The Water Dancer

 By Ta-Nehisi Coates

One World     2019

410 pages     Historical Fiction

I finished reading The Water Dancer this afternoon, and I am exhausted. We will discuss it tomorrow night at book club, and I needed to finish it for that purpose, but I also needed to release my mind and emotions from the intense pressure the book was creating. There are few books so powerful that you just can’t stop thinking about them. This is one of those books.

First, we need to discuss terminology. In Coates frame of reference regarding the plantations of Virginia in the mid-1800s, family slaves are called the “Tasked.” Plantation owners are called the “Quality,” and the ordinary white working people are the “Lows.” The shacks where the slaves live are called the “street,” but they may also live under the big house in the “warrens.” If you have visited Monticello or any other Southern plantations, you are already familiar with those living arrangements.

Now a bit about plot. Hiram Walker is the son of a plantation owner, Howell Walker, and a water-dancing slave girl, Rose. He is a brilliant young man with a near-photographic memory, which his father recognizes and encourages by having a tutor teach him to read and write. The tutor is part of the Underground, and he creates an awareness of Hiram to Corrine Quincy, a Southern belle and the leader of the Virginia Underground. After Hiram is recruited to the Underground, he is taken to Philadelphia for training, and then returns to Virginia to work as a conductor.

One of the most interesting, and at the same time confusing, aspects of the plot is the term “conduction.” Coates intends it to be magical realism, and indeed there is magical realism in the way Hiram escorts the runaways. Conduction is a magical gift that transports certain gifted individuals from one place to another by way of a blue light that lifts and carries them along or across bodies of water. As Hiram realizes his special conduction abilities, he is connected with the Moses of the Underground movement—Harriet Tubman. When he first meets Harriet, he is completely overwhelmed—and I heard myself gasp aloud.

Because of the presence of Tubman in the book, the role of the women in the novel take on special significance. The Tasked women face huge amounts of trauma, enormous challenges, and tremendous work tasks. They are also the keepers of the families and their stories.  And when they are sold, the family stories go with them. The job of Hiram and the other Underground conductors is to get the families together again.

Observations that I really connected with.

·         Many of the Tasked are smarter than the Quality. It is the Tasked that keep the households going, the children cared for, and the crops harvested. The Tasked are very aware that they are smarter and have more ability.

·         The land in Virginia was becoming depleted in the mid-1800s, and slaves were sold and sent to other areas of the South to keep up the appearance of wealth and status for the landed Virginia gentry. This I had to do some research about, because the Tasked are always worried that they are going to be sent to Natchez, and the concept of Natchez is not very well explained.

·         Grief is constantly with the Tasked, for most of them have been separated from some, if not all,  of their family members. Most of the time, they never see those family members again. Hiram has a marvelous memory, but he cannot remember his mother, who was sold when he was a young boy.

The Water Dancer is not without its imperfections. I would recommend that readers make a list of characters because one character may be gone for a hundred pages or more and then show up again. I missed an important character reveal because I couldn’t remember the name of the tutor when it was revealed that he was one of the leaders of the Underground. I also missed the magical realism connection until I was explaining the plot to my husband today, and all of a sudden, the concept of “conduction” and its importance to Hiram’s ability to work in the Underground came clear to me.

The book is so beautifully written that it is very easy to get caught up in the poetry of the writing and lose track of the plot line. Coates has multiple purposes in the concepts he develops in the book, and sometimes it is hard to grasp all those purposes. The Kirkus reviewer says, “even his most melodramatic effects are deepened by historical facts and contemporary urgency.”

At the same time, there is transformative power in the words Coates writes and the characters he has developed. This is a book that will stay with me a long time.

A terrific article in The Atlantic where Coates discusses writing fiction.

My posting about Between the World and Me, a love letter from Coates to his son.