Ta-Nehisi Coates Wades Into Literary Fiction with 'The Water Dancer'

Goodreads: Can you talk a little about the genesis of this story. Where did it all begin?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I started on it probably in 2008 or 2009. I'd finished my first book, The Beautiful Struggle, and my agent suggested I should try fiction. I took that to heart. At the time, I was doing a lot of reading about slavery and the Civil War. I was always a huge admirer of E.L. Doctorow and how he almost reinvented history; he made history his in a certain kind of way. Ragtime was a favorite book. Billy Bathgate. Later on I'd read The Waterworks.

Like Doctorow, I had a few genre influences. I was a huge comic book fan as a child. Even as a young person, I was very interested in this notion of heroes—who got to be a hero and who did not. All of that came together with the Civil War research, because you can't read that and not realize that a lot of the people who were held up as heroic were in fact straight-up white supremacists.

So I had all these ideas working on me at the same time when I started this book. It was a very different book when I began. I basically spent the last ten years working on it to various degrees.

GR: The story folds in elements of the supernatural, which really opens things up in a way. There's that sense of cosmic significance that you sometimes get in speculative fiction, but we don't often see that in literary historical novels.

TC: Well, one thing that's happened in recent years is that we have a number of writers—Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, Colson Whitehead—people whose influences are not simply the traditional literary canon. I think it comes out in the work. I know it comes out in mine. I read a lot of science fiction and comic books as a kid.

I didn't understand—I still don't understand—why incorporating magic or science fiction is somehow against the rules in literature. Those stories are somehow thought to evade the basic questions that literature tries to concern itself with—the nature of being human. But in fact, in the best cases that I can think of, that's just what [speculative fiction] does. It felt natural to me to incorporate these elements into the story.

GR: You have all these intriguing terms in the book—the slaves call themselves the Tasked, and the slaveholders are the Quality. Then there's the whole concept of Conduction. Were these terms drawn from the historical record somewhere?

TC: No, although they're kind of taken from history. I'm a huge history fan. The notion of Quality—that's taken from the social structure of the Old South, where there were slaveholding whites that were allegedly of a higher class. Whites that were poorer did not hold slaves. The term Conduction—that comes from the language of the Underground Railroad. The people that worked together there, they called themselves "conductors." That was their language, and I just kind of flipped it around.

GR: The Underground Railroad details are fascinating. The book actually reads like an espionage thriller at times, especially toward the end.

TC: The period of slavery in this country is potentially the seed of some of America's greatest adventure stories. And those stories haven't been told. I'm thinking of stories like Ellen Craft and her husband, William. They escaped enslavement by disguising themselves—Ellen disguised herself as a white man, and her husband disguised himself as her servant. There's an allusion to this in the book.

My contention is that this would make for a great historical spy novel, for instance. There's so much within the texture of enslavement that provides the seed for great stories and great literature. But because of the history of white supremacy in this country, we move these stories around, we put them in other places. Like, take Mad Max: Fury Road. I loved Fury Road, but think of it—here's a story about runaway slaves. That's basically what that movie is about, but you don't see one black person.

So many of the themes you find in the black struggle—and not that they're black themes, these are human themes—but they're often shifted and moved into other places and stories. Once I realized that so much material was here to draw from, it really became natural to write the book and do it this way. I didn't want people to feel like they were watching an after-school special or a documentary. I wanted to tell it like an adventure story.

GR: The story is told from Hiram's point of view, so we're behind his eyes and getting all the description in his voice, which is this kind of old-timey African American vernacular. It's great, but it's so different from your writing voice that I'm used to from your journalism and essays. It's incredible how you maintain that for 400 pages—that's some kind of magic right there....

TC: Oh, thank you, but one thing to keep in mind is that I was a poet before I was a journalist. My first serious writing was poetry. I thought that's where I was going to go professionally. It was only later that I turned to journalism.

But the impulse was always the same. I never lost that. I think it's probably there to some degree in my nonfiction writing. But with fiction, you have to take it to another level. You're freed from the gravity of reality—you know, actual nonfiction events. In addition, I spent the past four years writing comic books. So I've been exercising that muscle, too.

GR: Are you still writing the Black Panther series?

TC: Yeah, and Captain America.

GR: There's this idea that's been in the culture for a while, that comic book superhero stories—or movies like Star Wars—they've become a kind of new mythology, a new way to tell ourselves the important stories all over again. Did you find that your comic book work helped with writing the novel?

TC: Yeah, it did, it did. By the last draft of the book, I'd been doing the comics for about three years and I knew a lot of new things about story—I'd been thinking a lot about story. So yes, definitely so.

I have to say, I love it. I love it as an art form. I'm not talking about the movies or the TV series; I mean the actual comic books. Once you understand what people are really doing with that form—the people who are really good at it—it becomes even more profound.

GR: Were you into reading as a really little kid, and do you remember the first books that hooked you?

TC: Yeah, I was. I learned to read when I was, like, four years old. My mama was a schoolteacher, so I learned to read before I went to school. Two things I remember: Probably the first book I recall reading was a Choose Your Own Adventure. Remember those?

GR: Oh, totally!

TC: Man, I can still see it. I can still see the haunted house one that I read. I also had a set of encyclopedias, World Book encyclopedias. I've always been into reading those, even as a really, really young child. I was very into Childcraft books. My mom used to have me subscribe to these children's magazines, like Ranger Rick.

And I played Dungeons & Dragons as a very young child. There's a lot of stuff in those books, a lot of mythology. You've got to read a lot to play Dungeons & Dragons. I spent a lot of time getting lost in those novels.

GR: Did you read the Dragonlance books?

TC: I read Dragonlance, yeah. And the rule books, too—the source books. You had to read a lot of those to really understand. I mean, that's some incredible word-building in those books.

I'll tell you, one thing you needed—one thing that is required with Dungeons & Dragons—is time. When I was a kid, I was in a role-playing club with my brother and we'd sit there all day reading. Like, all day, come home at five or six and start reading some more.

GR: One last question: When you read for pleasure, do you read one book at a time or do you have multiple books going? So far, it's around fifty-fifty on this—people seem to land on one side or the other.

TC: I prefer one at a time. I gotta finish a book before I move on, or I'm afraid I'll never finish. So yeah—gotta do one at a time.