The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

My part has been to tell the story of the slave. The story of the master never wanted for narrators. FREDERICK DOUGLASS

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.

The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. 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.

The jail was a daily reminder that no matter their freedoms, these coloreds of Starfall existed in the shadow of an awesome power, which, at a whim, could clap them back into chains.

Oh, the curses my mind constructed for my fool of a father, for this country where men dress sin in pageantry and pomp, in cotillions and crinolines, where they hide its exercise, in the down there, in a basement of the mind, in these slave-stairs, which I now I descended, into the Warrens, into this secret city, which powered an empire so great that none dare speak its true name.

And fools despise wisdom and instruction.