According to Annalisa Quinn (2019), 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.
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 (Hilon, H. 2020).
The main character in the story was Hiram. 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 TheUnderground 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 (Hilon, H. 2020).
According to Constance, G. (2019), the story is rich, intellectually interesting metaphor, if nowhere near as elegantly deployed as the similar metaphor in Beloved that Coates is cribbing from. (It’s a high bar!) And the honesty Coates is striving for thematically is fully supported by Hiram’s relationship with the rest of his family: his father, who is also the master of Lockless, and his brother, who Hiram is Tasked with serving. Slave narratives often muddy the relationships between enslaved people and their white fathers — “The opinion was ... whispered that my master was my father,” is all Frederick Douglass says on the subject — but Hiram always refers to Mr. Walker as “my father,” never as “my master.” He is always aware that he is descended both from the men for whom Lockless was built and the enslaved people who were forced to build it.
The Water Dancer is a novel in which everyone talks in basically the same way, which means everyone talks in essays. And that, in turn, means it is nearly impossible to get a real feel for any of the characters besides Hiram, because all of them are more or less interchangeable: They’re just walking illustrations of various intellectual ideas that Coates would like to parse out. Ta-Nehisi Coates is not quite there yet. He doesn’t have the kind of command over the novel as a medium that will let him meld disparate genres together; he doesn’t seem to care about his characters as people rather than as devices he can use to convey ideas; he doesn’t really understand how to keep a plot moving. What Coates can do — and what he does better than nearly anyone — is build an argument that resounds with clarity and moral urgency, and craft a sentence beautiful enough to take your breath away. It will be incredible to see what he can do with those tools a few books from now.
REFERENCES
Annalisa, Q. (September 26, 2019). In 'The Water Dancer,' Ta-Nehisi Coates Creates Magical Alternate History. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764373265/in-the-water-dancer-memory-is-the-path-to-freedom.
Constance, G. (September 24, 2019). Ta-Nehisi Coates is a great writer. His new book The Water Dancer is not a great novel. Retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/24/20879736/water-dancer-review-ta-nehisi-coates.
Hilon, H. (January 31, 2020). The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – a slave’s story. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/31/the-water-dancer-ta-nehisi-coates-review.
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