The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I searched to remember her corrections, her affections, I found only smoke. She’d gone from that warm quilt of memory to the cold library of fact.

Some part of them has died, and like surgeons, they know that amputation must be immediate.

Bored whites were barbarian whites. While they played at aristocrats, we were their well-appointed and stoic attendants. But when they tired of dignity, the bottom fell out.

I was certain my father saw things as I did, and I wondered how wrong it must have felt to see the best of you emerge in this way, in the place you didn’t expect, indeed in the place your whole world depends on it never appearing.

We were better than them—we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.

I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown. Love was not concerned with any deep knowledge of its object, of their wants and dreams, but mainly with the joy felt in their presence and the sickness felt in their departure.

It was the strong association between the jail and the low whites who fed and served it that gave them the name Ryland’s Hounds. We feared them and hated them, perhaps more than we feared and hated the Quality who held us, for all of us were low, we were all Tasked, and we should be in union and arrayed against the Quality, if only the low whites would wager their crumbs for a slice of the whole cake.

The tree of our family was parted—branches here, roots there—parted for their lumber.

And where was I now running to? What is North but a word?

“But these fools, these Jeffersons, these Madisons, these Walkers, all dazzled by theory, well, I am convinced that the most degraded field-hand, on the most miserable plot in Mississippi, knew more of the world than any overstuffed, forth-holding American philosophe.

For eventually I began not simply to read but to write. At first it was merely a record of my studies. But soon this record expanded to my thoughts, and then from my thoughts to my impressions, so that I now possessed, not merely a record of my head, but of my heart. From where did such an idea originate?

I felt something new arising in me and the new thing was power. The power extended out from my right arm, projected itself through the pen, and shot out through the wilderness, right at the heart of those who condemned us.

There is a moment in the stormy lives of a few blessed colored people, a moment of revelation, when the sky opens up, the clouds part, and a streak of sun cuts through, conveying some infinite wisdom from above, and this moment comes not from Christian religion, but from the sight of a colored man addressing a white one as Raymond White now did as he turned to the white man.

She had taken the whip. But I was the one who was claiming to be wounded. I was supposed to love her. But all I was truly loving was my own regard.

Soldiers fight in war for all kinds of reasons, but they die because they cannot bear to live in the world as it is.

for where I once perceived chaos, I now saw a symphony in the city, in the low things in the alleys, in the abominable odor, in the great variance among the peoples, spilling out of their brick hovels, piling into the omnibus, heaving in the pewter shops, bickering in haberdasheries, haggling over groceries.

“My favorite season,” I said. “World is so beautiful this time of year. There’s a kinda peace that just falls on everything, even up here. It’s like summer wear the world out,

I was what I was and could no more choose my family, even a family denied me, than I could choose a country that denies us all the same.

I knew that they had been taken but because I knew how they had been taken, how they had been parted from each other, how I was born and made by this great parting. Better than before, I understood the whole dimensions of this crime, the entirety of the theft, the small moments, the tenderness, the quarrels and corrections, all stolen, so that men such as my father might live as gods.

Oh, to be back there, and be young again. To be seated in the dawning hours of my life, the sun of everything breaking over the horizon, and all the promises and tragedies ahead of me. To be there in that chaise, with a day-pass, and a girl I loved more than anything, in the last doleful days of old and desolate Virginia. Oh, to be there with time to spare, with time to dream of riding out as far as that Elm County road went until fortune abandoned us.