The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – a slave’s story

This ambitious debut novel from the leading American thinker is set on a Virginia plantationTa-Nehisi Coates’s eagerly awaited and ambitious debut novel is set in pre-civil war Virginia, on a slave plantation called Lockless in Starfall, Elm County. The stars of Lockless and other neighbouring plantations are indeed beginning to fade and fall: the slave owners, through a mixture of ineptitude and greed, have worked their lands to exhaustion and are now reduced to selling off their slaves to maintain their lives of idle luxury. Virginia is a hierarchy; at the top are the Quality, white slave owners with the power of life and death over their chief possession, their slaves. Next are the Low – poor whites, mostly uneducated, employed by the Quality to supervise the plantations and keep the enslaved in check. After them are the Freed, former slaves who were able to buy their own freedom. At the very bottom are the Tasked, the enslaved.The main character and narrator, Hiram, is no ordinary slave. He is gifted with, among other things, a photographic memory; he is also son to Mr Howell Walker, the plantation owner. Howell acknowledges Hiram as his son; he takes him out of the fields and makes him a house slave, sometimes letting him entertain dinner guests with memory tricks, and even assigning to him the same teacher as his other son – and heir – the foolish, bumbling Maynard. This open recognition by his father encourages Hiram to believe in a special destiny for himself, and “in my quiet moments, to imagine myself in their ranks” – this despite constant warnings from Thena, an older slave and Hiram’s adoptive mother, that to the Quality he will always remain a slave. Continue reading…
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