The Water Dancer is a novel about slavery in America during the early nineteenth century. Anyone choosing to write about this topic has to decide early on how to convey the horror of slavery and how to bring the very familiar facts of the subject to life in a new way. Like Colson Whitehead in The Underground Railroad and Toni Morrison in Beloved, to name two relatively recent examples, Coates uses the supernatural to look afresh at this issue.
The novel is narrated by Hiram (Hi) Walker. Hi was born into slavery on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, the son of the white plantation owner and his black mother. His mother was sold when Hiram was young, as are increasing numbers of the plantation’s slaves as the value of the tobacco crop dwindles. Hiram has a photographic memory, with one big exception – he can remember almost nothing about his mother.
The novel opens when Hiram is in his late teens. Driving a carriage across a bridge he has a vision of his mother, which causes the carriage to crash into the river below, drowning his half-brother Maynard.
And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life, and though there were other bridges spanning the river Goose, they would have bound her and brought her across this one, because this was the bridge that fed into the turnpike that twisted its way through the green hills and down the valley before bending in one direction, and that direction was south.
Hiram miraculously survives, seemingly by being transported out of the river onto the bank. This incident introduces Hiram’s super-power which Coates calls ‘conduction’, the ability to use memory to transport himself and others through space, a power that he eventually uses to rescue himself and others from slavery.
I must admit to feeling conflicted about this unusual metaphor. The real members of the underground railroad did not have super-powers. Escaping from slavery must have been a terrifyingly dangerous undertaking. Does it diminish the risks people took to describe them in this way? Aren’t the bare facts of the enterprise sufficiently dramatic without the need to overlay a supernatural element to what happened? In all other respects the novel is entirely naturalistic, (Wikipedia ridiculously calls it ‘surrealist’, which is just plain wrong) and it is only with this one element, which it takes Hiram a long time to harness, that the paranormal is invoked. I had no similar concerns with Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, in which the railroad was strikingly imagined as a literal train, so why the reservations here? I assume the point being made is that remembering one’s ancestry is the key to a person’s strength and thus to one’s freedom. But is it? Remembering where we came from is important, of course, but freedom for the enslaved in nineteenth century Virginia was a much more urgent, practical matter of life and death, an urgency that seems largely missing in The Water Dancer, where freedom can be gained by holding hands and wishing hard. Remembering the past is surely far more important to today’s descendants of the enslaved – although even as I write that I recognise it is hardly my place to tell them what is and isn’t important to them!
Appropriately, the plot of The Water Dancer meanders. There’s nothing hurried in the series of events which takes Hiram out of Virginia into the underground railroad organisation, where he meets Harriet Tubman, who like him can ‘conduct’ people to freedom. Tubman – an almost mythical figure known as Moses – is convincingly sketched, and becomes a mentor to Hiram. He eventually makes his way back To his father’s plantation, with a plan to help others escape from slavery, but settles into a role as his father’s carer and seems in no hurry to leave.
Sadly I just really didn’t care that much about Hiram. He didn’t come alive as a character (unlike Harriet Tubman – she was very well realised and I would have been happy to spend a lot more time following her adventures). The horrors of slavery are not directly confronted in this novel – even to the extent of the euphemistic indirect language used. Being enslaved is described as being ‘tasked’, which seems to drain much of the historic impact from the original term. Similarly enforced prostitution is described as going to ‘the fancy’. In this version of slavery, when slaves run away they are captured and resold rather than the brutality described in other accounts of the period. Hiram is not recognised legally as his father’s son, but is called his son nonetheless, and given privileges that are closer to those of a domestic servant rather than a slave. Perhaps that’s the point. At one stage he attends an abolitionist rally and meets people campaigning for many other types of freedom – marriage, gender, work, religion. Coates identifies an early version of white guilt amongst the abolitionists Hiram meets in the North:
“All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”
Once Hiram discovers his conduction powers he does very little with them – it takes him almost all of the novel to perfect his abilities, and even then only one person is rescued. Similarly his photographic memory features only briefly in the novel – he uses it as a party trick before a gathering of Virginian slave-owners, who are impressed with his expertise. This scene like many others did not ring wholly true – surely the racist Southern gentry would have felt threatened by such an obvious demonstration of the enslaved’s intelligence, when their whole existence was predicated on the ideology that black people were sub-human?
I’ve got to be honest about my feelings about this book. There was plenty to enjoy, but the whole was much less than the sum of the parts. It had little or no suspense despite the extraordinarily dramatic setting, the plot dragged, and the supernatural elements seemed shoe-horned in for interest rather than forming the core of the novel. I hope there’s a lot more to come from this author and we can look back at this as a good first attempt, but of course that’s never guaranteed – we shall see.
The Reading Bug 