Coates tackles fiction
The Water Dancer Ta-nehisi Coates One World
In 2014, Ta-nehisi Coates published an Atlantic essay titled The Case for Reparations. It didn’t just touch a nerve — it left a bruise. To a country that dared to pretend it had long ago cleared the books on 250 years of theft, Coates presented a discomfiting audit.
Two years later, this Macarthur grant recipient, National Book Award winner and trenchant cultural critic also revealed his secret identity as a writer of comic books. His resurrection of T’challa for Marvel’s Black Panther was a runaway bestseller that later influenced Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster Black Panther movie.
Now, Coates has unveiled a novel called The Water Dancer. While neither polemical nor wholly fantastical, the story draws on skills he developed in those other genres. Presented as a slave narrative in the tradition of Frederick Douglass, The Water Dancer is rooted in details of pre-civil War Virginia. But its bracing realism is periodically overcome by the mist of fantasy.
The result is a budding superhero discovering the dimensions of his power within the confines of a historical novel that critiques the function of racial oppression.
It opens with calamity: During a terrible storm on the Lockless plantation, a horse-drawn carriage crashes off a bridge into an icy river. The driver, the slave Hiram, miraculously survives. But the passenger, Hiram’s white half-brother and heir apparent of the plantation, drowns.
After the drowning death, he jumps back to describe the traumatic loss of his black mother and his existence as the favoured slave of his proud father/master. That precarious position introduces Hiram to the social and psychological contortions of America’s “peculiar institution,” and its layers of white deception.
Coates’ understanding of modern-day racism illuminates this portrayal of the 19th century, and it’s not difficult to hear the contemporary echoes of Hiram’s observations. We still live in a world carefully designed to dissolve the contributions of black Americans in the solvent of white superiority. Our national mythology still regards slavery as a tragic footnote, not the essential precondition for America’s rise to power.