“The tree of our family was parted – branches here, roots there – parted for their lumber.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer
Every once in a while, a writer comes along who can tell a good story in prose so exquisite that it makes you want to weep. It’s not purple prose. It’s not inflated and self-important. It’s just beautiful. Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of those authors. He has a true gift, and I’ve been privileged to read two of his books so far. I look forward to lots more.
The Water Dancer tells the story of Hiram Walker, the son of an enslaved woman and a plantation owner. He has what we’d probably call a photographic memory, but he can’t remember his mother. All he knows is that she was sold away when he was nine. Tied up with his lost memories is a mysterious power which saved him in the past, but which he struggles to understand and control. He will find that the bonds he forms, his love, his relationships, his memories, his past, all allow him to unlock the potential within himself.
What I loved about this book is how family-centered it is. Many of the historical novels I’ve read that deal with slavery focus on the cost of slavery to the individual. We read of cruel punishments, hard labor, rape, torture, and death. What I feel is missing in some of these novels, and what The Water Dancer illustrates so beautifully, is the cost of slavery to the enslaved family. The children ripped from parents. The parents torn from children. The spouses who never saw one another again. The people who spent the rest of their lives wondering where their brother or sister was, whether they were still alive.
What Ta-Nehisi Coates taught us in this book is that slavery didn’t just destroy individuals. It severed bonds. And even when the enslaved enjoyed times of relative peace, they knew that it couldn’t last. Every moment was poisoned by the thought that their children were not their own to keep. They could not protect them from the block, just as they couldn’t protect their husbands from the lash or their wives from the lusts of their enslavers. Coates paints the psychological pain of these atrocities in painstaking detail. Sometimes it’s difficult to read, but Coates demands that we do not look away.
The whole injunction of The Water Dancer is to remember. We, as individuals, as a nation, must remember. We must remember the people who were lost, the lives that were destroyed, the sins that were committed. I read an article recently that listed some of the major U.S. buildings that were built by the labor of enslaved people: Mount Vernon, Wall Street, the White House, the Capitol Building, the Smithsonian, Trinity Church, Harvard Law School. There are more. We live in a society that was literally built on the backs of people, men, women, and children, who had their lives and their families stolen from them. We forget this at our peril.
I’m not sure why I’ve been reading such heavy stuff lately, but it all seems important and it all seems incredibly urgent. I knew The Water Dancer couldn’t wait any longer. You’ve got to read this one. I know it’s hard, but we can’t look away. We’ve got to remember.
