I think I’ve heard a historian say that we too often examine the pathology (real or imagined) of #slaves but not the pathology of the #slavers and the #slavery system and its propaganda: #whitesupremacy. There’s something, I believe, that is particularly perverted about looking in the face of a child you created, and then selling that child away from their mother on an auction block for profit.
Coates takes this a step further. What would that enslaved (“The Tasked”) child or mother “witness” about the “peculiar institution” and it’s maintainers (“The Quality”) from their perspective?
This is one of my “take aways” from Ta-Nehisi Coates new joint The Water Dancer. The main character, Hiram Walker, is the enslaved son of a Virginia tobacco plantation owner.
On its surface, the book is Hiram’s coming of age story but at its core-core it is about him remembering and reclaiming his intrinsic human value–his connection to his mother–the source of his true power.
If I were to classify The Water Dancer, I would say that it is an #AfroRetroist tale about myths, and the unseen real magic (science?) that rules our lives.
Coates conjures a tale that is like Octavia Butler’s Parables, meets Star Trek Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge, while hanging out on Maryland’s eastern shore with Mami Wata and Aunt Nancy (the original spiderwoman), and briefly shaking hands with Iron John back in the slavery days.
As well, the story dances on that knife edge of acquiring and wielding power (supernatural and otherwise) and the attendant yen and yang of managing the consequences of powers use–both intended and unintended.
Who has to pay the power bill and why? And by what currency do they pay? What north star guides the characters on their journeys through swamps of seduction and moral decay? Will they succumb or free themselves?
And wherever there is imbalance of power, there must also be war. Because for the scales of justice (Goddess Maat) to be balanced, power must be “Conducted” from those who have usurped it, and returned to the disinherited and dispossessed.
Slavery was(is) war. The Water Dancer displays a ground truth of this war–what it looked like through the eyes of the people who were enslaved.
Now, I’m not about to spoil the The Water Dancer for you. Please read it for yourself. Borrow it out from your local public library or buy it from an independently owned bookstore–amazon has enough of our money. I bought mine from MahoganyBooks. (The same place where I buy Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Intergalactic Black Panther comics.)