The Water Dancer
.png) First edition cover | |
| Author | Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|---|---|
| Audio read by | Joe Morton[1] |
| Cover artist | Calida Garcia Rawles[2] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical fiction, science fiction |
| Publisher | One World |
Publication date | September 24, 2019 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 407 |
| ISBN | 978-0-399-59059-7 |
| 813/.6 | |
| LC Class | PS3603.O17 W38 2019 |
The Water Dancer is the debut novel by Ta-Nehisi Coates, published on September 24, 2019, by Random House under its One World imprint. It is a surrealist story set in the pre–Civil War South, concerning a superhuman protagonist named Hiram Walker who possesses photographic memory, but who cannot remember his mother, and, late in the novel, is able to transport people over long distances by using a power known as "conduction". This power is based in the power of memory and storytelling and can fold the Earth like fabric and allows him to travel across large areas via waterways.[3]
The novel debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list and was selected for the revival of Oprah's Book Club.
Plot[edit]
Hiram Walker was born into slavery during the Antebellum South on a declining tobacco plantation in Virginia named Lockless. He is the mixed-race son of a white plantation owner and a black mother who was sold away by his father when Hiram was young. The local community consists of the enslaved ("the Tasked"); the landowners ("the Quality"); and the low-class whites ("the Low"). Hiram has an extraordinary photographic memory but is unable to remember his mother. However, in one instance when Hiram is driving across a bridge he suddenly has a vision of his mother dancing. When the vision ends, his carriage has fallen into the water. His (white) half brother drowns, but Hiram is transported out of the water. He learns that his miracle survival was a result of a superhuman ability he has called conduction, which transports himself and others across impossible distances. This conduction is triggered by powerful memories: those of his mother. He eventually becomes involved with the Underground Railroad. Hiram escapes to Philadelphia, where he encounters Box Brown and Jarm Logue. He eventually comes to meet a famous member of the Underground named Moses, who also has the power of Conduction. Moses is later revealed to be Harriet Tubman.
Background[edit]
Coates began writing the novel around 2008 and 2009. He had recently finished his first memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, and was encouraged by his agent to write fiction. At the time, Coates was extensively researching slavery and the Civil War. He was influenced by author E. L. Doctorow and "how he almost reinvented history; he made history his in a certain kind of way". Coates cited Doctorow's novels Ragtime (1975) and Billy Bathgate (1989) as early influences and recalled later reading The Waterworks. He was also influenced by his childhood love of comic books and, in general, the concept of heroes. While researching the Civil War, he was frustrated with how "a lot of the people who were held up as heroic were in fact straight-up white supremacists." Coates worked on the novel for a decade in "various degrees".[4]
Reception[edit]
The Water Dancer received favorable reviews, with a cumulative "Positive" rating at the review aggregator website Book Marks, based on 42 book reviews from mainstream literary critics.[5] The novel debuted at number one on The New York Times fiction best-seller list for the week ending September 28, 2019.[6] The novel was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the first book for the revival of her Oprah's Book Club on Apple TV+. She called it "one of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. Right up there in the Top 5."[7][8][9]
Publishers Weekly gave the novel a rave review, writing, "In prose that sings and imagination that soars, Coates further cements himself as one of this generation's most important writers, tackling one of America's oldest and darkest periods with grace and inventiveness. This is bold, dazzling, and not to be missed."[10] David Fear of Rolling Stone gave the novel a rave review, saying it exceeded expectations for a debut novel and writing, "What's most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. [...] There’s an urgency to his remembrance of things past that brims with authenticity, testifying to centuries of bone-deep pain. It makes The Water Dancer feel timeless and instantly canon-worthy."[11] Dwight Garner of The New York Times gave the novel a positive review, calling it "a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler."[12] Kirkus Reviews gave the novel a favorable review, but felt it was "less intensely realized" than Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2015).[13]
Constance Grady of Vox praised the "clarity of Coates's ideas and the poetry of his language" but largely panned the novel as a "mess" with monotonous characters and lacking a strong plot development to make up for it. She criticized the movement between the plot-driven and allegorical storytelling modes as "whiplash-inducing".[14] Shah Tazrian Ashrafi of The Daily Star, while complimenting its "lyrical prose", felt that the novel "left [him] craving more action and high-geared moments of grief, suspense, climax, and character development."[15]
References[edit]
- ^ Canfield, David (September 24, 2019). "Listen to Joe Morton read Oprah's Book Club pick The Water Dancer". Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
- ^ de León, Concepción (February 12, 2019). "A First Look at the Cover of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Forthcoming Novel". The New York Times. Retrieved October 1, 2019.
