The Water Dancer (Oprah's Book Club)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  When my father left, I took the washcloth and water and cleaned myself, but my hands shook while I juggled the madness of his last words. Maynard loved you. This notion—that Maynard loved anyone, that Maynard would give his life for anyone, much less me—was astounding me. But then as I dressed, and turned it over, I came to an understanding—my father believed this insanity. He had to. Maynard was him, was his wife, and this glorified portrait somehow lived right along with the admonition my father had always communicated to me—that Maynard must be watched, that he was not to be trusted with his own life. Walking down the back stairs, I knew that my father’s statement could only be reconciled through the peculiar religion of Virginia—Virginia, where it was held that a whole race would submit to chains; Virginia, where this same race held the math that molded iron and carved marble to exact proportion and were still called beasts; Virginia, where a man would profess his love for you one moment and sell you off the next. Oh, the curses my mind constructed for my fool of a father, for this country where men dress sin in pageantry and pomp, in cotillions and crinolines, where they hide its exercise, in the down there, in a basement of the mind, in these slave-stairs, which I now I descended, into the Warrens, into this secret city, which powered an empire so great that none dare speak its true name.

  * * *

  —

  When I got back to the Warrens, I found Thena standing just outside her door, in the dim light, talking to Sophia. Thena looked at me hard. I smiled at her. She walked over to me, shaking her head. Then she put her hand on my cheek and locked eyes. She didn’t smile, only regarded me from my head to feet, and I had the feeling that she was making sure every part of me was in its place.

  “Well,” she said. “Don’t look like you fell in no river.”

  She was not a warm woman, Thena, this other mother of mine. There was a general belief that if she wasn’t cursing you or shooing you off, she might, at least, have a good feeling for you. I generally returned this good feeling with my own muted affection. And there was no offense in that. We had our own language to affirm what we were to each other.

  But that day, without thought, I spoke a different language. I wrapped my arms around Thena and pulled her close, and held her tight as though venting all my joy at being alive, and held her tight like she were flotsam and I were back in the Goose.

  After a few seconds, she pulled back, looked me up and down again. Then she turned and walked off.

  Sophia watched her go, then when Thena had turned a corner, she looked at me and laughed.

  “That ol’ gal know she love you,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “I mean it. She don’t much talk to me. But after you went under, she kept asking questions, side-like, trying to get what word on you she could.”

  “She come see me?”

  “Not once—and that’s how I know she love you. I’d ask her and she’d get all flustered and I knew what it was—she couldn’t see you like that. It’s hard, Hiram. It was hard even on me, and I don’t like you, much less love you.”

  At that she slapped my shoulder and we laughed quietly together, but my heart tumbled in my chest.

  “So how are you?” Sophia asked.

  “Been better,” I said. “But glad to be getting back to where I belong.”

  “Which is to say not looking up from the Goose,” said Sophia.

  “That is about the fact of it,” I said.

  There was a silence between us for a few moments that began to feel uncertain and then rude. So I invited Sophia into my quarters. She accepted. I pulled out a chair for her, and when seated, she reached into her apron and produced a ball of yarn and needles and started knitting one of her inscrutable things. I sat on my bed, our knees now almost touching.

  “Glad to see you shaping up,” she said.

  “Yes, I am coming together,” I said. “Ain’t waste no time getting me out Maynard’s room, did they?”

  “It’s better that way, ain’t it?” she said. “Can’t say I’d want to be in some dead man’s bed.”

  “It is better that way,” I said.

  By instinct, I reached into my pocket for my coin, but the coin was not there. Likely it was now lost, and the fact of this saddened me. It had been my charm, my token of the Street, even if my great plans had come to nothing.

  “How’d they find me?” I asked.

  “Corrine’s man,” Sophia said, still knitting. “You know him? Hawkins?”

  “Hawkins?” I said. “Where?”

  “On the shore,” Sophia said. “This side of the Goose. Face-down in the muck. No idea how you made it out of there, cold as that water be. Got somebody watching over you.”

