Freedom is elusive in this notable debut
“The Sweetness of Water” — the latest Oprah Book Club pick — unfolds in Georgia during the murky 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, determined to maintain its superiority.
That this powerful book is Nathan Harris’ 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. And he explores this liminal moment in our history with extraordinary sensitivity to the range of responses from Black and White Americans contending with a revolutionary ideal of personhood.
The story opens in a fugue of mourning. George Walker is wandering through his 200-acre wood. A Northerner brought to Georgia decades ago as a child, George never developed any sympathy for the Southern cause. But the end of the War Between the States brings him no joy. He’s just received word that his only son, who enlisted with the Confederacy, was killed in the final weeks of battle. He reportedly died in a moment of panic, running “toward the Union line as though they might pity his screams of terror, might see him through the glut of smoke and grant his surrender and not shoot him down with the rest.”
Now the father’s shame is compounded. “Who was the bigger coward,” he wonders, “the boy for dying without courage, or George for not being able to tell the boy’s own mother that she would never see her son again?”
Just as George realizes that he’s somehow become lost on his own property, he runs into two Black men, Landry and Prentiss, brothers born and raised on a neighbor’s farm. Far from town, it’s a tense encounter, neither side knowing what to expect from the other. The Black men have been so recently freed that they still reflexively identify themselves by their owner. “We’re Mr. Morton’s,” one of them announces. “Well, was.”
“You could go anywhere,” George tells the brothers.
“We plan to,” Prentiss says. “It’s just nice.” “What’s that?”
“To be left alone for a time,” Prentiss says. “Ain’t that why you’re out here yourself, Mr. Walker?”
In this strange collision of bereavement and emancipation, an unlikely friendship germinates. George is desperate to distract himself from the death of his only child. After years of leisurely isolation, he craves a project, something to leave behind as evidence of his own existence. And so, in that moment, he conceives a bold plan to begin peanut farming, and he will hire these two freedmen to work for him.
For their part, the brothers have no intention of remaining in this place stained with bondage. “Their lives could now begin,” the narrator says, “and it was time to craft them in whatever way they saw fit.” But Harris gives a visceral sense of the complications of liberty. Landry and Prentiss have never traveled outside the boundaries of Mr. Morton’s farm. They have no map, no food, no friends and no expectation of employment in a ruined state already awash with idled Confederate soldiers. What’s worse, Mr. Morton routinely beat Landry so brutally that the young man is now mute. He’s a striking example of Harris’