- ^ Quinn, Annalisa (September 26, 2019). "In 'The Water Dancer,' Ta-Nehisi Coates Creates Magical Alternate History". NPR. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
- ^ Cybil (September 1, 2019). "Ta-Nehisi Coates Wades Into Literary Fiction with 'The Water Dancer'". Goodreads. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
- ^ "The Water Dancer". Book Marks. Retrieved September 23, 2021.
- ^ "Combined Print & E-Book Fiction - Best Sellers". The New York Times. October 13, 2019.
- ^ Morgan, David (September 23, 2019). "Oprah's new book club pick: Ta-Nehisi Coates' debut novel "The Water Dancer"". CBS News. Retrieved October 1, 2019.
- ^ Rahmanan, Anna Ben Yehuda (September 23, 2019). "Oprah Winfrey Selects 'The Water Dancer' by Ta-Nehisi Coates As First Pick For New Book Club". Forbes. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
- ^ Hipes, Patrick (March 25, 2019). "Apple Shows Off Original Series For First Time With Sizzle Reel – Watch". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved March 27, 2019.
- ^ "Fiction Book Review: The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates". Publishers Weekly. June 11, 2019. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
- ^ Fear, David (September 24, 2019). "'The Water Dancer': Ta-Nehisi Coates' American Odyssey". Rolling Stone. Retrieved October 1, 2019.
- ^ Garner, Dwight (September 20, 2019). "With 'The Water Dancer,' Ta-Nehisi Coates Makes His Fiction Debut". The New York Times. Retrieved October 1, 2019.
- ^ "The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates". Kirkus Reviews. July 1, 2019. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
- ^ Grady, Constance (September 24, 2019). "Ta-Nehisi Coates is a great writer. His new book The Water Dancer is not a great novel". Vox. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
- ^ Ashrafi, Shah Tazrian (April 16, 2021). "To drown is to be free in Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'The Water Dancer'". The Daily Star. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES #1 BESTSELLER
OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK
'One of the best books I have ever read in my entire life. I haven't felt this way since I first read Beloved . . .' Oprah Winfrey
Lose yourself in the stunning debut novel everyone is talking about - the unmissable historical story of injustice and redemption that resonates powerfully today
Hiram Walker is a man with a secret, and a war to win. A war for the right to life, to family, to freedom.
Born into bondage on a Virginia plantation, he is also born gifted with a mysterious power that he won't discover until he is almost a man, when he risks everything for a chance to escape. One fateful decision will carry him away from his makeshift plantation family and into the heart of the underground war on slavery...
'A transcendent work from a crucial political and literary artist' Diana Evans
'I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates' Toni Morrison
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The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – a slave’s story
This ambitious debut novel from the leading American thinker is set on a Virginia plantation
The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates
The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Photograph: The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Helon Habila
Fri 31 Jan 2020
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s eagerly awaited and ambitious debut novel is set in pre-civil war Virginia, on a slave plantation called Lockless in Starfall, Elm County. The stars of Lockless and other neighbouring plantations are indeed beginning to fade and fall: the slave owners, through a mixture of ineptitude and greed, have worked their lands to exhaustion and are now reduced to selling off their slaves to maintain their lives of idle luxury. Virginia is a hierarchy; at the top are the Quality, white slave owners with the power of life and death over their chief possession, their slaves. Next are the Low – poor whites, mostly uneducated, employed by the Quality to supervise the plantations and keep the enslaved in check. After them are the Freed, former slaves who were able to buy their own freedom. At the very bottom are the Tasked, the enslaved.
The main character and narrator, Hiram, is no ordinary slave. He is gifted with, among other things, a photographic memory; he is also son to Mr Howell Walker, the plantation owner. Howell acknowledges Hiram as his son; he takes him out of the fields and makes him a house slave, sometimes letting him entertain dinner guests with memory tricks, and even assigning to him the same teacher as his other son – and heir – the foolish, bumbling Maynard. This open recognition by his father encourages Hiram to believe in a special destiny for himself, and “in my quiet moments, to imagine myself in their ranks” – this despite constant warnings from Thena, an older slave and Hiram’s adoptive mother, that to the Quality he will always remain a slave.