  “Maybe,” I said. But I was not thinking of how I got out. I was thinking of Hawkins—how I’d seen him twice on race-day and then how he’d been the one to find me.

  “Hawkins, huh?” I repeated.

  “Yep,” she said. “Corrine and him and her girl, Amy, been here most days since. Sure would be nice to thank him.”

  “Sure would,” I said. “Guessing I will.”

  She rose to leave and I felt now the soft pain that came to me whenever she did.

  * * *

  —

  After Sophia left, I sat on the edge of my bed contemplating the shape of events. Something did not fit. Sophia had said that Hawkins found me on the riverbank. But I had the most distinct memory of falling down in the fallows. I remembered seeing the monument there, the stone left to mark the first works of the progenitor, Archibald Walker. But the fallows were two miles from the river, and I had no memory of walking the distance between the two. Perhaps I had imagined it all, in the throes of near-death, conjured up this last vision of my ancestry—my dancing mother, the monument of the progenitor—as some farewell to this world.

  I stood and walked out of my quarters. I had a notion to head out to the fallows, to the monument, hoping to find something there that might resolve my memory with Hawkins’s story. I turned down the narrow passage along which I lived, passed Thena’s quarters, and then into the tunnel that led outside. The sunlight beaming in blinded me. I stood there, looking out, my left hand formed over my brow like the brim of a hat. A team of tasking men walked past, with cross-back bags and spades, and among them I saw Pete, the gardener who was, like Thena, one of the old ones who had through his own ingenuity escaped Natchez.

  “Hey, Hi, how are you?” Pete said as he passed me.

  “Fine, fine,” I said.

  “Good to hear,” he said. “Take it easy, son, you hear? And make sure…”

  He was still speaking but the distance and my own thoughts overtook his words and I just stood there watching as he and his men disappeared into that blinding light, and at that moment I was, for reasons I do not know, struck by a great panic. It was something about Pete—something about how he disappeared like that into the sunlight, as I had felt myself to be disappearing only days before, but disappearing into a blindness. I rushed back to my quarters with this panicked feeling in me and lay down across my bed.

  Again, by instinct, I reached in my pocket for the coin that was not there. I lay there for the rest of the day. I thought back to Hawkins’s story, of finding me on the shore. I was certain I had been in the high grass, I remembered it clearly, remembered seeing the great stone monument before falling under, and my memory never failed.

  As I lay there I heard the sounds of the house, this place of secret slavery, rising with the hours into the afternoon, and then falling away, indicating evening had come. When all was silent, I walked back out of the tunnel, past the lantern-light, into the night. The moon looked out from behind a spray of thin black clouds, so that it seemed a bright puddle against the sky pinpricked by the stars.

  At the edge of the bowling green, I watched as someone crossed the low grass, and as the distance closed, I saw
that it was Sophia. She was wrapped from her head down in a long shawl.

  “Little late for you to be out,” she said. “Especially given your condition.”

  “Been in that bed all day,” I said. “I need air.”

  Sophia pulled the shawl tighter as a wind pushed gently out from the bank of trees to the west. She was looking down the road as though something else had taken over her.

  “I should let you be,” I said. “Think I’m gonna take a walk.”

  “Huh?” she said, now glancing back at me. “Nah, I’m sorry I have this habit about me, I’m sure you seen it. Sometimes a thought carry me away and I forget where I am. Come in handy sometimes, I tell you that.”

  “What was the thought?” I asked.

  She looked back at me and shook her head and laughed to herself.

  “You say you walking?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  “How bout I walk with you.”

  “Suit me just fine.”

  I said it as though it were nothing, but had she seen me at that moment, she would have known it was much more. We walked silently down the winding path, past the stables, toward the Street, the same path I had run up all those years ago in search of my mother. And then the path opened and I saw the long row of gabled cabins that had once been my home.

  “You used to live down here, huh?” she said.

  “In that cabin right there,” I said, pointing. “And then later when I took up with Thena, farther down.”

  “You miss it?” she asked.

  “Sometimes, I guess,” I said. “But if I’m honest, I wanted to come up. I had dreams back then. Big dumb dreams. Dead and gone.”

