The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

She rose to leave and I felt now the soft pain that came to me whenever she did.

“When I go, don’t want no lies spoken over my body. Tell them—start to end—what I was.”

I came here rough, lived as such, and will die the same.

She was such a lovely girl, and I wanted to be with her in a way that I would never want anyone again, in a way that age and experience rob you of, which is to say I wanted all of her, from her coffee skin to her brown eyes, from her soft mouth to her long arms, from her low voice to her wicked laugh. I wanted it all.

“And some of us have been down since the days of Rome. Some of us are born into society and told that knowledge is rightfully beyond us, and ornamental ignorance should be our whole aspiration.”

It’s got to be about more than anger, more than manhood.