In 'The Water Dancer,' Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines a magical means to freedom
The best writers — the best storytellers, in particular — possess the enchanting, irresistible power to take the reader somewhere else. Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines the furthest reach of that power as a means to transcend borders and bondage in “The Water Dancer,” a spellbinding look at the impact of slavery that uses meticulously researched history and hard-won magic to further illuminate this country’s original sin.
In depicting the fall of the plantation, Coates provides something of a microcosm of the nation. “Eat up the land, then keep going,” one character muses about the plantation’s future. “Someday they gonna run out of land, and I don’t know what they’ll do then.” Passages like these in “The Water Dancer” shine a light from the past through the present. The book, however, offers much more than a relatively easy indictment of history. Exploring the loaded issues of race and slavery have became yet more fuel for today’s culture wars, but an underlying message of liberation through the embrace of history forms the true subject of “The Water Dancer.”
Hiram is taken to the free Northern city of Philadelphia, where Coates begins blurring the line between reality and fiction as Hiram encounters the real-life slave narratives of Box Brown and Jarm Logue and is taken in by the fictional White Brothers, who were inspired by ex-slave abolitionists William and Peter Still, according to a closing note by Coates.
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