In Hi’s lifetime, his family’s plantation (Lockless) dwindles from its glory days when it was populated by many families of Tasked on the Street and in the Warren, to a small handful remaining in service in his father’s final years. The Quality sold their slaves south to the Deep South (“Natchez-way”) where they were deeper in “the coffin” of slavery. His mother, Rose, and his aunt, Emma, were born to the Task and both sent “Natchez-way.” As the Virginia soil gave way after generations of over-farming tobacco, plantation owners increasingly relied on the capital of human flesh.
Hiram’s grandmother, Santi Bess, was African-born.
Through Hiram’s stirring storytelling, Coates guides his reader through pain, trauma, love of life, and self-discovery among the Tasked, as well as the many reasons folks fought for abolition and toiled on the Underground.īoiled down, Hiram’s story is that of a child seeking to rebuild his disjointed memory in the wake of the family-wrecking that is the Task. Having visited Monticello previously, I could easily picture the Warren of passages below Big House and the Street down the hill a bit, as I read Coates’ descriptive prose. Throughout The Water Dancer, Coates employs a powerful vocabulary of slavery (“the Task”), in which slaves are “the Tasked,” landed whites are “Quality,” and poor whites are “Low.” Slave quarters become “the Street” or “the Warren” (under the big house). He remembers everything with near photographic recall, everything, that is, except his mother with whom he is parted as a young boy. Hi, the son of landed Virginia gentry, Howell Walker, and the water-dancing slave, Rose, sets himself apart early as a child capable of remembering every detail of a thing. This novel eloquently re-frames the Underground Railroad story, placing it in the intimate and profoundly personal experience of his protagonist, Hiram Walker.
From its first sentence-the rambling, fluid 100-word sentence/paragraph-Coates establishes The Water Dancer (both in diction and style) as a story about memory and one closely tied to water. Oprah’s Bookclub is doing a fantastic job (through Apple TV, Instagram, and other platforms) facilitating a discussion of this narrative-shifting book by hosting a readalong and interviewing Coates himself. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019) certainly deserves the critical and cultural acclaim it has garnered upon publication last month.
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