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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ hotly anticipated debut novel The Water Dancer is a lyrical creation from one of America’s foremost cultural critics. Coates is a widely read essayist and former national correspondent for The Atlantic, the author of such nonfiction bestsellers as Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power, who also has time to write for the Black Panther comic series. His work on contemporary race relations has afforded him a wide readership and a renewed relevance in the Trump era. However, his debut novel sets its sights much farther back in time, on a Virginia plantation in the 19th century. The novel centers on a young slave, Hiram Walker, who is recruited to become an agent for the Underground Railroad, where he utilizes his supernatural power of memory to help the cause. Readers of Colson Whitehead’s award winning 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, will find that this novel is crafted from a fairly similar blueprint in terms of style and subject, but differs in the wideness of its narrative ambition.
The novel is less concerned with the historical practice of slavery than it is with the social and cultural implications of it that are still being felt today. There is little actual detail about life on the plantation, or extended scenes of whippings and beatings, as the novel has its sights set on things much less easy to capture through narration. The novel’s protagonist, Hiram Walker, was born into bondage, the son of a slave woman and her master. Hiram’s mother is sold away when he is still just a young child, and almost instantly Hiram’s memory is completely wiped of all traces of his mother, who appears as a blue haze in his mind, despite the fact that he has the power to recall any other detail from his young life. His father/master notices Hiram’s gifts and begins to groom him for service within the house rather than out on the fields. Hiram is appointed the keeper of his wayward half-brother, Maynard, a drunk and unrefined individual who is generally disdained by his extended family. Hiram’s father believes that the only way to fashion a suitable heir of his incompetent son is to have Hiram protect and guide him, which all falls apart one evening when Hiram is escorting Maynard back to the plantation. Hiram is driving the carriage on a back road when he comes to a bridge over a river, and has a vision of a woman dancing with a jug of water over her head, and swerving to avoid the woman, Hiram, Maynard, and the carriage crash into the river below. Maynard dies, but Hiram is miraculously brought out of the river by forces that he does not yet understand, but ones that connect him with his past and his mother.
When Hiram is eventually brought to the plantation of a woman named Corrine Quinn, he finds out it is actually a training ground for agents of the Underground Railroad. Here, Corrine and the other agents train Hiram in survival methods and forgery, and his gift of memorization allows him to pen convincing freedom papers to free former slaves. It is clear from the beginning that the Underground agents have something much more important in mind for Hiram, they hope to develop his gift of “conduction”. Conduction is the power of an individual to conjure up specific details from their past, and if they are in contact with water, they can use this power memory to physically transport themselves and others. It seems that Hiram’s first moment of conduction occurred when he conjured his mother at the bridge and transported himself to safety, and the Railroad agents are eager for Hiram to use his power to transport slaves off of plantations and into the north. There is only one other agent in the Underground with this power, Harriet (not difficult to guess which historical figure this might be), whom Hiram eventually meets on his travels to Philadelphia. The function of conduction as a narrative object in this story is to elevate the qualities of memory and storytelling to superpowers, for it is only through these modes can the former enslaved free themselves and others.
The novel’s preoccupation with memory and retelling brought to mind a quote from one of Toni Morrison’s speeches, which goes,
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
The project of this novel is an exercise in avoiding that very distraction. The protagonist uses focus, memory, recollection, and retelling to dispel the evils of slavery. This is a novel about authorship, about what it means for disenfranchised communities to claim authorship over their own stories, and record them for future generations. It is also about the ways that memories are able to connect individuals, and can be one’s only hope in a time where family separation is common practice (Unfortunately, quite relevant). The novel engages in some really fruitful discussions, but the broadness of its narrative scope means that it never dwells on one question for very long. Some of the family drama and human relationships get lost in all of the philosophizing, which is unfortunate, because the character relationships are so complicated and intriguing. The novel loses track of itself in some places, and could have used a bit more aggressive editing, but it does not fail to provide a unique and lyrical entry in the larger narrative on black history and culture.