The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates: book review

The Water Dancer (2019) is mainly set on the plantations of Virginia during the Antebellum Period in America’s history.

Hiram Walker, the narrator, was nine years old when his mother Rose was taken away and sold. It was no secret that his father Howell Walker was the white master of Lockless and that he had a white brother – Maynard – ‘who luxuriated while I labored.’ Hiram lived with Thena and her family and was working on the Lockless tobacco plantation at the age of eleven.

Even at a young age, Hiram was planning for a better life; an escape. By thirteen, he was working and residing in the main house, remembering Thena’s advice: ‘they are not your family.’ She was trying to warn Hiram, but he says in hindsight, ‘my gift was memory, not wisdom.’

But he has more than a gift of memory – Hiram has a secret and a mysterious power that he will not discover until the time comes to escape.

First, he had to endure the insult of seven years as his brother Maynard’s personnal assistant – his personal slave; where ‘sloth was literal death’ while for Maynard sloth was his whole ambition.

The blue misty memory of his mother, the water dancer on the bridge, guides Hiram on and out of Virginia: ‘And I felt freedom, brief as it was, in those nights of flight … In running, I felt myself to be in a kind of defiance.’

Years later, when Hiram meets Kessiah, Thena’s oldest child, Hiram learns some home truths – she is ‘my bridge back to Virginia, my bridge to my mother, my bridge to Thena.’

This is the monumental, defiantly defining truth of injustice and redemption, when running free doesn’t mean being free. It begins powerfully, but some readers may find the magical realism aspects challenging in this historical novel.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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