Sure enough, as soon as Hiram comes of age, Howell cuts his private lessons and assigns him to be a manservant to his own half-brother, Maynard. But, just as Howell overturned Hiram’s dreams, fate also overturns Howell’s dream when Maynard and Hiram are involved in a freak accident, their carriage tumbling into the turbulent river Goose. A mysterious power transports Hiram out of the water and deposits him elsewhere on his father’s plantation. He has been Conducted.
The revelation of Hiram’s gift of Conduction is one of the most important outcomes of the accident. Conduction, we discover, is the ability to magically transport oneself, and others if necessary, from one place to another. It will take Hiram a while to master and control it, but because of his potential, he is recruited by the local Underground Railroad cell, run by the outwardly prim and proper southern belle Corinne, Maynard’s fiancee, who is herself a rich plantation owner. The Underground Railroad refers to a series of safe houses and routes running from the slave-owning south to the free north, used by slaves trying to escape their bondage. In his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly pushes the metaphor of the railroad into the literal sphere by making the escaping slaves catch real trains in real underground stations as they make their way north.
In The Water Dancer, Coates uses a similar trope: he takes the secret wish of every enslaved person – the ability to magically escape bondage by teleportation – and makes it a reality. The myth of slaves escaping from plantations by swimming or flying back to Africa is a popular one in African American folklore; it populates songs and folktales, from where it makes its way into the writings of authors such as Toni Morrison. In The Water Dancer Coates hands Hiram, and a few others, this power. Coates also honours the achievement of the slaves by pointing out how indispensable they are to the masters, and to the whole American economy: “The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them – we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition for their lives.” In comparison the “gentleman” plantation owner is shown as weak, greedy, ineffectual, keeping control of the enslaved not by any inherent superiority but by terror and systemic white privilege.
Most of the novel follows Hiram in his efforts to master his powers of Conduction. To Conduct successfully, he has to tap into his past and unlock his childhood memories, because Conduction is powered by such recollections. For the enslaved, memory, both individual and collective, kept alive in stories and songs and dances, is a way of survival by connecting to a past that was free and dignified, going back all the way to Africa. The book, in this sense, is the story of Hiram’s apprenticeship as a Conductor. He has many mentors, both white and black, most of them agents of the Underground, but his most significant mentor, herself gifted with Conduction powers, is the abolitionist Harriet Tubman, presented here as a rather idealised figure – Moses and Jesus all wrapped in one.
The Water Dancer is partially fashioned after the popular slave narratives of the late 19th century, and like most slave narratives it is a coming-of-age story, a movement from “boyhood” to adulthood, from servitude to freedom, mirrored in the movement of the enslaved from the southern plantation to the free territories of the north. When he eventually arrives in Pennsylvania, a free man, Hiram is amazed to see other blacks living freely and in charge of their lives, and this makes him more determined to master his powers of Conduction. He yearns to go back to Lockless and free his beloved Sophia, and his adoptive mother, Thena.
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A cemetery designated for slaves in the Middleton Place plantation, South Carolina.
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Surprisingly, he also finds himself missing the plantation, and the paradox of home is another central theme in the novel. During his earlier episodes of Conduction, Hiram will find himself transported back to Lockless – because it is home and, logically, home is where he should be safest. And yet, in reality, he is never safe there; he is a slave, a prisoner. Such are the psychological disorientations the institution of slavery exact on the enslaved. Hiram does eventually go back to Lockless, setting up the novel’s climactic ending.
In his wildly successful book of nonfiction, Between the World and Me, and in his opinion pieces for the Atlantic, Coates has proved himself a keen and insightful observer of racial and cultural politics in America, and has been described by many critics as the natural successor to James Baldwin. Some of the themes in his nonfiction writing, especially his criticism of America’s unbridled capitalism, are raised in The Water Dancer. In Pennsylvania Hiram attends a progressive convention, where speakers compare child labour and the subjugation of women to slavery: “Slavery was the root of all struggle … factories enslaved the hands of children … child bearing enslaved the bodies of women … and rum enslaved the souls of men. In that moment I understood … that this secret war was waged against something more than the Taskmaster of Virginia, that we sought not merely to improve the world but to remake it.” Slavery, Coates seems to be pointing out, isn’t just about the past, it is about the present as well; not only about America, but about everywhere such inequalities exist.
