The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“You know that feeling you had for this woman Sophia?” he asked. “You know how it rips you to pieces wondering what became of her? You know all the moments you’ve lost wondering how you might have done things different? And you know all the nights you’ve sat up wondering if she were even alive? Hiram, that is the feeling that marks an entire nation held down. A whole country looking up wondering for their fathers and sons, for their mothers and daughters, cousins, nephews, friends, lovers.

I heard this the way an old man hears a young unrequited love attest to their true feelings from that bygone era—the mix of trivia and nostalgia, an ancient wound reawakened by the rain, the ghost of a feeling, once deeply held, but now only a stray memory from what seemed another lifetime.

Corrine Quinn was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. 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.