book talk: the water dancer
My favorite piece by Ta Nehisi-Coates, Between the World and Me, was raw and intimate. Coates describes the world, which his son is now inheriting, with such detail and proximity that all readers, white readers too, could feel the weight on Coates’ shoulder to survive as a black man and protect and raise a young black son. It was non-fiction as hell. So when I saw Coates’ The Water Dancer in the fiction section of Barnes & Noble, I had to see how his words fit into this genre.
The Water Dancer is from the first-person perspective of Hiram (“Hi”), an enslaved boy in Virginia. The entire novel is Hiram telling his story from a retrospective narrative, giving the reader a fascinating insight. Hi remembers everything. He has what we call today an eidetic memory. This is an important detail in the novel.
Hiram lives on a plantation called “Lockless” (I think Coates did something with the name there). The master of Lockless, Howell, is also Hi’s father. His mother, Rose, an enslaved woman, was the best dancer at Lockless, but Hi can't seem to remember her. We don’t really know what happened to her but we know it was violent and traumatic and Hi was without a mother from a young age.
Hi seems to obtain the power of “conduction” which means by remembering, he can move through water (like Moses). For pretty much the whole novel, Hi narrates the path of familiarizing himself with the power of conduction, and in the end, how he used it for good.
The first thing I noticed, and my favorite aspect of the novel, is that Hiram was surrounded by strong and supportive black women who weren’t his mother. He even mentions to the reader, that he wouldn’t be where he is without the women in his life. Even more moving, Hiram wasn’t lusting after all of them. Too often, authors of historical fiction novels insert women into the novel to simply be the source of the main character’s lust. Coates carefully and intentionally created female characters who enriched and guided the main character’s path; it is clear to the reader that the main character would not have made it without their insight. The last thing I’ll say about this aspect of the novel is that while Hiram does fall in love with a woman, Sophia, his lust for her isn’t from her appearance. Hiram tells the reader he falls in love with Sophia because of her mind, her outlook on life, her tenacity (which he didn’t have a lot of), and other non-physical characteristics. That’s a character trait you don’t see very often. My favorite line in the whole book comes from Sophia– she says to Hiram, “but what you must get is that for me to be yours, I must never be yours.” Brilliant.
A theme that I was particularly interested in was morality. Pause, I know that sounds like a very frequent theme–especially in a book about slavery. But this theme of morality is really different from what’s in most books. Hiram says that those who are enslaved are “blessed, for we do not bear the weight of pretending pure.” Hiram doesn’t just believe whites are immoral for owning slaves, but also because they put the face makeup on, the fancy dresses, the best suits, and exotic dishes–they paint a fictitious picture of purity which those who don’t have the privilege of painting, can see right through. Read that again.
I think this novel stands alone in historical fiction. I don’t think there are very many authors who can weave the most human emotions and experiences into characters whose humanity is taken like Coates can. Not to mention, the creativity to give an enslaved man a special power when he has no power as an enslaved man. Read that one again too.
Quotes that I read twice:
“The sharp smell of her was still in our room, on our bed, and I tried to follow that scent down the alleys of my mind, but while all the twists and turns that marked my short life were before me, my mother appeared only as fog and smoke.” Page 13.
“I now rise when I want and I sleep well when it is my will. My name is Parks because I said so. I pulled the name from nothing–conjured it as a gift to my son. It got no meaning except this–I chose it. Its meaning is in the doing.” Page 59.
“And I think of all that beauty sometimes, how it withered in them chains…” Page 60.
“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.” Page 144.
“There is this moment in the stormy lives of a few blessed colored people, a moment of revelation, when the sky opens up, the clouds part, and a streak of sun cuts through, conveying some infinite wisdom from above, and this moment comes not from Christian religion, but from the sight of a colored man addressing a white one as Raymond White now did…” Page 200
“It occurred to me that an examination of the Task revealed not just those evils particular to Virginia, to my old world, but the great need for a new one entirely. Slavery was the root of all struggle. For it was said that the factories enslaved the hands of children, and that the child-bearing enslaved the bodies of women, and that rum enslvaed the souls of men.” Pages 251-252.