The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

And though I know they had to be, that there was no other way for them to be, it meant a certain distance between us, for their war was against the Task, and mine would be a war for those who were Tasked.

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 struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.

“Season of life, huh?” I said. “Naw, I prefer this season of loss, this season of dying, for I think it is the world at its most true.”

All of nature seemed in on it, so that when I tasted the rum of her mouth, it was the sugar of life.

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.

We forget sometimes—it is freedom we are serving, it is the Task that we are against.