  “And what do you dream of now?” she asked.

  “After what I just came up from?” I said. “Breathing. I just dream of breathing.”

  Looking down toward the cabins, we watched as two figures, barely shadows, emerged, stopping just outside. One shadow pulled the other close, and stayed that way for a minute or two, until they released each other, slowly, and one shadow went back inside, while the other turned toward the back side of the cabin, disappeared, then reappeared in the fields, darting now toward the woods at the far edge. I was certain that the shadow now running was a man, and the shadow gone into the cabin was his wife. It was a normal thing to see back then because so many marriages extended across the wide miles of the county. When I was small, I would wonder why any man would impair himself so. But now, watching the shadow bound through the fields, and standing there with Sophia, I felt that I understood.

  “You know I’m from somewhere,” she said. “I had me a life before all of this. I had people.”

  “And what was your life?”

  “Carolina,” she said. “Born there the same year as Helen, Nathaniel’s woman. But it ain’t about her or him, you know. It’s about what I had down there.”

  “And what was that?” I asked.

  “Well, in the first place, I had a man. A good one. Big. Strong. We used to dance, you know. Go down with the folks to this old broke-down smokehouse on Saturdays and stomp the floor.”

  She paused, perhaps to savor the memory.

  “You dance, Hi?” she asked.

  “Not even a little,” I said. “I am told my momma had the gift. But look like I favor my daddy in that capacity.”

  “Ain’t about ‘favor,’ Hi, it’s about doing. Best thing about the dance is it really didn’t matter who had it and who did not. Only crime you could commit was to spend that whole night all lonesome against that old smokehouse wall.”

  “Is that a fact,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “Now, don’t misunderstand: I was a caution. Every time I shook, I put some hen out her happy home.”

  We both laughed.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get to see it—didn’t get to see you dance,” I said. “Everything had changed here by the time I came up, you know. And I was a different kind of child. Even now, a different kind of man.”

  “Yeah, I see that,” she said. “Kinda remind me of my Mercury. He was a quiet one too. Was what I liked about him. No matter what happened, I knew it was between us. I should have known that it could not stand. But he danced, see. Man, in those days we’d dance before we would eat. Used to tear that old smokehouse down, and my Mercury, in brogans thick as biscuits, was light as a dove.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Same as happening up here. Same as happening everywhere. I had people, you know, Kansas, Millard, Summer…People, you know? Well, you don’t, but you understand.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  “But wasn’t none like my Mercury,” she said. “Hoping he resting easy. Hoping he found himself some thick Mississippi wife.”

  Now she turned without a word and started back.

  “I got no idea what for I am telling you all this,” she said. I nodded and listened. It was always like this. People talked to me. They told me their stories, gave them to me for keeping, which I did, always listening, always remembering.

  The next morning, I washed and walked out, just as the sun made its way over the trees. I passed the bowling green, then the orchards, where Pete and his team—Isaiah, Gabriel, and Wild Jack—were already picking and gently depositing apples in their burlap satchels. I walked until I was in the fallow field, covered with clover, walked until I saw the stone monument. I stood there for a moment, letting it all come back to me—the river, the mist, the high grass waving, black in the wind, and then the sudden appearance of the progenitor’s stone. I circled the monument once, twice, and then saw something glinting in the morning sun, and before even reaching down, before picking it up, before fingering its edges, before putting it in my pocket, I knew that it was the coin, my token into the Realm—but not the Realm I’d long thought.

  6

  I HAD BEEN THERE IN the fallow field. And if I had been in the field, then all of it—the river, the mist, the blue light—must bear out too. I stood stock-still amidst the timothy and clover, the coin now in my pocket, and felt a great pressure in my head, so that the world seemed to wheel and spin around me. I knelt down in the high grass. I could hear my heart pounding. I pulled a handkerchief from my vest and mopped the sudden drizzle of sweat from my brow. I closed my eyes. I took in several long, slow breaths.

  “Hiram?”

  I opened my eyes, to see Thena standing there. I wobbled to my feet and felt the sweat now running down my face.

