The Water Dancer an Impressive Debut

The Water Dancer (2019)

By Ta-Neshi Coates

★★★★

Conduction: The transfer of heat, energy, or acoustics within or through a substance due to a change in temperature and without moving materials. It’s what happens when we turn on a radiator, heat a tea kettle, or hold onto an ice cube as it melts. In Ta-Neshi Coates’ debut novel, it’s also linked to the various meanings of conductors, the kind that transfer or store energy, those who orchestrate, and a crew member on a railroad.

Hiram “Hi” Walker is the protagonist of The Water Dancer. He is a slave on a declining Virginia tobacco plantation, but occupies a semi-privileged position as the half-white son of widowed plantation owner Howell Walker, who (rightly) sees Hi as the more promising of his two sons. He educates him and hopes that his commonsense will rub off on his white heir, Maynard. Coates gives us a memorable look at life at Lockless Plantation and Freetown, the adjoining hamlet. It is a world divided into “the Quality,” the white elites; “the Tasked,” those held in bondage; and “the Low,” who are essentially poor white trash and all the more dangerous for their degraded status. It is they who make up Ryland’s Hounds, who round up runaways and jail them, after they’ve had their sport with them. Coates never specifies the date, but one can infer that the novel is set sometime in the 1850s due to its references to escaped slaves such as Box Brown, Jarm Logue, and Harriet Tubman, all of whose abolitionist works took place after 1849.

Hi grows up thinking he will have a role at Lockless, even though Thena warns him against it. She is the hardened and outwardly unaffectionate older woman who acts as his surrogate mother. (Hiram’s actual mother, Rose, disappeared when he was a toddler.) Thena proves correct. A carriage in which Hi and Maynard are riding plunges into the Goose River. Maynard drowns, but Hi makes it to the bank after having a vision of Rose dancing on the water. Howell is outwardly kind, but Hi learns the hard way that the Quality do not cross social color lines. The upside is that Hi is more than a little attracted to Sophia, the slave and sex partner of Howell’s brother Nathaniel. That too is a reminder that Quality and Tasked live in different worlds, as is the coldness Hi receives from Corrine Quinn, Maynard’s betrothed.

Hi and Sophia attempt an escape that goes very badly–­at least for Sophia. Through circumstances outlined in the novel, Hi’s tormentors and captors are actually members of the Underground Railroad testing his mettle. In Philadelphia, Hi experiences the sweetness of liberty for the first time and immerses himself in a free community. There are many surprises awaiting, though, not the least of which involve those who are other than whom they appear to be.

Coates wishes us to see abolitionism as a higher calling—literally so. This brings us back to conduction. Hi is singled out because others see him as having special abilities. He is like his guide, Harriet Tubman, who takes him on his first journey on the Underground by bending the fabric of time and space. It’s not exactly like a wormhole, but that’s the best I can do. In other words, this novel is shot through with magical realism. Coates skillfully mixes magic with the real—Chautauqua gatherings, the ways in which fear sustains slavery, the potential treachery of all whites, and the serial affectionate bonds of slaves, just to name a few. For Virginia slaves, being sold “down Natchez way” was the ultimate fear, it being a symbol of the Deep South where the Quality neither put on genteel airs nor spared the lash. Escape from Natchez was exceedingly difficult. Coates presents water dancing as a gift, but not a superpower. The Underground was valiant, but not always successful.

The Water Dancer is beautifully written. It is especially impressive as a first novel. Many know Coates as an award-winning journalist and social commentator, but non-fiction and fiction share only a homonym, not a skill set. As in all first novels, there are details that don’t add up. I was quite underwhelmed by an ending and resolution that defied logic, but not in a magical way. A deeper critique is that The Water Dancer bears a lot of resemblance to Colson Whitehead’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad. Plus, Coates’ magical realism strays very close to some of Octavia Butler’s science fiction devices.

Nonetheless, The Water Dancer is a terrific book. Even with its borrowed elements and homage it remains a rare original perspective on slavery. I don’t mean that as a cavalier remark. Like the Civil War, slavery is one of the topics that so dominate the output of historians that it is hard to put an original slant on it. Like a modern-day conductor, Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers us to unexpected places by transferring our gaze from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Rob Weir