it was more than knowing I would never be a subscriber to the fruit of my own labor. It was also that my own natural wants must forever be bottled up, that I must live in fear of those wants, so that more than I must live in fear of the Quality, I must necessarily live in fear of myself” (48).
“‘Ain’t nobody out, son, you hear? Ain’t no out. All gotta serve. I like serving here more than at some other man’s Lockless, I will grant you that, but I am serving, of that I can assure you’” (60). George to Hiram.
“I am here, telling you this story, and not from the grave, not yet, but from the here and now, peering back into another time, when we were Tasked, and close to the earth, and close to a power that baffled the scholars and flummoxed the Quality, a power, like our music, like our dance, that they cannot grasp, because they cannot remember” (66).
“It is hard to convey this now, for it was another time replete with its own rituals, choreography, and manners among the classes and subclasses of Quality, Tasked, and Low. There were things you said and did not, and what you did marked your place in the ranks. The Quality, for instance, did not inquire on the inner workings of their ‘people.’ They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only in the thinnest way possible. To strip a man down, condemn him to be beaten, flayed alive, then anointed with salt water, you cannot / feel him the way you feel your own. You cannot see yourself in him, lest your hand be stayed, and your hand must never be stayed because the moment it is, the Tasked will see that you see them, and thus see yourself. In that moment of profound understanding, you are all done, because you cannot rule as is needed. You can no longer ensure that the tobacco hillocks are raised to your expectation; that the slips are fed into those hillocks at the precise time; that the plants are weeded and hoed with diligence; that your harvest is topped and the seed is filed and saved; that the leaves are left on the stalk, and the stalk spiked and hung at the proper distance, so that the plant neither molds nor dries out, but cures into that Virginia gold which moves the base and mortal man into the pantheon of Quality. Every step is essential and must be followed with utmost care with a process that rewards him nothing, and that way is torture, murder, and maiming, is child-theft, is terror” (83-84).
“The light of freedom had been reduced to embers, but it was still shining in me, and borne up by the winds of fear, I kept running, bent, loping, locked, but running all the same, with my whole chest aflame” (144).
“Power makes slaves of masters, for it cuts them away from the world they claim to comprehend. But I have given up my power, you see, given it up, so that now I might begin to see” (153).
“‘But freedom, true freedom, is a master too, you see—one more dogged, more constant, than any ragged slave-driver,’ she said. ‘What you must now accept is that all of us are bound to something. Some will bind themselves to property in man and all that comes forthwith. And others shall bind themselves to justice. All must name a master to serve. All must choose’” (155).
“Their humanity wounded me, for here too were the bonds of family, and here too were young lovers overrun by the rituals of courting, and here too lay sorrow, a grim understanding of the sin of the Task. And here too were fears that in that last calculation they too were slaves to some Power, some God, some Demon of the old world, which they had unknowingly unleashed upon the new” (169).
“We are all divided against ourselves. Sometimes part of us begins to speak for reason we don’t even understand until years later” (216).
“We forget nothing, you and I,’” Harriet said, ‘To forget is to truly slave. To forget is to die.’ [. . .] ‘To remember, friend,’ she said. ‘For memory is the chariot, and memory is the way, and memory is bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom’” (271).
“It is quite a thing, a messy, dirty thing, to put your own son, your own daughter, to the Task. Way I see it, ain’t no pure and it is we who are blessed, for we know this. [. . .] Blessed, for we do mot bear the weight of pretending pure. I will say that it has taken some time for me to get that. Had to lose some folk and truly understand what that loss mean. But having been down, and having seen my share of those who are up, I tell you [. . .], I would live down here among my losses among the much and mess of it, before I would ever live among those who are in their own kind of muck, but are so blinded by it they fancy it pure. Ain’t no pure [. . .]. Ain’t no clean” (293).
“‘My favorite season,’ I said. ‘World is so beautiful this time of year. There’s a kinda peace that just falls on everything, even up here. It’s like summer wear the world out, and by October everyone is just ready for a nap’” (307).
“I want you to know that I have seen, the mean I have known since I have gone. The men who have had to decide what they love more, the everything, lovely and mean, right in front of them, or their own wrath and regard. And I choose the muck of this world [. . .] I choose the everything” (351).
“There was a big king who come over from Africa on the slave ship with his people. But when they got close to shore, him and his folk took over, killed all the white folks, threw ‘em overboard, and tried to sail back home. But the ship run aground, and when the king look out, he see that the white folks’ army is coming for him with they guns and all. So the chief told his people to walk out into the water, to sing and dance as they walked, that the water-goddess brought ‘em here, and the water-goddess would take ‘em back home.
And when we dance as we do, with the water balanced on our head, we are giving praise to them who danced on the waves. We have flipped it, you see? As we must do all things, make a way out of what is given. Ain’t that what you done last night? Ain’t that what you say you do? Flipped it. It’s what Santi Bess done, ain’t it? She all I could think about when we came back up out of it last night. That king. The water dance. Santi Bess. You” (379).
“I wanted him to know that I now knew all that he knew, that to forgive was irrelevant, but to forget was death” (403).
Bibliography:
Coates, Ta-Nahesi. The Water Dancer. One World: New York, 2019.
Berry, Harrison. “Ta-Nahesi Coates Talks Literature, Black Lives at Cabin Readering Series Q&A” Boise Weekly: 10/8/19, https://www.boiseweekly.com/boise/ta-nehisi-coates-talks-literature-black-lives-at-cabin-reading-series-qanda/Content?oid=19518062
