The Water Dancer (Oprah's Book Club)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Finally tired, I doubled over on my knees. The fire was now burning low. But I could see Bland standing there with a girl and a man, and the man stood in front of the girl to shield her from my anger, and it occurred to me then that the man was the girl’s father.

  “Are you finished?” Micajah Bland asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not ever.”

  We are all divided against ourselves. Sometimes part of us begins to speak for reasons we don’t even understand until years later. The voice that took me away from the Underground was familiar and old in me. This was the voice that conspired to come up off the Street. This was the voice that consigned my mother to the “down there.” It was the voice that had spoken to Thena, and so callously left her behind. It was the voice of freedom, a cold Virginia freedom—freedom for me and those I chose. But now a new voice was rising, one enriched by the warmth of the house of Viola White, and the ghost of my aunt Emma who from somewhere deep within admonished me, Don’t forget, family.

  We walked through the woods until we reached a town where Bland had left his horses, carriage, and a cart. I was aware now of the blow I’d taken earlier, as my head was pounding steadily, seemingly in rhythm with every step we took. I sat in the cart with the girl and her father. Morning was just beginning to break over the horizon in a fan of orange and blue. We had gone a few miles when we stopped. I turned and saw Bland talking to a small woman standing in the road, her whole body wrapped and covered in a shawl. Then she turned and began walking to the back of the cart. When she was close enough, she put a hand on my cheek, and then my forehead and then the back of my head, which was sore to the touch. I could now see that she was, judging by her countenance, only slightly older than me, and yet in her approach, in her confidence and command, I sensed someone much senior.

  “Got ’em, did you?” she said, calling back to Bland, even as her hand was still on my face.

  “Yes,” Bland said. “They had not even made it that far out and the fools decided to stop and have a banquet.”

  She turned to Bland and said, “Glad they did.” The she turned back to me and said in a soft voice, “But you, boy, what were you doing? And what kind of agent let them hounds get under him like that? Mmmm-hmmm. Almost carried you off.”

  I said nothing but felt my face burn. She laughed and pulled back her hand.

  “All right,” she said to Bland. “Y’all get gone.”

  The cart began to creak as the horses moved. The woman waved to us and then walked off into the woods to our rear. I could feel some excitement in the cart now. The man and the girl started chattering with each other. When I didn’t join in, the man leaned over to say, “Don’t you know who that was?”

  “Not particularly,” I said.

  “Moses,” he said. He waited for a moment as if to recover from the effect that speaking the fact of things had on him.

  “My God…” And he paused again. “That was Moses.”

  * * *

  —

  There seemed to be as many names for her as legends. The General. The Night. The Vanisher. Moses of the Shore, who summoned the fog, and parted the river. This was the one of whom Corrine and Hawkins had spoken, the living master of Conduction. I did not register all of this at that moment. Too much had happened, and I was mostly in shock at all that had befallen me.

  An hour later, the girl was asleep in her father’s lap. Bland pulled over the cart and called for me to join him in the front. We rode for another few minutes in silence. I broke it with a question.

  “How did you find me?”

  He snorted and laughed. “We are all watched, Hiram.”

  “If you were watching,” I said, “why you ain’t stop them before they socked me and dragged me out the city?”

  Bland shook his head. “The men, the ones who grabbed you, they’ve operated in Philadelphia for some time now. They prey off the free coloreds. Children are especially prized. We can’t really stop them. But sometimes we get a chance to send a message as to just how dangerous the man-catching business can truly be.”

  “So you planned it all?” I asked.

  “No. But you asked why we didn’t stop them. And this is why—to send a message, a warning. To make their cohort understand the perils of their trade. We could not send such a message in the confines of the city. But out here in the open country, with no one to tell…”

  “Murder,” I said.

  “Murder? Do you know what they were going to do to you?”

