The Water Dancer: Part 1 Discussion

[Myles Willis]

Georgie Parks............

[Myles Willis]

"can now say that slavery murdered him, that slavery made a child of him, and now, dropped into a world where slavery held no sway, Maynard was dead the minute he touched water."

"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."

These two quotes made me think of the book and movie Gone with the Wind. Although I had never watched nor read the book and am familiar with the contemporary criticisms of the romanticization of the Antebellum South, I recognized the fake esteem of white Southerners during this time. Their entire world is built on a contradiction. The myth of superiority plus their reliance on black skilled labor. Without their slaves, they had nothing, monetarily, physically, and figuratively. From the snippet I saw on TikTok, Gone with the Wind captures how fragile their existence truly was and in this book Coates is defining the rage at the realization Hiram discovers as he gets closer to the Quality.