The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

not just of pride but of quiet derision—I was better than Maynard, given so much less yet made of so much more.

an old man held and chained by a baby.

And it was more than knowing I would never be a subscriber to the fruit of my own labor. It was also that my own natural wants must forever be bottled up, that I must live in fear of those wants, so that more than I must live in fear of the Quality, I must necessarily live in fear of myself.

The low whites, men such as our own Harlan, were tolerated publicly by the Quality, but spurned in private;

They were a degraded and downtrodden nation enduring the boot of the Quality, solely for the right to put a boot of their own to the Tasked.

There were neither Quality nor Low among us, no jockey clubs to be ejected from, and this was its own America, was its own grandeur—one

Ain’t no freedom for a woman in trading a white man for a colored.”

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.”

sudden shame and anger, rage and resenting for they who let this happen, who stoically watched their children carried off,

this entire order was engineering, was sorcery, all of it held up by elaborate display, by rituals and race-day, by fancies and parades, by powders and face-paint, it was all device, and now stripped of it I saw that we really were just two people, a man and woman,

Keep your end of the yard clean and leave the justice to the Lord.”

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.