Perhaps the most powerful and lasting image in this beautifully executed novel is that of the enslaved – or the Tasked, as Coates prefers to call them – who take their destiny into their own hands. They refuse to suffer in dignified silence, or sing hymns and hope for divine intervention; in fact, Coates’s vision here is a very secular one. Sometimes he seems to be making a subtle dig at faith-based abolitionist organisations; for if the church was helpful in freeing the slaves, it had also been complicit in justifying slavery.
Helon Habila’s Travellers is published by Hamish Hamilton. The Water Dancer is published by Hamish Hamilton (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
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The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – time traveller on the Underground Railroad
Magical realism meets real life in the acclaimed journalist’s debut novel about American slaves escaping to the north
Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘illuminates the degradations heaped upon recaptured runaways’
Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘illuminates the degradations heaped upon recaptured runaways’. Photograph: Paul Marotta/Getty Images
Colin Grant
Sun 2 Feb 2020 22.00 AEDT
62
Aformer national correspondent for the Atlantic magazine, Ta-Nehisi Coates is among the most revered and widely read intellectuals in the US. His bleak but scintillating book about race, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), was a passionate collection of essays focusing on the sharp divisions and overpowering emotions – from uplifting to ugly – that surfaced when Barack Obama became his country’s first black president. What white America fears most is black competence, Coates reasoned. Black excellence turns that fear into paranoia.
Coates alerted readers to his talents two years earlier with the National Book award-winning Between the World and Me, a letter to his then 14-year-old son in which he warned about the perils of being African American. It was acclaimed by Toni Morrison, who celebrated Coates as the long-awaited heir to James Baldwin.
Like Baldwin, Coates’s elegant nonfiction is haunted by the dark legacy of the American civil war. Little wonder, then, that slavery is the subject of his first novel.
As a cultural analyst, Coates is noted for his stylish prose, but here the writing is spare
In common with Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which draws on the life of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who hid for years in a low-ceilinged attic in which she couldn’t stand, The Water Dancer makes use of a number of real-life narratives. For one, there are parallels between the protagonist, Hiram, and the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Born in Maryland to a raped, enslaved woman whom he barely remembered after she was sold to another plantation, Douglass was a child prodigy, famous for his extraordinary biography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which told of his escape from slavery to become a great orator and an advocate for emancipation.
Born on an antebellum plantation in Virginia named Lockless – whose community consists of the Quality (masters and mistresses) and the Tasked (enslaved) – Hiram is also the son of a slave master and slave, Rose, who is sold “down river”, leaving Hiram orphaned. Like Douglass, he is an exceptional child who has a gift for remembering everything. Everything, that is, except his own mother.
As a cultural analyst, Coates is noted for his stylish prose, but in The Water Dancer the writing is spare. Hiram considers slavery “a kind of fraud, which paints its executors as guardians at the gate, staving off African savagery”. Sophia, a fellow slave, who admires Hiram’s intellect, dreams of escaping with him: “We could go together. You are read and know of things far past Lockless.”
To escape they will need to evade the man-hunters, the trackers of runaways who “glorified in their power to reduce a man to meat”. The pornography of violence that characterised plantation life is approached with caution here and Coates’s descriptions of flogging – “upon the ocean of his back I saw the many voyages of [the overseer’s] whip” – are among the most memorable in the book. When Coates illuminates the degradations heaped upon recaptured runaways, he does so while ensuring they retain their dignity (“there were no chains... these men were more than bound, they were broken”).
The book’s title refers to an African folk tradition where women on plantations balanced jugs of water on their heads while dancing. In Coates’s telling, theirs is a ritual of remembrance, of the possibility of slipping the shackles of slavery, if not bodily then spiritually. Lockless’s dancers are the reincarnations of those captured Africans who managed to flee the slave ships by wading into the water “to sing and dance as they walked, that the water-goddess brought ’em here, and the water goddess would take ’em back home”. This fable-like quality informs much of the book.
