Dancing with Family
Conduction! Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer follows its protagonist Hiram Walker from a plantation in Virginia to Philadelphia and back again. The Water Dancer personifies everything to be loved about historical fiction—thoroughgoing research into the historical context and time period mixed with a little bit of magic. What’s historical fiction without a little razzle-dazzle? As a result the book teaches readers a little bit about slavery in Virginia (and the antebellum south more broadly) and the Underground Railroad, while Coates explores other issues such as family, kinship, love, violence, malice, revenge, morality, and of course, the Black body.
Readers are introduced to “the water dancer” (Rose) and Hiram’s family structure in a scene very early on where Hiram and his half-brother Maynard wind up ensnared in the River Goose. We learn that Hiram was born unto a slave mother and their owner Howell Walker. Hiram’s consanguinity is thus complex. On one hand, his position affords him privilege and proximity to whiteness that other slaves at Lockless do not have. On another, Hiram is still slave born and thereby, property of Lockless born under “the Task”. For Hiram, family is an unstable concept. He struggles with comparisons of his father’s treatment of Maynard and of himself. He wavers from early desires to leave Lockless to wanting to return there later for the sake of ties that readers may identify as familial—with Sophia and Thena, respectively.
Hiram’s memories of Thena and the promises he made to Sophia, drive his ability to “conduct” back to Virginia from his staton in Philadelphia. The power of conduction factors in prominently throughout The Water Dancer. Conduction is the power to traverse across great distances, carrying passengers from one place to another. The fact that Hiram shares this power with Harriet Tubman in novel prompts curious questions as to what the inclusion of a historical figure of Tubman’s stature adds or takes away from the novel? Ultimately, in addition to being a master escape artist, Harriet serves as a mentor and a guide for Hiram as he learns to use his power of conduction. Playing on the ways that electricity can be conducted through a power source and water, she teaches Hiram that conduction requires water. Even more, she teaches, that the source of conduction power is memory as saying that “We forget nothing you and I…To forget is to truly slave. To forget is to die… For memory is the chariot and memory is the way, and memory is the bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom.”
Hiram makes mention of how excellent his memory through out the novel, for example he says “I remember everything I tell you, I remember it all, all except those moments I gave up memory.” Hiram’s memory was a gift was unparalleled in the book. Yet, the power of Hiram’s memory is what emphasizes the things he forgets—Rose (his mother) and his beatings by Ryland’s hounds, for example. The fact that Hiram struggles to remember his mother (but for the second hand stories he receives from other characters in the novel) connects memory to family and the failing to remember one’s family as a powerlessness before the Task.
“Family” appears in other ways as well. For example, all of the passengers set to be conducted on the Underground Railroad, all seemed to be moved by considerations of family. Folks wanted to be conducted to get back to families that they were separated from; they also wanted to be conducted to protect children and future families from the violence of the Task. Family also clouds Harriet’s pristine judgments in some cases leading her to the vociferation “Family gets a hold of your heart and starts to twist it and well what often comes of it is not wise.” Using family ties as a motivation for conduction foregrounds Coates belief that while folks had won wars of politics, “they have actually lost the wars of history and memory.” Conduction being conducted through the power of memory casts readers into hyper-reflexive spaces where past events are its focal point.
There is also a juxtaposition between biological family and kinship. For example, Thena informs Hiram early in the novel that “I am more your mother, than that man sitting up on that horse is your father.” And, when Hiram arrives in Philadelphia he chooses his family amongst the folks working at the station there. All of this points to family to be a flexible yet, rich, concept throughout The Water Dancer.
Coates strings readers along the alleged love affair with Sophia who spends the majority of the novel apart from Hiram. The presence of the relationship between the two generates questions of the possibility of long distance love. In their time away from one another, Sophia gives birth to a child that is not Hiram’s. Hiram is left to explore love in her absences and to critically re-think his notion of love and the nuclear family and the book leaves an open end in what is to become of Hiram and Sophia’s relationship. Aside from his relationship with Sophia, Hiram thinks of romantic love only couple of times in the work. Early on, he reflects and thinks that “[lovers] would fight and draw knives, they would kill each other before being without each other”; and later at the convention in Philadelphia, he narrates that the pinnacle of the conventions radicalism was the insistence that he “and everyone else rebuff even the bonds of marriage which was itself a kind if property, a kind of slavery, and ally myself with the doctrine of ‘Free Love.” These couple of reflections and the relationship with Sophia leaves readers wondering whether The Water Dancer actually needed them at all in the development of the story as it is not immediately clear what they add.
Ultimately, The Water Dancer’s categorization as historical fiction is ultimately what situates this recommendation. That is, for readers who enjoy fiction or fantasy, this book is a solid contribution and is an enjoyable read.
