The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Power makes slaves of masters, for it cuts them away from the world they claim to comprehend. But I have given up my power, you see, given it up, so that now I might begin to see.”

“You are not a slave, Hiram Walker,” said Corrine. “But by Gabriel’s Ghost, you shall serve.”

“Man made us slave, but God willed us free.”

“I know that you don’t understand,” Harriet said. “But you will adjust yourself to these facts. You will have to. There will be more. Could be you. Could be me.”

“We forgot nothing, you and I,” Harriet said. “To forget is to truly slave. To forget is to die.”

“To remember, friend,” she said. “For memory is the chariot, and memory is the way, and memory is bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom.”

“Stay with me, friend,” Harriet said. “No exertions needed. It’s just like dancing. Stay with the sound, stay with the story and you will be fine. And the story is as I have said, offered up for all those given over to the maw of the Demon. We seen it all our lives, yes we have. Starts when you young, with but the barest sense of the world, but mayhaps even then, you got some sense that it is wrong. I know I did.”

What happened then was a kind of communion, a chain of memory extending between the two of us that carried more than any words I can now offer you here, because the chain was ground into some deep and locked-away place, where my aunt Emma lived, where my mother lived, where a great power lived, and the chain extended into that selfsame place in Harriet, where all those lost ones had taken up their vigil. And then

I looked out and saw them, phantoms flittering, flittering like that baleful day out on the river Goose, and I knew exactly what the phanto...

So when I saw the boy off to the side of us, out in the mist, wrapped in spectral green, no older than twelve, I knew that his name was Abe, and I knew that he was among those gone Natchez-way, sent across “the river with no name.” And now I could hear Harriet’s voice ...

Now the light of Harriet opened with some brightness, and I saw a path before us, across the water that was not water. There was no dock in the distance, but in and out of the darkness I saw the phantoms of Harriet’s memory—dancing about, as they would have been in that time when they were known to her.

I speak now of the crossing of the nameless, of the long walk to Natchez, the mournful march to Baton Rouge. I saw it all, friend. Why, my uncle Hark lost half an arm just thinking of the nameless, just watching them white men watch him a little too closely. So one morning he got up, and thinking how hard it’d be to sell a cripple, raised his axe with one hand, and gave the other hand over to the Lord. ‘I might be lame,’ Hark say. ‘But I shall not be parted.’

“But for those who were hard, for those who worshipped the seven and nine, Abe was a caution. I tell you, friend, that boy could not be held. Would have made a hell of an agent, for he ran like he had the lungs of a lion. The moment Master Broadus even thought of correction, the boy would fly.

unbroken by the seven and nine. And

and the song was that old feeling put to hymn, and on my sign we fell down upon this sinful country, and our battle-cry was as mighty as a great river conducted through a high and narrow valley.

And we would scourge this Natchez. And we would burn this Baton Rouge.”

who have seen you know the truth. You might be lamed, but you shall never be parted.”

And I knew we were not in Philadelphia anymore. A door had opened. The land had folded like fabric. Conduction. Conduction. Conduction.

“The jump is done by the power of the story. It pulls from our particular histories, from all of our loves and all of our losses.

But nevertheless, when I was conducted, I underwent a drastic revision of the world around me, and what wonders and powers it held.

“It was said that this Bess could unwind an African tale with such effect that sometimes a first frost would feel like a prairie heat.”

one that would turn back time itself, and journey her back to that place where her fathers were buried in honor, and her mothers gathered their own corn. That night Bess walked down to the river, in the middle of winter, and disappeared.

Because you, unlike the others, can see a bridge across that river, many bridges even, connecting all the islands, many bridges, each one made of a different story. And you cannot just see the bridges, you can walk across, drive across, conduct across, with passengers in tow, sure as an engineer conduct a train. That is Conduction. The many bridges. The many stories. The way over the river.

“But we are here now. And we have forgotten the old songs and lost so many of our stories.”

When I look back, I can see my childhood playing out like a stage show right here in front of me, but the main player is fog.”

Only you know what the thing might be. But I think if you can find that lever, then you can find your mother, and when you find your mother

See, when I came up from that deep sleep, I ain’t just remember, I heard colors, I saw songs, I felt all the various odors of the world. Voices assaulted me from all over, and remembrances old as ancestors did not dim but burned bright as torches. I would watch them play out before me, and everywhere I walked, was just like you said, a whole stage of memories was with me.

“Water, Hiram. Water. Conduction got to have water.”

We walked out into the fog. Jane

“My daddy, Big Ben Ross. He grab me up and say Harriet got to love who love Harriet.”

“And brothers, I shall tell you, like Pop Ross told me—got to love who love you.”

“May you find a love that love you, even in these shackled times.” “That’s the word.”

A weight was falling away, and the weight wasn’t merely the fact of the Task, its labors and conditions, but the myths beneath—my father as my savior, my plot to leave behind the Street, my notion that Lockless could be redeemed by my special hand. My forgetting. I forgot my mother. And then went off into the house of Lockless like I had no mother. And then I was conducted, brought up out of the coffin, brought up out of slavery. And now I felt myself shedding the lie, like old skin, so that a truer, more lustrous Hiram emerged.

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.

“I remember him too,” I said. “But he is all I remember of those times. I can see him at the door, and everything else is fog.” “Might be good,” Sophia said. “No notion of what’s lurking behind that fog.” “Ain’t nothing good about it,” I said.

But we must tell our stories, and not be ensnared by them.

THE SUMMONING OF A story, the water, and the object that made memory real as brick: that was Conduction.

I had been practicing the mask long before I met Corrine. Instead, I simply said, “I want them out. Both of them.”

“So many…so many gave me the word…but they could not give memory. They could not give story…” My

“We are what we always were,” she said. “Underground.”