The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

She was trying to tell me, trying to warn me of what was coming. But my gift was memory, not wisdom.

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.

I had been in her company long enough to be familiar with this habit of beginning conversations in her head and then continuing them out loud.

They grow together, and as the play hours decline, the ritual changes. They are both weaned on the religion of society, of slavery, which holds that for no particularly good reason one of them will live in the palace, while the other will be condemned to the dungeon. It is a cruel thing to do to children, to raise them

For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors as guardians at the gate, staving off African savagery, when it is they

For what did it mean to be free, in a city such as this, when those you hold to most are still Tasked? What was I without Sophia, without my mother, without Thena?

We are all divided against ourselves. Sometimes part of us begins to speak for reasons we don’t even understand until years later.

The voice that took me away from the Underground was familiar and old in me. This was the voice that conspired to come up off the Street. This was

the voice that consigned my mother to the “down there.” It was the voice that had spoken to Thena, and...

She existed in my mind not as one with her own notions and ideas but as an idea herself,

a notion herself, so that to think of my Sophia was to think of a woman for whom I possessed a true and a sincere feeling, but, too, was to think of my dreams and my redemption. It is important that I tell you this.

is important that you see how little I knew of her dreams,...

You know what they did to us back there. You done forgot? You don’t remember what they do to the girls down here? And once they do it, they got you. They catch you with the babies, tie you to the place by your own blood

New ways of being, new ideas of liberation, now intruded upon me. Only a year ago, I would have rejected them all.

Slavery was the root of all struggle.

“Blessed, for we do not bear the weight of pretending pure.

“But on the whole, better than being held, huh?” “On the whole, yeah,” I said. “Still. There are parts of life that can’t be gotten out of, and I have had to learn, here, that we are all, at the end, held somehow. Just

that up here you get to choose by who and by what.”

I felt in that moment something low and beautiful. Something born down here on the Street, and all the Streets of America. Something nurtured and birthed out of the Warrens. It was the warmth of the muck. It was the relief of the low-born. The facing of the facts, the flight from Quality, the gravity and excrement of the true world where we all live.

“Ain’t a chain if it is my choosing.”

I should not have been surprised. I knew by then how much the past weighs upon us.

And what was it that would make this woman, this lady, who had it all, risk it all? I looked out on the common room, marveling at what

But I wanted him to know that I now knew all that he knew, that to forgive was irrelevant, but to forget was death.