The Water Dancer

This is at least 3 books. It is a rousing adventure story with well developed characters, it is a polemic about the evils of slavery, and it is a fantasy novel. Coates is a skilled writer and I spent the first third of the book admiring his use of language. At some point I became immersed in it, and stopped remarking on the cleverness. I was listening to the audiobook, and there are definitely places where call-response spoken word and snatches of song enriched that immersion. The fantasy element is relatively small, if important as a plot device / metaphor. Probably nobody reading this needs to be convinced of the general notion that slavery was (and is) evil, but at least for me, reading this helped me internalize some of the specifics. The hero is "owned" by his white father, the same father who sold his mother into even more brutal conditions further south. This shocking family situation is actually rather commonplace for the people in the book. I doubt that inhumanity is invented.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a beautiful debut novel, conveying the emotional toll and outrageous wrongs suffered by people who were forced into slavery in the American South. The story emphasises the importance of memory. Without memory, there is no life story, no collective knowledge, no culture. For a group of people who have no rights at all, who can be sold away from their family members and traditions, memory is tantamount to a sense of identity.

In this novel, Coates refers to slaves as The Tasked, while the plantation owners are Quality. The main character is Hiram Walker, the Tasked son of a plantation owner, who was brutally separated from his mother when his father sold her away. Hiram becomes the servant of Maynard, his Quality half-brother, and they are perfect foils; Maynard is a coarse, slow witted boor whose character makes the word "quality" suitably sarcastic. In contrast, it is obvious from the beginning that Hiram is gifted in many ways, including a phenomenal memory.

Hiram eventually becomes involved with The Underground Railroad, and leads people to freedom with a skill called conduction. This is magical, and involves oral story telling on the part of the conductor. As Harriet Tubman tells Hiram, "Memory is the chariot and memory is the way." This seems spiritual, a way to acknowledge the world while rising above it.

This is a thought provoking novel with well written characters, and I recommend it highly.