Coates has long argued that one of America’s great sins is not just slavery, but our refusal to look the fact of slavery in the face, to grapple honestly with the fact that slavery was foundational to our country and that its aftereffects are still with us. The hole in Hiram’s memory where his mother used to be forms the central metaphor of The Water Dancer.

Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark But to do so he’ll have to allow himself to remember his mother.

That makes him a valuable asset to the Underground, if only he can learn how to harness his gifts. Hiram also has the supernatural power of Conduction, the ability to travel from one place to another - from Virginia to Philadelphia, say - in mere instants. He can hold almost anything in his mind - except for his mother, who was sold away from Lockless when Hiram was young and of whom he has allowed himself to remember almost nothing.īut Hiram’s memory and his intelligence aren’t his only gifts. Hiram is one of the Tasked (Coates, with his characteristically careful eye for language, almost never refers to slavery as anything but the Task in this book) on the plantation of Lockless, and he has a bottomless, hungry memory. The Water Dancer centers on a young man named Hiram living in antebellum Virginia. The Water Dancer showcases the clarity of Coates’s ideas and the poetry of his language He’s an okay novelist who can write the hell out of a sentence. He’s a genuinely great writer and everyone knows it he doesn’t have to prove that to anyone.īut with Coates’s first novel, The Water Dancer, out this week, it’s clear that Ta-Nehisi Coates is not yet a great novelist. He’s the kind of essayist who knows both how to use data to ground an argument and how to use poetry to lift it up and make it sing. Ta-Nehisi Coates is such a great essayist that he more or less single-handedly resurrected the conversation about reparations for black Americans. You don’t need me to tell you that Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of America’s greatest living writers.

The water dancer a novel