And when Hiram attempts to escape Virginia, he’ll eventually find himself recruited to use his conductive powers for a vast abolitionist network that will eventually take him in search of answers, a loved one, and maybe even a way to liberate his people.Ĭoates re-creates the world of the pre-Civil War South - from the plantations’ cramped slave quarters and ornate parlors to abolitionist gatherings to the jails run by Southern militias - with a journalist’s eye and ear for detail. There’s talk of another person up north who has the same talent, a woman they call the “Moses” of the Underground Railroad. And in a supernatural twist, he also possesses the extraordinary gift of “conduction” - an ability to move through space and time. He has a photographic memory, which earns him privileges, if not full personhood, among the gentry. Hiram is a little different from the rest of the Tasked, however. Those forced to give their bodies, their free will, and their lives on Hiram’s father’s plantations are known as “the Tasked.” Their owners, the aristocrats of the antebellum South, are “the Quality.” The man who emerges from that would-be watery grave is Hiram Walker, a slave, the product of a white master’s rape and the servant to his wastrel half-brother. One man drowns the other finds himself enveloped in a blue mist and then jolted awake miles away, dazed and confused and unharmed. The novel opens with two men crashing a horse-drawn carriage into the Goose River in mid-1800s Virginia.

The Water Dancer, Coates’ meditation on the legacy of slavery, is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations - and then proceeds to exceed them. Ta-nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me.

Ta nehisi the water dancer