As The Water Dancer progresses, it is increasingly shaped by the real-life saga of William Still’s The Underground Railroad Records (an 1872 book comprising the stories of slaves who escaped). Coates’s focus is on the strategies of the network of abolitionists who engineered passage of the enslaved from the “coffins” of southern plantations across the Mason-Dixon line to freedom in the north.
We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – on white supremacy
Read more
Having nearly drowned and been buried under a river, dug himself out, been recaptured and escaped again, Hiram joins forces with another character, the actual abolitionist Harriet Tubman, whose daring rescues feature prominently. Like Tubman, Hiram is blessed with a supernatural gift called “conduction”, triggered by powerful emotions and enabling him to travel great distances.
The description of conduction is The Water Dancer’s greatest strength – the author’s method of fictionalising the mystery of Tubman’s out-of-body hallucinations.
During episodes of stress (especially when helping others escape plantations), Hiram, too, is a passenger in his own body. Distances collapse as the Underground Railroad agents travel back in time and jump into the future, the “jump” achieved by the power of their stories: “It pulls from all our lives and all of our losses. All that feeling is called up, and on the strength of our remembrances, we are moved,” says Hiram.
In The Water Dancer Coates is attempting his own conduction – to make the terrible past real for modern readers. As Hiram says at the end of the book: “To forgive was irrelevant, but to forget was death.”
Colin Grant’s most recent book is Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation (Jonathan Cape).
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
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In 'The Water Dancer,' Ta-Nehisi Coates Creates Magical Alternate History
September 26, 201910:00 AM ET
ANNALISA QUINN
Twitter
The Water Dancer
The Water Dancer
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hardcover, 403 pagespurchase
In an essay on race and memory, Toni Morrison wrote of "the stress of remembering, its inevitability, [but] the chances for liberation that lie within the process." Ta-Nehisi Coates' new novel, The Water Dancer, is an experiment in taking Morrison's "chances for liberation" literally: What if memory had the power to transport enslaved people to freedom?
Coates is best known as a writer of nonfiction, including Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power, but with a new novel and his work on the Black Panther comic series, he is straying into speculative fiction. The results are mixed. At its best, The Water Dancer is a melancholic and suspenseful novel that merges the slavery narrative with the genres of fantasy or quest novels. But moments of great lyricism are matched with clichés and odd narrative gaps, and the mechanics of plot sometimes seem to grind and stall.
Coates' protagonist, Hiram Walker, can remember everything — faces, stories, facts — with photographic recall. But there is one exception: his mother, who was sold south when Hiram was 9 years old by his father, the owner of a fading Virginia plantation called Lockless.
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One day, when Hiram is driving across a bridge, he has a sudden vision of his mother dancing. Before he understands what is happening, the carriage is in the water. His brother drowns, but he is transported to safety.
Hiram learns that he has a power called conduction, a power shared by the great escape artist Harriet Tubman, whom enslaved people (in this novel, "the Tasked") call Moses. Conduction made the earth fold "like fabric," and on contact with water, Hiram can use it to transport himself and other people across great distances. But to do it, he needs to access a powerful source of feeling. He needs to remember his mother.
The summoning of personal feeling, faith or memory to access supernatural powers is a regular trope of fantasy. But for Coates, remembering is not only a personal process — it involves tapping into the collective culture, memory and pain of generations. In her essay, Morrison distinguishes between history and memory: When it comes to black Americans, inherited memory is more important, and more true, than history, because they are treated like "objects of history, not subjects within it." Coates writes too of "heroes who did not live in books, but in our talk; an entire world of our own, hidden away from them, and to be part of that world, I felt even then, was to be in on a secret, a secret that was in you." This collective memory is also part of the power needed to achieve conduction.
The book's most poignant and painful gift is the temporary fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and anguish, but going home.
For me, the most moving part of The Water Dancer was not Hiram's escape or the escape of the people he loves, but the possibility it offers of an alternate history. In epigraphs between chapters, Coates quotes poems and writings about people who were captured and drowned in the middle passage. We read lines from Robert Hayden: "Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter / to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under." Coates also quotes from a contemporary eyewitness: "The negroes, in the meantime, who had gotten off, continued dancing among the waves, yelling with all their might, what seemed to me a song of triumph."
With his metaphor of conduction by water, Coates gives us permission to read those scenes differently. The book's most poignant and painful gift is the temporary fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and anguish, but going home.
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43982054-the-water-dancer
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