BOOKS: The Water Dancer

Having read his brilliant Between The World And Me, I knew that Ta-Nehisi Coates was an extraordinary writer, and in The Water Dancer, he shows that he is equally adept with fiction as with essay and memoir. This tale centers on Hiram Walker, born a slave, whose mother was sold away when he was young and whose father was the master who sold her. A young Hiram dreams of earning his father’s respect and perhaps somehow supplanting his white but far less gifted half-brother, but when the Underground Railroad gets a hold of him, his life changes in ways he could not have imagined. Coates not only creates a compelling story with true-ringing characters, but the vivid description of their lives is permeated by a depth of research into antebellum Virginia society – how Virginia estates worked and how the Virginia plantation economy eroded as they overworked the soil, what people wore and what they ate, and even how they talked. The landowning whites were “the Quality” and the slaves were “the tasked”, with the “low whites” in a miserable in-between. But what really makes this book is Coates’ ability to imagine and portray the emotional truth of people in these barely imaginable situations – the mask that is trained into the Tasked to never display their true emotions to their masters, the willful blindness that the Quality must engage in order to be masters, and the emotional scars and buried feelings that allow mothers, fathers, and children to survive when families are viciously ripped apart. Amidst the horrendous cruelty and injustice, the story is lifted by a humanity that refuses to be extinguished, along with a touch of magical realism concerning the power of our deepest memories to transport us.