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, I know now that this story, this Conduction, had to begin there on that fantastic bridge between the land of the living and the land of the lost.

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

I was terrified, not simply because I had lost my mother, but because I was a boy who remembered all his yesterdays in the crispest colors, and textures so rich I could drink them.

Beautifhl synesthesia

I tried to recall her face, and when it did not come, I thought of her arms, her hands, but there was only 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.

Even when she swung her broom at us, I sensed the depth of that loss, her pain, a rage that she, unlike the rest of us, refused to secret away, and I found that rage to be true and correct.

She was not the meanest woman at Lockless, but the most honest.

But I was a boy, seeing in him what boys can’t help but see in their fathers—a mold in which their own manhood might be cast.

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. “We have our own world down here—our own ways of being and talking and laughing, even if you don’t see me doing much of neither. But I got a choice down here. And it ain’t great, but it is ours. Up there, with them right over you…well, it’s different. “You gon have to watch yourself, son.

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. New games were anointed and we were but pieces on the board. It was terrifying. There was no limit to what they might do at this end of the tether, nor what my father would allow them to do.

The tunnel, where I first entered the house, was the only entrance that the Tasked were allowed to use, and this was not only for the masters’ exaltation but to hide us, for the tunnel was but one of the many engineering marvels built into Lockless so as to make it appear powered by some imperceptible energy.

There were dumbwaiters that made the sumptuous supper appear from nothing, levers that seemed to magically retrieve the right bottle of wine hidden deep in the manor’s bowels, cots in the sleeping quarters, drawn under the canopy bed, because those charged with emptying the chamber-pot must be hidden even more than the chamber-pot itself.

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.

Social instinct and grace had not found him in manhood. He gambled and drank to excess, because he could. He fought in the street, because no matter how throttled, he could never be throttled from his throne. He lost fortunes in the arms of fancies, because the labor of the Tasked—and sometimes their sale—would cover all his losses.

Almost any tasking man at Lockless would have traded his life for mine. But there was a weight of being so close to them, the weight that Thena had tried to warn me about, but something more, the crushing weight of seeing how the Quality truly lived, in all their luxury, and how much they really took from us.

almost unaware that he was holding all of us in the palm of his hand.

He insisted she dress like a lady of Quality when visiting, but use the back road of his estate to enter.

nodded, and then I walked up that back staircase of awful secrets into that house of bondage. And as I mounted each step, I felt the terrible logic of the Task, my Task, snap into place. It was not just that I would never be heir to even one inch of Lockless. 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.

No joy. No meni g

because it was never the costume that made the Quality, but how the lady wore

I shadowed them from the edge of the avenue, as all the other tasking men shadowed their charges, watching at a distance as Maynard grew more excited in conversation and Adeline’s tolerations were taxed. But she bore it well, as the ladies of Quality were trained to do.

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.

an entire world of our own, hidden away from them, and to be part of that world, I felt even then, was to be in on a secret, a secret that was in you.

I am be aue yoh are

this was its own America, was its own grandeur—one that defied Maynard, who must forever carp about his place in the order.

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 wild freedom of the swamps to the civilized slavery of Elm County.

and then the drinking would start and the festive spirit would darken,

These men became rich off the flesh trade, but their names were of too recent vintage and their work of such ill repute that they could never rise above their designation. It was the strong association between the jail and the low whites who fed and served it that gave them the name Ryland’s Hounds.

We feared them and hated them, perhaps more than we feared and hated the Quality who held us, for all of us were low, we were all Tasked, and we should be in union and arrayed against the Quality, if only the low whites would wager their crumbs for a slice of the whole cake.

My whole life depended on me not feeling it, you know?”

now rise when I want and I sleep when it is my will. My name is Parks because I said so. I pulled the name from nothing—conjured it as a gift to my son. It got no meaning except this—I chose it. Its meaning is in the doing. Do you get me, Hiram?”

she had otherwise disappeared into the flat words of others and the fog of my mind.

A man is blooming inside me, Georgie, and I cannot shackle him.

Maynard was all I had of his mother. When his eyes went gleeful, I saw hers. When he was forgetful, I saw her habit. When he was compassionate, as he was always, I saw her.” He was crying now. “And now he is gone, and I am twice departed.”

But lying there, all I found were questions and paranoias that rattled around in my head—the deceptions of Hawkins, my dancing mother on the bridge. Work was the only escape.

And it was not just the tenor of her voice but the very nature of her address that felt unusual. It is hard to convey this now, for it was another time replete with its own rituals, choreography, and manners among the classes and subclasses of Quality, Tasked, and Low. There were things you said and did not, and what you did marked your place in the ranks.

But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only in the thinnest way possible. To strip a man down, condemn him to be beaten, flayed alive, then anointed with salt water, you cannot feel him the way you feel your own. You cannot see yourself in him, lest your hand be stayed, and your hand must never be stayed, because the moment it is, the Tasked will see that you see them, and thus see yourself.

In that moment of profound understanding, you are all done, because you cannot rule as is needed.

So to hear Corrine address me in this way, to attempt to draw some human bond, was bizarre and then terrifying because I was certain that the attempt itself concealed some darker aim. And I could not see her face, and thus could not look for any sign that might betray this aim. I know, she had said. I know. And recalling the story Hawkins told, and the truth of what had happened, I wondered then what, precisely, she knew.

You have to remember what I was: not human but property, and a valuable property—one learned in all the functions of the manor, of crops, read, capable of entertaining with my tricks of memory.

“The lies come like gospel to these folk. Why, I tell you, they used to talk about that boy like he was the fall of nature. Now they telling us he was Christ risen.”

But the event shook me, for I had by then completed a shift inside of myself. I’d already gone from Tasked to fugitive.

AM SO MUCH OLDER now, old enough to understand how a tangle of events can be unraveled to reveal a singular thread.

Slavery is everyday longing, is being born into a world of forbidden victuals and tantalizing untouchables—the land around you, the clothes you hem, the biscuits you bake.

The math of profit shielded me and the boy.

The wall between sleep and the waking world dissipated, so that dreams were indistinguishable from the figments and illusions that now began to bedevil my mind.

Corrine returned to her seat. “But freedom, true freedom, is a master too, you see—one more dogged, more constant, than any ragged slave-driver,” she said. “What you must now accept is that all of us are bound to something. Some will bind themselves to property in man and all that comes forthwith. And others shall bind themselves to justice. All must name a master to serve. All must choose.

“Soon,” she said as they left. “Soon you will understand it all. Soon you shall singularly comprehend, and then your comprehension will be a new binding, and in this binding—in this high duty—you will find your true nature.”

“You see that there?” she asked. I did not answer. “That there is what it is. Sitting here watching the sun set on your own time, with nothing over you and no one to command you or threaten a seven and nine. It was not always this way, for me. I was, with my brother, tied to the meanest man in the world and that man married Corrine and, well, that man is not with us anymore and I am here with you able to enjoy small natural things such as this.

hand. Own the man’s especial knowledge and you shall own the measure of the man. Then you might fashion the costume, Hiram, and make it yours to fit.”