Sweetness of Water a miraculous debut novel
The Sweetness of Water
Nathan Harris
Little, Brown
The Sweetness of Water — the latest Oprah Book Club pick — unfolds in Georgia during the twilight of the Civil War. Union soldiers have marched through the state telling enslaved Black people they're free, but that freedom exists in the ruins of a white society seething with resentment. That this powerful book is Nathan Harris's debut novel is remarkable; that he's only 29 is miraculous. His prose is burnished with an antique patina that evokes the mid-19th century.
The story opens in a fugue of mourning. George Walker, transplanted Northener unsympathetic to the Southern cause, is wandering through his Georgia wood. He's just received word that his only son, who enlisted with the Confederacy, was killed in the final weeks of battle. He's terrified to tell his wife about the loss.
George runs into two Black men, Landry and Prentiss, brothers born and raised on a neighbour's farm. It's a tense encounter, neither side knowing what to expect from the other. In this strange collision of bereavement and emancipation, an unlikely friendship germinates. George conceives a bold plan to begin peanut farming, and he will hire these two freedmen to work for him.
Prentiss is determined he and his brother shall not fall victim to the old model of exploitation.
And George imagines that he can, through the force of his own idealism, create an oasis based on the principle of a living wage offered without regard to the colour of a man's skin.
Harris weaves in another dramatic subplot involving the clandestine affection of two former Confederate soldiers, who have no context in which to understand their desires nor any opportunity to express their love openly.
As an author, Harris eventually exercises a kind of fiery Old Testament justice, which is at once satisfying and terrifying. But if this is an era — and a genre — that has no room for encouragement, The Sweetness of Water is finally willing to carve out a little oasis of hope.