The Water Dancer

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Completed 3/20/2021, Reviewed 3/20/2021
4 stars

I’ve been on a run of strange, beautiful novels lately, and this one is right up there with them.  It’s about slavery in pre-Civil War Virginia and the Underground Railroad mixed with magical realism.  It tells the tale of one’s man journey into discovering himself and his past so that he can affect the lives of the slaves around him.  The author is known for his non-fiction, and to be honest, it reads like good non-fiction with magical realism woven into it.  At times, I felt like the plot meandered without much direction until the magical realism really kicked in.  But the reading experience was simply marvelous.  

Hiram Walker grew up a slave on a plantation in Virginia.  He has an amazing memory, remembering everything he witnesses or has told to him, except for one thing.  He doesn’t remember his mother.  She was sold off the plantation when he was eight or nine and he has suppressed these memories because of the pain of her leaving.  One day he tries to escape with the woman he loves, but is betrayed by a freed slave.  However, he is rescued in a curious fashion and becomes part of the Underground Railroad.  He is chosen for this task because has the gift of Conducting.  When he experiences a memory or tells its story, a path or bridge across water is created that lets him travel across distances.  The Underground uses Conductors to help free slaves still in captivity.

This is another one of those books where the prose is so wonderful, you want to read every word.  So it took me a while to get through this book.  I couldn’t read it very quickly.  My one complaint with the book though is that sometimes, the description and the action flowed into each other so seamlessly that I missed things and had to go back and reread.  And I completely missed the first time Hiram experienced the Conducting when he was drowning in the Goose River.  It might have been that he didn’t understand it, so it wasn’t explained very well, or I didn’t understand it so I didn’t comprehend it very well.  I finally got it later in the book when he was consciously experiencing the Conducting.

The characterization was great.  Hiram was a stoic, all-observing narrator.  The characters around him were passionate, but he was very guarded.  For a while, the only emotion we really get out of him is anger, justifiably so.  But he stays pretty stoic through most of the book.  Thena, the woman who raised him after his mother was sold, and Sophia, the woman he loves, are very passionate, very relatable characters.  

The book raised several questions for me, most particularly was why Coates used the terms Tasked and Quality to describe slaves and masters.  I thought it was amusing that at the end of my e-copy of the book, there are discussion questions and that’s the first one.  I also didn’t realize until part of the way through that the Underground meant the Underground Railroad.  It also took me a while to realize that the appearance of a character named Harriet was Harriet Tubman.  But I thought it was brilliant that the gift of transporting was called Conducting.  

I give this book four stars out of five.  I think part of the reason was I that I was emotionally guarded while reading the book, probably because Hiram was as well.  Like him, I didn’t let myself feel really attached to what was going on.  So there was no emotional element to my appreciation of the book, which is what pushes books from four to five stars for me.  But it is a tremendous book, with the magical realism interwoven into the historical fiction in a very creative way.  I have one of his non-fiction books, which I look forward to reading later this year.