The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

In 2016 I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. In this letter to his son, Coates describes the painful burdens that African Americans carry from slavery to the present. Coates’s seeks to warn him of our country’s history of enslavement and warn him about the scourge of racism that he will soon navigate.

While Between the World and Me is a polemic, Coates’s first novel, The Water Dancer allows him to write in a freer form. The book illuminates the excruciating emotional toll slaves endured as their families were separated and sold. This painful but liberating story is narrated by Hiram Walker, who was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation called Lockless. The estate is owned by his inept and feckless white father, Howell Walker. When Hiram was young, Howell cruelly sold Hiram’s mother Rose. This trauma haunts Hiram. Realizing that Hiram is curious and capable, Hiram’s father insists that Hiram take care of his lazy white older brother Maynard (repeating the pattern of slaves taking care of their masters). His father says to Hiram, “I have made it known how high you sit in my esteem. It is not fair, I know it, none of it is fair. You have to save Maynard, son. You have to protect him.”

When Maynard drowns in a carriage accident, Hiram’s father needs Hiram to assist with the plantation. His father arranges for a tutor. Since Hiram is intellectually gifted, he learns to read and write quickly. Hiram still lives in the slave quarters and understands that he will always be considered property. Hiram is alone. He soon gains insight into the limited capabilities of Virginia plantation owners. Many slave owners are unskilled farmers who are neither smart nor capable and thus rely on the expertise and experience of their slaves. Hiram states, “The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them – we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them, it was the whole ambition of their lives.”

Hiram witnesses the many ways his father steals from his slaves. Hiram eventually runs away, is captured, escapes captivity, lives as a free man in Philadelphia and becomes part of the Underground Railroad. Besides his ability to forge papers and convey information, Hiram has extraordinary powers, like Harriet Tubman, who appears in this novel. Coates endows them with a magical realism gift called Conduction. Using the power of memory, Hiram, like Harriet Tubman, can transport slaves to freedom.

The novel calls out the pathology of the white plantation owners who project their own fears and desires onto their slaves. Hypocrisy is rampant across many domains. For example, white people propagate the myth that black men want to rape white women, but in reality, those myths are projections. It is slave owners like Hiram’s father who assault black women like Hiram’s mother. As Hiram gets older, he comes to love a woman named Sophie. Sophie is not required to do farm work because she is Hiram’s Uncle Nathaniel’s girl. Nathaniel calls for Sophie whenever he wants. Hiram writes, “This ‘arrangement’ was not unusual, was indeed the custom of the men of ‘quality’. And like the dumbwaiters and secret passages that the quality employed to mask their theft, Nathaniel too employed means to take as though not taking and transfigure robbery into charity.”

Though The Water Dancer meanders at times Coates is a wise and talented writer. What makes this book unique is his insight into the mindset of the mediocre white oppressors who, in attempting to erase the humanity of their slaves, reveal their dishonor and debasement. As Hiram says, “For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors, as guardians at the gate, staving off African savagery when it is, they themselves who are savages."