The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

But knowing now the awesome power of memory, how it can open a blue door from one world to another, how it can move us from mountains to meadows, from green woods to fields caked in snow, knowing now that memory can fold the land like cloth, and knowing, too, how I had pushed my memory of her into the “down there” of my mind,

how I forgot, but did not forget,

Paradox

begin there on that fantastic bridge between the land of the living and...

what happened next shook forever my sense of a cosmic order. But I was there and saw it happen, and have since seen a great many things that expose the ends of our knowledge and how much more lies beyond it.

can now say that slavery murdered him, that slavery made a child of him, and now, dropped into a world where slavery held no sway, Maynard was dead the minute he touched water. I had always been his protection. It was I, only by good humor, and debasement, who had kept Charles Lee from shooting him; and it was I, with special appeal to our father, who’d kept him countless times from wrath; and it was I who clothed him every morning; and I who put him to bed every night; and it was I who now was tired, in both body and soul; and it was I, out there, wrestling against the pull of the current, against the fantastic events that had deposited me there, and now wrestling with the demand that I, once again, save another, when I could not even conjure the energy to save myself.

and now the same blue light I’d seen on the bridge returned and enveloped me again.

felt weightless, so that even as I sank into the river, I felt myself rising into something else.

Perhaps my mother would be there, and then, at the speed of thought, I saw her flittering, before my eyes, water dancing in the ring.

And thinking of all of this, of all the stories, I was at peace, and pleased even, to rise into the darkness, to fall into the light.

There was peace in that blue light, more peace than sleep itself, and more than that, there was freedom, and I knew that the elders had not lied, that there really was a home-place of our own, a life beyond the Task, where every moment is as daybreak over mountains. And so great was this freedom that I became aware of a nagging weight that I had always taken as unchangeable, a weight that now proposed to follow me into the forever. I turned, and i...

would like to say that I mourned right then, or took some manner of note. But I did not. I was headed to my ending. He was headed to his.

ALL MY LIFE I had wanted to get out. I was unoriginal in this—all the Tasked felt the same.

even in the maw of the Goose, even after the bridge fell away and I stared down my own doom, that this was not my first pilgrimage to the blue door.

It had happened before. It had happened when I was nine years old, the day after my mother was taken and sold.

searched for a fully fleshed memory, and found only scraps.

And there I was, awakening with a start to nothing but ephemera, shadows, and screams.

the meaning of the dream: a secret path that would deliver me from Lockless to reunite me with my mother. But when the blue light cleared, I saw not my mother but a wooden gabled ceiling, which I recognized as the ceiling of the cabin I had departed only minutes before. I

and I tried to follow that scent down the alleys of my mind, but while all the twists and turns that marked my short life were clear before me, my mother appeared only as fog and smoke.

and when 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.

And I knew I had a brother up there, a boy who luxuriated while I labored, and I wondered what right he had to his life of idle pursuit, and what law deeded me to the Task.

They calling us up, now, you hear? Us. That trick of yours, and I seen it, we all seen it, it got me too. I am to come up and tend to you, and you might think you have saved me from something, but what you have really done is put me right under their eye.

would begin again in mere hours, for

Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.

But Georgie had it all. The past unfolded itself in front of him like a map, and I saw his eyes glow as he recounted his travels through every mountain pass and gully and gulch.

“Georgie filling you with lies again?”

They were no better than us, and in so many ways worse.

“You know I’m from somewhere,” she said. “I had me a life before all of this. I had people.”

my token into the Realm—but not the Realm I’d long thought.

did not then know why I found them so forbidding. All I knew was in their presence I felt something more terrible than any Holy Spirit.

And I knew then, looking at her, that we must run.

You bury the longing, because you know where it must lead.

was freedom-bound, and freedom was as much in my heart as it was in the swamps, so that the hour I spent waiting on our meeting was the most careless I had ever spent. I was gone from Lockless before I had even run.

“I cannot lie,” I said. “I hope that you will some day, at some time, choose me out there. I confess it. I have dreams. Wild dreams.”

“I dream of men and women who are fit to wash, feed, and dress themselves. I dream of rose gardens that reward the hands that tend to them,” I said. “And I dream of being able to turn to a woman for whom I got a feeling, and speak that feeling, holler that feeling, with no thought beyond me and her as to what that might mean.”

The elders all knew what was coming. They knew what the land whispered, because none lived closer to the land than those who worked it. They lay awake at night, listening to the groaning ghosts of tasking folk past, those who’d been carried off.

The remaining days passed until finally it came, the morning of Georgie’s fateful promise, came like life itself, long and quick.

So I must go, for my world was disappearing, had always been disappearing—Maynard called out from the Goose, Corrine from the mountains, and above all, Natchez.

I brought nothing with me save ambition, not clothes, not victuals, not books, not even my coin, which I now pulled from the pocket of my overalls, rubbed one last time, and deposited on the mantel. I

I heard the creeping things of the earth calling out to each other. The night was starless and overcast. “So it’s freedom then,” I said.

“Freedom,” she said. “Mend it or rip it. No more treating. No more in-between. Die young, or not all.”

And I tell you, as I have always, that I remember everything, but here perhaps, I am playing tricks upon myself because it was a starless night, and I could not see Sophia as little more than a silhouette before me, but I swear that I remember seeing the face of Georgie Parks, and his face was pained and was sad and I did not know why. And then I heard the footsteps again and I saw five white men emerge, one by one from the darkness, and I saw that one of them carried a rope between his hands. And when they were out, they stood before us for what seemed like forever and I heard Sophia moan, “No, no, no…”

Were I to tell you the evils of slavery…I should wish to take you one at a time and whisper them to you. WILLIAM WELLS BROWN

I would fall into myself during these “examinations,” because I quickly learned that the only way to survive such invasion was to dream, to let my soul fly from my body, fly back to Lockless and another time, when I called out the work songs—“Be back, Gina, with my heart and my song”—or stood before Alice Caulley, watching her gleam as I recited her history, or sat under the gazebo, passing a jug of ale and nursing all my wants and desires. But it was only a dream. And the fact was I was there in the awful now, being handled by men who gloried in their power to reduce a man to meat.

like a scene from some other unrecalled life.

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

And remembering the promise made to me of freedom, I knew that I was close. I learned to cover my tracks, to double back over them, so as to confuse them, and learned, too, that I could track them as sure as they tracked me. And I realized that I had a gift that I could bring to bear—my memory. It was always the same crew, and they were unoriginal in their workings.

I was running, when what I needed was to fly. Not just in my mind, but in this world. I needed to lift up away from these low whites, as I lifted away from Maynard and the river.

But how? What was that power that could pull a man out of the depths? That could pull a boy out of the stables and into the loft? I began to reconstruct events. Both of those uncanny moments featured blue light and both brought me, in different ways, close to my mother, or to the dark hole in my memory where I’d lost her.

The moment struck me not as another turn on the carousel, but wholly new. It was like being asleep and never recognizing, no matter the absurdity of things, that you are in a dream. The very nature of logic and expectation was bent, and the absurd struck me as normal, so I simply observed myself, observed Maynard, as we had been, in that other time. Even