The Water Dancer and literary healing
As I noted in my reading of The Underground Railroad, contemporary American novels about the escape from slavery have their roots in autobiographical “Slave Narratives” written prior to abolition in the nineteenth century. Exigencies of how these came to be produced meant that their authors had almost always escaped or been manumitted. Only about 2% of enslaved people ever escaped, but even when the genre made the jump to fiction (a shift performed with Uncle Tom’s Cabin) there seemed to remain a sense that any story of slavery was not complete without a story of escape. The converse has also come to be true: any novel about a person who escaped slavery has tended to be a story of the trauma of slavery.
It’s easy to forget how unique this is. Not every story about an ex-con, for instance, is a story about the injustices of the American carceral state: the Oceans movie trilogy, for instance, centers on Danny Ocean after he gets out of prison. I’m not saying that what we need are glib, popcorny stories about runaways, but there’s room for books that don’t adhere so closely to the norms of the Slave Narrative. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ magical realist The Water Dancer is just such a book.
At first, this is surprising. There are no intentional anachronisms in Dancer, unlike in Railroad. Both novels are narrated in a self-consciously nineteenth-century voice, and, almost point-for-point, Coates follows Brit Bennett’s steps for constructing a Slave Narrative: “A person is born in bondage to a cruel master; he or she observes a first whipping, struggles to obtain literacy, attempts to flee, fails, and later successfully escapes to the North.”
The difference lies in the focus. While Whitehead foregrounds and repeats black trauma, bringing it back into the scene whenever readers or characters think they might have finally gotten away, Dancer, without shirking from the horrors of slavery, is at its center about healing from the same trauma, and helping others out of it.
If Railroad was the Slave Narrative as a picaresque horror story, Dancer is the Slave Narrative as a superpower kunstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young comic book hero. For anyone who has been under a rock for the last fifteen years, Coates is a stone-cold genius with a once-in-a-generation talent for delivering people into the light, a man whose humility is surprising only because of his considerable talents, who learned at a surprisingly young age the importance of intersectionality and family. Hiram Walker, the protagonist of Coates’ novel, is also a stone-cold genius with a once-in-a-generation talent for delivering people into the light, a man whose most significant personal flaw is that sometimes, when he is under as much pressure as a diamond in formation, he can, for periods not exceeding 48 hours, become selfish or curt (though he quickly apologizes and credibly promises to do better in the future). Hiram, before his twentieth birthday, also learns the importance of respect for women and family. The biggest difference between Coates and Hiram is that the author leads people to enlightenment by writing books and essays reminiscent of James Baldwin, while the character does so by, well, walking in front of them into a bright monochrome light, just like the novel’s version of Harriet Tubman does.
There is something truly joyous about the combination of Coates’ and Hiram’s big-heartedness in Dancer. At one point a character subjects Walker to a Groundhog Day sequence of simulated-death-torture (it’s a mark of Coates’ approach in the book that this quickly ceases to be harrowing, turning instead into a demonstration of the main character’s will and capacity to perfect his talents). When she’s done, he harbors no grudge about that, though he is upset that the woman, a freedom fighter, bought a friend of his and did not immediately liberate her. The plot’s big question is whether Hiram’s superpower will be sufficiently developed by the last showdown as to enable him to succeed, and the novel does a good job of intimating in advance that the answer is “yes.” In this way at least, the movie is very much like the remakes of Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job: readers have a fair degree of certainty that the protagonist will show himself triumphant in the end. Secondary characters meet sometimes heartbreaking, deadly setbacks, but these are timed according to natural beats in the story, such that by the end, they are remembered mainly as way-stations on Hiram’s growth into the savior his grandmother’s grandson was always supposed to become.
Coates’ decision to forgo an antagonist is a masterstroke. Now, as Spike Lee illustrated in Inside Job, the ultimate big bad in a heist movie is always the bank president, but if every heist movie had a bank president as its antagonist, new iterations would get stale and formulaic in an instant. Instead, you could have a security guard, or a teller, a branch manager, police officer, or private investigator as your antagonist. Heck, even a member of the bank-robbing crew or a thief’s significant other can play the role. The antagonist need not know the bank president, or even get along with him if they do know one another. There’s a lot of room for play in the way you set things up. Unfortunately, Slave Narratives tend to be rather stodgier, with one after another making the plantation owner or white slave patroller the primary antagonist (often with a lightly sketched, even more malevolent black character doing his dirty work). This works well if you read only one or two such books, but after a while, it gets terribly repetitive.
Coates avoids this predictability by dispensing with a unifying antagonist altogether. Hiram Walker’s white half-brother Maynard is as despicable as the book gets, but he dies in the first chapter. Walker’s relationship with his own father is so delightfully shaded and developed over the course of the novel’s length that the elder Walker is more a study in the complexity of life than an antagonist, while Georgie Parks, who for a while stands athwart Hiram’s path, is sent permanently offstage shortly after Hiram’s first escape. There is a slave-patrol group called Ryland’s Hounds, but we never meet Ryland. As a result of all this, American slavery itself, as a system, becomes the book’s villain, denying any reader the opportunity to dismiss a unitary antagonist as a bad apple. Slavery is not personified, and its cruelty and impropriety is all the better presented for it.
Coates also does an excellent job of portraying how chattel slavery preceded and contributed to the creation of racial reductionism by the way he talks about social groups. The book has no “slaves” per se, but rather “Tasked” — characters are defined not by the situation into which they are forced, but by the fact that the system has so forced them. White characters are divided into the Quality (slaveholders) and the Low (poorer free whites given various reasons to buy into the system of enslavement). It is an efficient and startlingly effective way of talking about social stratifications and social roles in a unique way.
Not everything works. From a Caribbean perspective, Hiram spends altogether too much time speculating that perhaps in the eighteenth century, when rich homesteader’s morals were higher, American-born enslaved families were less likely to be split up through sale and inequality on the average American plantation was not as high as it would become in the nineteenth century, perhaps then an argument could be made in favor of slavery. At least, Hiram is willing to entertain the idea. Pish (but then again, it’s a very American book). There’s also a subplot in which Hiram dreams of a relationship with a beautiful young woman who rebuffs him because she thinks he will become possessive in the future. He then learns not to think of her in those terms and tells her he’s changed, at which point she agrees to a relationship and sleeps with him. The whole bit feels a little like The Tao of Steve with a more dreamboat lead. It would have been nice to see Hiram grow up and either develop a platonic friendship with the woman or remain forever apart from her, as she remains interesting in and of herself while being for him “the one who got away.” But that’s asking too much. Hiram really is All That; why shouldn’t he wind up respected even by his professional adversaries, and loved by the people he loves?
The Water Dancer has been picked up by Oprah and Brad Pitt (who also produced the adaptation of Twelve Years A Slave), who plan to make it into a movie. The book was an immediate bestseller, though it’s hard to imagine it having the same reputation long into the future as The Underground Railroad. In many ways, that’s a shame. If Whitehead’s novel asked, “What happens if we take the Slave Narrative and concentrate its trauma?” Coates’ asks, “What happens if we start from the same place, and focus on the breadth of black potential?” Not everything in Dancer works, and Coates’ background as both an essayist and a writer of comic books means that the book’s length balloons as he devotes pages of text to explaining to readers what the plot’s subtexts are, but the result is still amazing and thoroughly engrossing. Plus, there may be no one writing today who crafts sentences as beautiful as Coates does. While hitting all his pacing marks and unostentatiously teaching his readers all manner of lessons, he bathes them in the warm pleasure of his well-crafted periods. As I read both books simultaneously, finishing Dancer second offered a measure of hope.
