The Water Dancer

An important conflict in the novel is the tension between serving the self and serving the greater good. This same tension appears in the slave narratives that are an important influence on Coates’ novel and is further support for the idea that The Water Dancer is a neo-slave narrative.

In Hiram’s case, this tension plays out in many ways. Hiram must choose between becoming the favored slave of Howell or becoming an agent of the Underground. Staying a favored slave would fulfill Hiram’s wish to receive his father’s approval but staying would also force Hiram to surrender all the important props of identity, including love and having a family. In terms of the big picture, Hiram’s decision to stay at Lockless, given that he has the capacity for Conduction, would make him complicit in perpetuating a system of slavery. Although Hiram’s decision to run away is initially motivated by his understanding of the true cost of the loss of his personal freedom, Hiram’s decision to participate in the Underground shows that he understands the larger issues at stake.

Hiram’s efforts to balance duty to self and duty to community also play out in what he discloses to the reader in telling his story. Ex-slaves were by were frequently fugitives from the law in many instances, and the narrative was evidence of their crime of self-theft. In popular culture, people assumed the work of the enslaved because of white supremacist notions about the inherent inferiority of slaves. Fear of undercutting the case for freedom meant slave narrators made choices designed to advance their cause. Revealing details of their escape might close that avenue to freedom for others. Sometimes, the reality of the lives of the enslaved did not always jibe with the morality of the day, most especially in terms sexual mores.

As a novelist, Coates has the latitude to tell a different story about the enslaved self. Sometimes Hiram refuses disclose the full story of his slavery liberation. Hiram repeatedly tells the reader that he will not disclose important details about the Underground. Coates’ decision to write these gaps into his novel is true to his source texts and shows how even that most personal of things, the story of one’s life, the ex-slave had to choose duty to his community over self-expression.

As a neo-slave narrative, The Water Dancer has much more space to explore certain gaps, however. While writers such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs left out information or explained away actions that would have looked like moral flaws to their conventional readers, Coates has the liberty to focus on some of the less heroic aspects of the life of the enslaved person. Coates takes pains to show that Hiram is heroic but also selfish, angry, and vengeful. Hiram wants freedom for himself but also must learn the hard lesson from his relationship with Sophia that his definition of freedom cannot begin to encompass the perspective of an enslaved women with a child.

Coates also represents the other hero of the slave narrative, the abolitionist, in Corrine. Corrine has mixed motives: She is an abolitionist who dedicates everything to ending slavery, but she is also a white woman whose choice to become an abolitionist is in part motivated by an insidious, white self-love that Hiram comes to understand is a form of fanaticism: White abolitionists fervently support anti-slavery efforts because “[s]lavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess” (370). This fanaticism at times blinds her to the humanity and individual will of the enslaved.

While it is highly unlikely that the slave narrators who depended upon the goodwill of white abolitionists would ever have included such a blistering psychological analysis of their abolitionist patrons in print, Coates’ novel provides a space for Hiram to explore the complex motivations of the character and his sense of personal grievance over Corrine’s actions in placing him in the pit and the hunt. In other words, the neo-slave narrative opens up space to talk about the lack of purity of the white abolitionist. Hiram says at one point, “Ain’t no pure” (293) when it comes to surviving slavery. In developing his characters, Coates revises the story of slavery by moving away from painting the ex-slave and abolitionist as purely good and showing that as real human beings, they at times are driven by selfish motives. 

In the world of The Water Dancer, the primary social divisions are ones based on the status of a person as a member of the Tasked community or of the Quality. This difference in status is not just economic: As was the case with the historical United States from its founding up until the abolition of slavery, slavery is an economic institution in which the rights of personhood are distributed according to race. Coates uses Hiram and Maynard as foils to each other to show the arbitrary and constructed nature of using the Tasked/Quality division as the primary marker of identity, however.

Like slaves in the historical North America, the Tasked are associated with negative traits such as low intelligence, promiscuity, an inability to form and sustain familial relationships, and dishonesty. The Quality, on the other hand, are the beneficiaries of a form of white supremacy in which their economic and political control over the Tasked is the supposed result of inborn nobility, superior intelligence, and inherent morality. As Coates makes clear in his contrasts between Hiram and Maynard, these supposed biological differences are just the result of a sleight of hand that most people—even intelligent ones like Hiram and somewhat benevolent ones like Howell—cannot see for the most part.