  “Oh my,” she said and then put her hand to my brow. “What are you doing, boy?”

  I felt faint. I could not speak. Thena threw my arm over her shoulder and began walking me back to the fields. I was aware that we were moving, but through my fever, everything seemed a rush of autumnal brown and red. The smell of Lockless, the fetid stables, the burning of brush, the orchards we now shuffled past, even the sweet sweat of Thena, were suddenly acute and overpowering. I remember seeing the tunnel into the Warrens flitter before me in a haze, and then I was doubled over, retching into a basin. Thena waited for me to recover.

  “All right?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said.

  Back in my quarters, Thena helped me take off my outer garments. Then she handed me a fresh pair of drawers and stepped outside. When she returned, I was lying on my rope bed with the blanket pulled up to my shoulders. Thena took the stone jar from over my mantel and walked out to the well. When she came back, she set the jar on the table, took a glass from the mantel, poured water into it, and then handed the glass to me.

  “You gotta rest,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “If you know, what was you doing out there?”

  “I just…how’d you find me?”

  “Hiram, I will always find you,” she said. “Taking these clothes for the washing. I’ll have them back to you by the M
onday next.”

  Thena stood and walked to the door.

  “I gotta get back to it,” she said. “Rest. Don’t be no fool.”

  I fell quickly into sleep, and into a dream world, but one of memory. I was once again out in the stables, my mother just lost to me. I peered into the eyes of the Tennessee Pacer, peered until I disappeared into them and came out in that loft where I had so often played among my young childhood thoughts.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Roscoe came to my quarters. “Take it light,” he said. “They’ll be working you hard in time. Rest yourself now.”

  But lying there, all I found were questions and paranoias that rattled around in my head—the deceptions of Hawkins, my dancing mother on the bridge. Work was the only escape. I dressed and walked out of the tunnel, rounded the house, only to be greeted by Corrine Quinn’s chaise crawling up the main road. This had become a regular occurrence since Maynard’s passing. Corrine would arrive with Hawkins and her maid Amy, and then spend an afternoon leading my father through prayer. There had never before been anything observant about the house. My father was Virginian, and like the relics of his Revolutionary fathers, a certain godlessness testified to the old days when everything seemed in question. But now he had lost his only heir, his legacy to the world, and his Christian god seemed all that was left. I backed into the tunnel a bit and watched as Hawkins helped his mistress out of the chaise, and then her maid, and the three walked up to the house. I did not then know why I found them so forbidding. All I knew was in their presence I felt something more terrible than any Holy Spirit.

  I thought to return to my childhood habit of trying to fit in where I might be needed. But as I walked from kitchen to smokehouse, then from smokehouse to stable, then from stable to orchard, I was greeted with woeful looks, and it was clear that someone—Thena, Roscoe, or both—had dictated that I not be put to labor. So I resolved to find work myself. I returned to my quarters and changed out of my suit of house clothes into a pair of overalls and brogans. Then I walked out to a brick shed at the start of the woods just west of the main house, where my father kept a collection of lounges, footstools, bureaus, roll-top desks, and other old furnishings awaiting restoration. It was late morning. The air was cold and damp. Fallen leaves clung to the bottom of my brogans. I opened the shed. A block of light cut through a small square window, shining on the collection. I saw an Adams secretary, a camelback sofa, a satinwood corner chair, a mahogany highboy, and other pieces nearly as old as Lockless itself. I decided to work the mahogany highboy, on sentiment. It was here that my father had once kept secret and valuable things, a fact I knew because Maynard routinely rummaged through it and liked to detail his findings. Having decided upon my target, I went back to the Warrens. I took a lantern into the supply cupboard, and rummaged until I found a can of wax, a jar of turpentine, and an earthen pot. Just outside the shed I mixed the turpentine and wax in the pot. I left this solution to sit and then, with no small exertion, moved the highboy outside. I felt slightly faint then. I bent over with my hands on my knees and breathed deep. When I looked back up, I saw Thena looking out from the lawn into the trees.