  “Yeah, I do know,” I said. And at that moment I was back at that terrible night, chained to the fence, with Sophia at my side. And I was recalling how badly I wanted to give in to it all, to die right there, and how she held me up, and spoke to me without speaking, how strong she was when I needed her most, and how foolish I had been when she needed me. And now she was gone, and they, Ryland, the hounds, had done God knows what with her.

  I said, “You only got half the story about me. You know about the girl—Sophia—the one I ran with. But you don’t really know the feeling I had for her, and how much it aches me that they have her now while I am up here, breathing the free air. All I can tell you is she was better than me. Fact is, sometimes I think you got the wrong one for an agent. Shoulda been her.”

  I began to weep. Softly and quietly, but enough that I had to stop and collect myself.

  “She saw so much in me,” I said. “But I fell. And Sophia fell with me. And here I am, up here, in the North, and she is…I don’t even know where she is. What I know is she deserved better than me. She deserved more than a man who would lead her right into the jaws of Ryland.”

  And at this there was no control. I was weeping openly. It was all out there now. I had led a woman I loved right into the maw. And the weight that this put upon me was now open and known. Bland made no effort to conciliate. He kept his eyes on the road. And when I had stopped weeping, he spoke.

  “You know that feeling you had for this woman Sophia?” he asked. “You know how it rips you to pieces wondering what became of her? You know all the moments you’ve lost wondering how you might have done things different? And you know all the nights you’ve sat up wondering if she were even alive? Hiram, that is the feeling that marks an entire nation held down. A whole country looking up wondering for their fathers and sons, for their mothers and daughters, cousins, nephews, friends, lovers.

  “You say I murdered those men back there. But I say to you that I saved the lives of so many unknowable others. Those who would murder you—strip you away from all your family and friends—and remember nothing of it. They cannot live, not without some fear, some specter, and if murder is what you must name it, then I gladly accept the claim.”

  We rode in silence for a moment.

  “Thank you,” I said. “That should have been the first thing I said. Thank you.”

  “No need to thank me, Hiram. This work, this war, it gives my own life meaning. I don’t know what I’d be without it. And I must say that I think if you gave it a chance, you might well find meaning…”

  Bland was still talking, but the headache overpowered everything, and soon, to my great relief, the world faded away and I slipped out of consciousness.

  * * *

  —

  Late that next day, I awoke with a dull ache all over my body. I dressed, walked downstairs, and found Raymond, Otha, and Bland all in conference. They summoned me over and I sat down before them. Scanning their faces, I had the sense that they were ashamed of something almost—my foolishness at being captured, perhaps. And I thought then that they had been called to do something awful yet necessary.

  “Hiram,” Raymond said. “Bland is an old friend to me. I trust him as much as my own family, and to be truthful with you, more than certain members of that family. He is not, as you well know, an exclusive agent of this station. He has his acquaintances across the Underground
and, in his dealings with those acquaintances, has, on occasion, taken up projects that would not have met my approval. I understand that you were among those projects.”

  I began to feel a shift in the temperature of things.

  “I know well the methods and reputation of Corrine Quinn. They are not my methods, Hiram, no matter their aim.”

  Raymond shook his head now and looked to the ground. “This ritual burial, the hunting, the chasing, it is all abhorrent to me. In that spirit, I am compelled to say that you are owed an apology. I feel that what was done to you, no matter the aims, was wrong.”

  “It was not you who did it,” I said.

  “Yes, but it is my cause. It is my army. And while I cannot balance Corrine’s accounts, I can tend to my own. And it was wrong, not just on her behalf, but to our cause”—and here Raymond paused a moment before looking back at me—“no matter what power may beat in your breast.”

  “I understand,” I said. “It is nothing. I understand.”

  Now Raymond took in a deep breath. “No, Hiram,” he said. “I do not think you truly do.”

  “I know more than you give me credit for, Hiram,” Bland said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, I knew it all. I knew about Sophia, all about your feelings. It is my business to know. And that is why I know not just how you felt then, nor just how you feel now. I also know exactly where Sophia is being held.”