The contrasts between Hiram and Maynard are legion. Hiram is intelligent, gifted with supernatural powers, gracious, and capable of being charming when called to do so. He is also hardworking, a typical trait for the Tasked, who must be good workers to survive. As Hiram’s account of his early childhood and time in the big house makes clear, the presence of these traits is the result of some inborn talents but also of nurture he receives at the feet of all the adults down on the Street and Thena. Maynard, on the other hand, is a dull boy and a useless man whose early nurture Howell neglects with the death of his wife. The point of these contrasting childhoods is to show that there is nothing inherently good or superior about the Quality. If anything, they are boors and “barbarian[s]” (27) who devolve into brutality very quickly because of their unchecked power.

Hiram comes to this knowledge only as he enters adulthood. As a boy, Hiram sees Lockless and Howell as models of all that is good. Aware that Howell is both his master and his father, Hiram believes through some form of magical thinking that his father will recognize the part of him that is a Walker and remove him from the indignity of being Tasked. This moment never comes, however, and from the footrace during which Hiram injures himself to the moment during which Howell assigns Hiram to be the servant of his half-brother, Hiram is forced to learn that his Tasked status alone is enough to ensure that he can never truly be a Walker, no matter how disgracefully Maynard behaves.

What saves Hiram from sinking into hopeless self-hatred is his ability to seize on a power that counters that of white supremacy—Conduction. This supernatural power belongs only to Tasked people in Coates’ imagined America. It is a power passed down through African bloodlines, with the implication that to be able to Conduct is to maintain connection to one’s racial and cultural roots in Africa. The mechanism by which Conduction works—creating stories that celebrate and connect one to family and racial history—is just further evidence that racial heritage is an untapped strength necessary for survival. As Hiram becomes more and more knowledgeable about his past, he gains the ability to master his power and become the fullest expression of himself. By the end of the novel, Hiram has essentially become the master of Lockless. His power comes not as the result of being able to claim the half of him that is a Walker but because of his ability to fully integrate his slave past.

Coates’ message has important implications in terms of the discussion of race in the novel. His argument ultimately seems to be that people with a heritage of slavery cannot run away from this past out of a sense of shame about the connection between race and slavery. Instead, the survivors and descendants of slavery must learn to recall their pasts and use it as a basis upon which to build a future.

The history of slavery is one filled with gaps. Important historical documents such as birth records, ports of origin for people imported directly from Africa, and family histories are missing from the written historical record of slavery, either because such information was not important to those engaged in the slave trade or because such information would have put an unflattering light on the actions of the benefactors of this system. The slave narratives serve as a corrective to these gaps, but these narratives also have gaps related to representing the experiences of enslaved women.

Less encumbered by commitments to family and child-rearing and with access to work that gave them more physical mobility, ex-slave narrators are much more likely to be men rather than women. As a result, it is only rarely that the impact of gender on the lives of enslaved women enters the historical record. An important way that Coates engages in revision to that record is by including the voices and stories of enslaved female characters in his neo-slave narrative. The stories of Sophia and Thena help fill in this gap in the record.

Sophia’s story is one that shows how enslaved women suffer in terms of sexual exploitation and decisions about whether and how to give birth to children. Sophia has little choice but to accept Nathaniel’s advances after the death of her mistress. Despite the coercion inherent in her connection with Nathaniel, Hiram still feels resentment towards her. She calls him out over this resentment and asserts her right to autonomy by explaining that she will not give up what little leverage she has by running away from Nathaniel to subjugate herself to Hiram. She changes her mind only after she realizes that she is pregnant with Nathaniel’s child and thus will be less mobile as a pregnant woman or a woman with a young child. From the moment of her recapture and entrance into motherhood, Sophia’s options radically narrow. Her story allows Coates to add some dimension to why women were less likely to gain their freedom.

Thena’s story is also a common one despite its differences from Sophia’s. Enslaved women had the painful experience of reproducing slavery because their children became the property of their masters from birth. Thena loses all her children when they are sold to pay for Howell’s debts, and her unresolved grief and anger are vivid reminders of the human cost of the treatment of people as movable property. Like many enslaved people, however, Thena creates her own family out of other wounded people like Hiram once she loses her biological children and partner. Her story shows the way that slavery visited long-lasting psychological damage on the psyches of women. Not all the wounds of slavery were physical, in other words.

Coates refuses to paint the resolution of the stories of these women and mothers as completely happy ones. Thena is reunited with her daughter Kessiah in Philadelphia, but she will never completely recover from her traumas. Sophia will always have to bear the physical evidence of Nathaniel’s sexual coercion of her—her daughter, whom she nevertheless loves. Coates’ sensitive portrayal of the impact of slavery on important life milestones—falling in love, forming a relationship, having children—allows him to show the gendered dimensions of the oppression of slavery for women.