The Water Dancer

“To forget is to truly slave. To Forget is to die.”

I LOVED  Between the World and Me! I read it at a formative time in my life when reading the notes of a father to his son was especially needed. I have loosely followed Coates since reading those notes. I was going to go and see him discuss “The Message”, but then it went viral right before I could buy tickets and the prices did the same. Before reading The Water Dancer, I was interested to see what Coates could do with a fictional work, as much of what I have read and watched has been semi-autobiographical. Unsurprisingly, what he was able to do was something genius.

So What Had Happened Was…

The novel begins with our main character welcoming death. Hiram, commonly referred to as Hi, was a Tasked man (Coates never describes a person as a slave) driving his white brother/owner, Maynard, in the rain when they fell into a nearby river, the Goose. While Hi accepts his death as the eternal rest described by all of his ancestors, he realizes that it is not yet this time. While viewing the glimpses of life that we all have become accustomed to as the final view of a person’s life before death, a blue light moves Hi to safety. While Hi was saved by this unknown force, Maynard was not so lucky. Upon returning to the plantation we meet Hi’s father, Howell, and realize that the Virginia slave society was in decline. The Quality (the plantation owners of the highest class) are seeing the yields dwindling and escaping by moving west. The Tasked have seen this coming for decades, but the Quality do not consult the Tasked.

After being nursed back to health, Hi realizes that his near death experience has forever changed him. It was a taste of freedom that he has never known. Hi has been Tasked his entire life, he only has wisps of memories of a mother that he loved. She is one of the people he saw in his brief feeling of freedom. He was raised by an older woman, Thena, who was known on the plantation as a surly old woman. Hi and Thena are moved from the fields to work in the big house by Howell.  During which time, Hi is educated and trained to be the personal assistant to Maynard who will inherit Lockless, but Maynard is known to be obviously incompetent. During this time, Hi falls for Sophia, a tasked woman who is kept at Lockless so Hi’s uncle can call upon Sophia behind the back of said uncle’s wife. After this brief feeling of freedom for Hi and for a reason which is only later revealed for Sophia (she is pregnant by Hi’s uncle, who she hates for obvious reasons), Hi and Sophia decide to run. They consult a free Black man who they believe is connected to the Underground. However, they are betrayed by him and instead are jumped by slave catchers. These slave catchers torture Hi for what feels like months. Until Hi feels the release of death coming to him, however it is again not his time. The blue light moves him. This time another person witnesses this blue light and impossible movement which we come to know as conduction.

It turns out that this torture was calculated to see if Hi had the power of conduction. It was only upon seeing the conduction that the plan was revealed. The plan was orchestrated by Corrine Quinne a woman of Quality who was engaged to Maynard. Corinne is now Hi’s owner (she purchased Hi from his father after his attempted escape). But Corinne is secretly a member of the Underground who had heard that Hi possibly had the power of conduction. She wants to use this power for the purposes of the Underground. Hi eventually begrudgingly accepts working as an agent of the Underground after the realization that it, along with Corinne, was the reason for his torture. Still unsure of how to control this sought after power, Hi accepts the role for the freedom of his people.

Hiram while not able to control conduction relies on his amazing memory. He is able to recall facts and flourishes which are key to the needs of the Underground. He is sent to Philadelphia on his first mission. In Philadelphi, Hi helps others in the movement and begins to know the man that was assigned as his teacher at Lockless, a white man who is also a member of the Underground. Hi helps forge letters to rescue the wife of a member of the Underground. Unfortunately, the mission fails and Hi’s teacher is killed. After hearing this Hi meets Moses, Harriet Tubman, and joins her on a mission to save her own brother. Hi learns that Harriet is able to not only conduct, but also control and use it at will. After several discussions with Harriet, Hi comes to an understanding that conduction is a force that is passed down ancestrally from Africa and is attached to a powerful mix of emotion and memory. Those who are able to use the power are able to travel using memories to propel from one place to another. However, Hi still does not know how to control his own power.

With his limited understanding Hi returns to Lockless, where it all began, with the intent to rescue the woman that he loves and the woman that raised him. This plan changes pretty quickly as Corrine refuse to help Hi get Thena and Sophia out. Corinne is worried that it would be too suspicious and endanger the Underground. Through practicing and unlocking the full memory of his mother and the physical and emotional pain of losing her (she was sold by his Father after an attempted escape), Hi learns how to control the power of conduction. Hi uses the newly controllable power to deliver Thena to the North and reacquaint the woman who was like a mother to him with her child who was sold in front of her. Hi and Sophia decide to stay at the plantation and work as part of the Underground in the midst of Virgina. They make the decision to become a family and after Howell’s death, Corinne purchases Lockless, but Hi  runs the plantation in Virgina as a front for the true goal of freedom for their people. An inheritance he could not have dreamed of.  

Aiight so boom…

This was a great and richly interconnected story! My little summary does a disservice of how many moving pieces make up its tapestry. In a text like this there are often multiple things I walk away with. One is the black-feminist approach of Sophia describing the mentality of ownership by men, whether white or Black. Another, is the comparison to Colson Whitehead’s magical realism book on the underground railroad. Yet another is the other forms of bondage throughout the book: the bondage of whiteness, womanhood and even freedom as a Black person at the time. But what I was focused on for the entirety of the book was, what is this power of conduction and what does it mean? At first, I thought the key to conduction was pain. While a possibly morbid thought, it reflects the theoretical reality of afro-pessimism. However, it becomes richer when the connection is not to solely the pain, but the memory undergirding the pain. Pain alone was not sustainable for conduction, which is why Hi could only access it in short bursts. It was when Hi pushed past the pain and made peace that he could access the truth of the memory. It is in remembrance of these moments and deeper truths which happen to be incredibly painful, that Hi is able to access conduction. Ultimately, it is in remembering  the deep pain and the truth of the sale of his mother that Hi is able to provide freedom for the woman who chose to raise him. As such, the message is to never forget! To dig through the pain, past the facts, to the truth, as Toni Morrison would have intimated, and that is where our power is found. That is where our path to freedom is. This is made even more impactful by the purposeful shielding of our memory. This happens to Hi, when Howell hides heirlooms from Hi’s mother from her son. We can see this in the present when our history is not taught at all or taught through a lens not our own. It isn’t until we can wrap our hands and minds around our own history that the necessary peace and truth can be accessed. We can then travel this truth to freedom by remembering our selves and where we come from. Learning the lessons of our ancestors and using their stories to propel us to freedom.