  “What?” I said. My head throbbed with almost the same force it had throbbed last night.

  “We had to know,” Bland said. “What kind of agents would we be if we didn’t know exactly who you ran with and what became of them?”

  “I asked Corrine,” I said. “She said it was out of her power.”

  “I know, Hiram, I know. It was wrong. I can’t defend it. I can only tell you what you must already know—that when you are operating as Corrine Quinn does, on the other side of the line, the math is different. It has to be. You were part of that math.”

  I screened out the headache and said, “Where?”

  “Your father’s place. Lockless. Corrine prevailed on him to take Sophia back.”

  “But you didn’t get her out? All the power held by your Underground and you…”

  “Virginia has its rules. We took what we could from them. We could not take it all.”

  “And so that’s it,” I said. “You’re going to leave her to it?”

  “No,” Otha said. “We don’t never leave nobody to it. Ever. They have their rules. And by God, we got ours.”

  “Hiram,” Raymond said. “We don’t mean to just offer you an apology. It is not just words we bring, but action to match them.”

  “You see, we don’t just know where Sophia is,” Bland said. “We know precisely how to bring her out.”

  18

  FOR THOSE NEXT FEW days, walking the streets of Philadelphia, or at work with chisel and lathe, at work forging the letters and passes, I thought of little else but Sophia. I thought of her water dancing by the fire. I saw us under the gazebo, trading the jar of ale. I remembered her long fingers, brushing against the dusty furniture in the workshop. I thought of us down by the gulch and I, very badly, wished I had embraced her there. And I thought of all the possibilities of a life up here—of a family of our own, of gingerbread memories, and daughters who sang after dinner, and long walks by the Schuylkill. And I wanted badly to show this world to her, wondered what she would make of it all—the trains, the crush of people, the omnibus—all of which were, day by day, more and more familiar.

  Two weeks after I was taken by the man-catchers, I was summoned out to Raymond’s home across the river. He met me on the porch and told me he was alone. His wife and children were in the city, and I gathered from the look on his face that this was by design. There were always so many secrets.

  We went into the home and climbed up to the second level, where he reached up and grasped a metal ring, attached by a hinge in its wooden housing in the ceiling, and pulled gently, until the ceiling opened up and a ladder slid down. We then climbed up the ladder, into the rafters of the home. Raymond walked to a corner where I saw several small wooden crates. He selected two. We carried them back down out of the rafters, closed up the ceiling again, and took them down to the drawing room.

  Raymond opened the crates and said, “Have a look, Hiram.”

  Reaching in, I found an assortment of paper, correspondences with fugitives—filled with kind words, familial reports, and grave intelligence on the movements of Ryland’s Hounds, the plots and intrigues of the Slave Power, and most often, requests for the liberation of relatives. I saw that he marked those that he had acknowledged and those he hoped to. There was great value in these papers, and he had crates of them, much to be learned about the actions of our enemies, but should our enemies ever acquire them, much to be learned of our own. In the wrong hands, countless agents would be exposed.

  “The stories here are beyond anything anyone could ever believe—even those of us who are actually party to them,” Raymond said. I was still filing through them, amazed at the array. It seemed that there was a testimony from nearly everyone who’d ever run from the Task and been rescued by the Philadelphia station. It occurred to me that my own interview with Mary Bronson likely was contained there. “It is good to remember why we do what we do. I have worked with agents of all persuasion and I cannot say that they are moved by the purest of motives.”

  “Possible that none of us is pure,” I said. “Possible we all got our reasons for doing what we do.”

  “Indeed,” Raymond said. “Can I say that without the connection of my family, I would be here right now? Involved as I am? Of course not. And family is what we promised you, is it not? Your beloved Sophia—who ran with you, in a manner not so different from all those stories contained in my files, indeed, not so different from my very own parents.”

