Slavery -- Southern States -- History -- Fiction. |
Fantasy fiction. |
Historical fiction. |
Abolition of slavery |
Antislavery |
Enslavement |
Mui tsai |
Ownership of slaves |
Servitude |
Slave keeping |
Slave system |
Slaveholding |
Thralldom |
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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * From the National Book Award-winning author of Between the World and Me, a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.
"This potent book about America's most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist."-- San Francisco Chronicle
IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE * Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films
NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD * NAMED ONE OF PASTE 'S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time * NPR * The Washington Post * Chicago Tribune * Vanity Fair * Esquire * Good Housekeeping * Paste * Town & Country * The New York Public Library * Kirkus Reviews * Library Journal
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her--but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram's resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.
This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children--the violent and capricious separation of families--and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today's most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.
Praise for The Water Dancer
"Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me . So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations--and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer . . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . 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. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy." -- Rolling Stone
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power) makes his ambitious fiction debut with this wonderful novel that follows Hiram Walker, a boy with an extraordinary memory. Born on a Virginia plantation, he realizes at five that he has a photographic recall--except where it concerns his mother, Rose, who was sold and whom he can only reconstruct through what others tell him. Born to Rose and Howell Walker, master and owner of Lockless, the land Hiram works, Hiram is called up at age 12 to the house to serve Maynard, his half-brother. When the novel opens, Hiram is 19, and he and Maynard are on their way back to Lockless when the bridge they're traveling over collapses. Deep in the river, Hiram is barraged with visions of his ancestors, and finally a woman water-dancing, whom he recognizes as his mother. After he wakes up, mysteriously saved even as Maynard dies, Hiram yearns for a life beyond "the unending night of slavery." But when his plans to escape with Sophia, the woman he loves, are dashed by betrayal and violence, Hiram is inducted into the Underground, the secret network of agents working to liberate slaves. Valued for his literacy and for the magical skill the Underground believes he possesses, Hiram comes to learn that the fight for freedom comes with its own sacrifices and restrictions. 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. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Hiram Walker is the son of an enslaved woman and her slave master, owner of a prominent Virginia estate. When Hiram is nearly killed in a drowning accident, he detects an amazing gift he cannot understand or harness. He travels between worlds, gone but not gone, and sees his mother, Rose, who was sold away when he was a child. Despite this astonishing vision, he cannot remember much about Rose. His power and his memory are major forces that propel Hiram into an adulthood filled with the hypocrisy of slavery, including the requisite playacting that flavors a stew of complex relationships. Struggling with his own longing for freedom, Hiram finds his affiliations tested with Thena, the taciturn old woman who took him in as a child; Sophia, a young woman fighting against her fate on the plantation; and Hiram's father who obliquely acknowledges him as a son. Throughout his courageous journey north and participation in the underground battle for liberation, Hiram struggles to match his gift with his mission. Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power, 2017) brings his considerable talent for racial and social analysis to his debut novel, which captures the brutality of slavery and explores the underlying truth that slaveholders could not dehumanize the enslaved without also dehumanizing themselves. Beautifully written, this is a deeply and soulfully imagined look at slavery and human aspirations.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling MacArthur fellow Coates has an avid following and his turn to fiction will bring in even more readers.--Vanessa Bush Copyright 2019 Booklist
Guardian Review
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. 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.
Kirkus Review
The celebrated author of Between the World and Me (2015) and We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) merges magic, adventure, and antebellum intrigue in his first novel.In pre-Civil War Virginia, people who are white, whatever their degree of refinement, are considered "the Quality" while those who are black, whatever their degree of dignity, are regarded as "the Tasked." Whether such euphemisms for slavery actually existed in the 19th century, they are evocatively deployed in this account of the Underground Railroad and one of its conductors: Hiram Walker, one of the Tasked who's barely out of his teens when he's recruited to help guide escapees from bondage in the South to freedom in the North. "Conduction" has more than one meaning for Hiram. It's also the name for a mysterious force that transports certain gifted individuals from one place to another by way of a blue light that lifts and carries them along or across bodies of water. Hiram knows he has this gift after it saves him from drowning in a carriage mishap that kills his master's oafish son (who's Hiram's biological brother). Whatever the source of this power, it galvanizes Hiram to leave behind not only his chains, but also the two Tasked people he loves most: Thena, a truculent older woman who practically raised him as a surrogate mother, and Sophia, a vivacious young friend from childhood whose attempt to accompany Hiram on his escape is thwarted practically at the start when they're caught and jailed by slave catchers. Hiram directly confronts the most pernicious abuses of slavery before he is once again conducted away from danger and into sanctuary with the Underground, whose members convey him to the freer, if funkier environs of Philadelphia, where he continues to test his power and prepare to return to Virginia to emancipate the women he left behindand to confront the mysteries of his past. Coates' imaginative spin on the Underground Railroad's history is as audacious as Colson Whitehead's, if less intensely realized. Coates' narrative flourishes and magic-powered protagonist are reminiscent of his work on Marvel's Black Panther superhero comic book, but even his most melodramatic effects are deepened by historical facts and contemporary urgency.An almost-but-not-quite-great slavery novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT This ambitious fiction debut by social critic Coates (Between the World and Me) features a protagonist with what might be called superpowers, not surprising from the man who brought The Black Panther back to life. Son of an enslaved African American woman and her owner, Hiram Walker grew up with conditional freedom, charged with being his slow-witted white brother Maynard's handler. The book begins with Maynard's death and focuses mainly on Hiram's efforts to piece together what happened that fateful night and how he himself escaped Maynard's fate. In passages sometimes weighty with philosophizing, Hiram becomes involved with the Virginia Underground Railroad, discovering that he has a skill called conduction that allows him to transport runaway slaves, as well as his loved ones, to safety in the free states. The two vital components of conduction are water and memories, and like most of us, Hiram has some memories he'd rather not revisit. VERDICT Coates cites Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow as huge influences in writing this book, and the scope and seriousness on display here would make them both proud. The author can be didactic, unable to escape the weight of his message, but when he allows the action to unfold, the story becomes a work of wonder. Essential for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, 3/4/19.]--Stephen Schmidt, Greenwich Lib., CT