  “Somewhat different,” I said. “We never got to a point of seeing things clear. We were very young. It’s odd to say it as such, I know. Ain’t even been a year since I was captured. But there was something there, something we were nursing that I do believe would have bloomed into family. But maybe not. Maybe I imagined it all.”

  “Well,” he said. “At the very least, you are owed a chance to find out.”

  “I believe so.”

  “It is not the simplest of matters, this business with Sophia. But you have been toyed with too much, Hiram, and so I will make the statement concerning you directly and then give you the rest of it after.”

  I took a deep breath, preparing myself.

  “We have yet to make contact with her—it is a delicate matter, as you can imagine, one that will require some time. But Bland has devised a plan for her conduction. Indeed, he has volunteered to handle the thing personally. But there is a complication here—not with Sophia, but with us. You have caught us at a particular time, as we are occupied with another operation,” he said. “Otha has spoken to you of his wife?”

  “Lydia?” I asked.

  “Yes, Lydia. And not just Lydia but their children…my nieces and nephews. It has long been our plan to see them out. Otha appeared to us as though out of a dream. We had thought him lost. But through fortune and the grace of God, he returned to us. And as happy as he has been to be back among us, and as happy as we have been to have him, we are not whole.

  “Lydia is in Alabama. Her owner has defied all our entreaties to pay for her freedom. And worse, we believe those entreaties have only raised his suspicions and made him watchful. Lydia and the children are truly in the coffin, Hiram, and with each day there, the coffin closes a little more.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Everyone—but everyone in their time.”

  “Yes,” Raymond said. “Everyone in their time. But there is more still. This operation is not just personal, but costly. We need som
eone to assist Bland, someone to ensure he can leave for Alabama at the appropriate time.”

  “Of course. It’s why I’m here.”

  “No, this is personal. This is not the Underground as you understand it, and this is certainly not Corrine. There are those who would object to this and so I need you to understand—this is of your own free will. Indeed if you cannot help us in this, we will still proceed with the rescue of your family. As I’ve said, it is my feeling that you have endured more than what was just. We do this for you as a way of bringing matters into balance, no matter Corrine’s feelings on things.”

  “Yeah, I figured,” I said. “This ain’t really Corrine’s sort of deal. She is a good woman, I think. And they are, no doubt, in a good fight. But what I have seen up here, what I have seen of your momma, your cousins, your uncles, ain’t just the fight. I have seen the future. I have seen what we are fighting for. I am thankful for Corrine. I am thankful for the fight. But I am most thankful to have seen all that is coming.”

  And now here, I did something very curious—I smiled. And it was an open and generous smile, one that rose up out of a feeling with which I was so rarely acquainted—joy. I was joyous at the thought of what was coming. I was joyous at the thought of my role in this.

  “So I am in, Raymond,” I said. “Whatever that means, I am in.”

  “Excellent.” Raymond smiled and said, “And you’re welcome to remain here as long as you like with these correspondences. As you saw, there are more upstairs. My wife will return soon and the children in the afternoon, but don’t let that stop you. Explore as you need. May we never forget why we do this, Hiram.”

  I spent the rest of that day lost in Raymond’s files, as thrilling as any Ivanhoe or Rob Roy. In the evening I joined the family for dinner and accepted an invitation to stay the night and thus continued my reading by lantern-light. I left the next morning after a small breakfast. I felt myself unbalanced by all that I had so quickly consumed, for it was only now, through those files, that I came to understand the great span of the Underground’s operations, and the lengths to which its clients had gone to escape the Task. There in my hands, in those files, legends came alive—the resurrection of “Box” Brown, the saga of Ellen Craft, the flight of Jarm Logue. These stories were incredible, and taken together they gave me some sense of why Raymond and Otha would dare such a thing as a liberation up out of the Alabama coffin. They had dared so much already. In Virginia what mattered was immediate and invisible. And while Raymond would not wish these files to be exposed to the world, not just then, the safety of a free state made him bold. Freedom was what mattered to him. Freedom was his gospel and his bread.