The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  “Get back in them quarters!” she yelled.

  I smiled and waved. She shook her head and stalked off.

  I spent the rest of the day sanding down the highboy. It was the most peace I’d had in days, as a kind of mindlessness fell over me.

  I slept long and deep that night, dreamless, and awoke filled with the anticipation of renewing yesterday’s labor and achieving again that mindless focus. After dressing, I walked back to the shed and found the solution of turpentine and wax ready. By late morning the highboy was gleaming in the sun. I stood back to take in my work. Just as I was about to walk back into the shed, in hopes of discovering another suitable target, I saw Hawkins coming across the grass in my direction. Corrine had obviously returned while I was working.

  “Morning, Hi,” Hawkins said. “That is what they call you, right?”

  “Some do,” I said.

  At that he smiled, a gesture that had the effect of underscoring the crisp, bony architecture of his face. He was a thin man of mulatto complexion with skin drawn tight, so that you could see in select places the green outline of blood vessels. His eyes were set deep in his skull like gems in a tin box.

  “Was sent out here to fetch you,” he said. “Miss Corrine would like a word.”

  I returned with Hawkins to the house, where I retreated to my quarters and changed out of my brogans and overalls into a suit and slippers. Then I walked up the back stairs, pushed open the hidden door, and emerged into the parlor. My father was seated on the leather chesterfield, Corrine at his side. He was holding her hand in both of his, with a pained look on his face, seemingly trying to peer into her eyes, an effort frustrated by the black veil of mourning Corrine wore over her face. Hawkins and Amy stood off to each side of the chesterfield, at a respectful distance, watching the room, awaiting any command. Corrine was speaking to my father in an almost whisper, but loud enough that I caught snatches of the conversation across the long room. They were speaking of Maynard, sharing in their longing for him, or at least some beautified version of him, for this Maynard—held by them as a sinner on the verge of repentance—was not one I recognized. My father nodded as she talked, then he glanced over to me, and released her hands. He stood and waited for Hawkins to draw open the sliding parlor doors. He gave me one last look, still pained, then walked out. Hawkins drew the door closed and I wondered if I’d misjudged the conversation, for I had the foreboding sense that the subject had not been Maynard alone.

  I noted then that they were all in black, Hawkins in a black suit, Amy in a black dress and, like Corrine, a veil of mourning, though less ornate. Standing there, Corrine’s staff seemed extensions of her deeper mood, ethereal projections of her widow grief.

  “You are acquainted with my people,” she said. “Are you not?”

  “Believe he is, ma’am,” said Hawkins, smiling. “But when last I saw this boy he was barely acquainted with his life.”

  “I should thank you,” I said. “I was told that I would have died if you hadn’t seen me on the shore.”

  “Just happened to be out wandering,” Hawkins said. “And I see a large steer laid out. And I walk up and sees that it is in fact a man. But you needn’t thank me. It was you who got yourself out, which is quite a thing. Get caught in that Goose? Brother, it will carry you off. Man pry himself out? Well, that is quite a thing, quite a man. Goose is powerful, mighty powerful, even this time of year. Carry you off.”

  “Well, I do thank you,” I said.

  “Wasn’t nothing,” said Amy. “He just did whatever any man would for one fixing to be family.”

  “And we were to be as family,” said Corrine. “And I think we should still. Tragedy should not break us. A man starts down a particular road. He remembers his steps, no matter what deluge may call upon the bridge.

  “Woman is made for the completion of man,” Corrine went on. “Our Father has made it this way. We take hands in matrimony and the rib is returned. You are an intelligent boy, all know this. Your father speaks of you as one would speak of miracles. He speaks of your genius, your tricks, your readings, but not too loudly, for envy rots at the bones of man. For envy, Cain slew his brother. For envy, Jacob deceived his father. And so your genius must be hidden from them. But I know, I know.”

  The light was low in the parlor, and the drapes half-drawn. I could see only the outline of Corrine’s and Amy’s faces. Corrine’s speech quavered under itself, such that it sounded like three voices trembling at once, a kind of perverse harmony, flowing out from whatever darkness lurked behind the veil of mourning.

  And it was not just the tenor of her voice but the very nature of her address that felt unusual. It is hard to convey this now, for it was another time replete with its own rituals, choreography, and manners among the classes and subclasses of Quality, Tasked, and Low. There were things you said and did not, and what you did marked your place in the ranks. The Quality, for instance, did not inquire on the inner workings of their “people.” They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only in the thinnest way possible. To strip a man down, condemn him to be beaten, flayed alive, then anointed with salt water, you cannot feel him the way you feel your own. You cannot see yourself in him, lest your hand be stayed, and your hand must never be stayed, because the moment it is, the Tasked will see that you see them, and thus see yourself. In that moment of profound understanding, you are all done, because you cannot rule as is needed. You can no longer ensure that the tobacco hillocks are raised to your expectation; that the slips are fed into those hillocks at the precise time; that the plants are weeded and hoed with diligence; that your harvest is topped and the seed is filed and saved; that the leaves are left on the stalk, and the stalk spiked and hung at the proper distance, so that the plant neither molds nor dries out, but cures into that Virginia gold which moves the base and mortal man into the pantheon of Quality. Every step is essential and must be followed with the utmost care, and there is but one way to ensure that a man takes this care with a process that rewards him nothing, and that way is torture, murder, and maiming, is child-theft, is terror.

  So to hear Corrine address me in this way, to attempt to draw some human bond, was bizarre and then terrifying because I was certain that the attempt itself concealed some darker aim. And I could not see her face, and thus could not look for any sign that might betray this aim. I know, she had said. I know. And recalling the story Hawkins told, and the truth of what had happened, I wondered then what, precisely, she knew.

  Now I fumbled for words—“Maynard had his charms, ma’am,” I said—and was duly checked.

  “No, not charms,” she said. “He was crude. Do not deny it to me. Put no flattery upon my ears, boy.”

  “Of course not, ma’am,” I said.

  “I knew him well,” she continued. “He had no enterprise. He had no device. But I loved him, for I am a healer, Hiram.”

  She paused here for some moments. It was late morning. The sun blinked through the green Venetian blinds and there was an unnatural silence in the house, usually busy with the labor of the Tasked. I badly wanted to go back to the shed, to attend to the secretary or corner chairs perhaps. I felt that it was only a matter of moments before some trapdoor fell out from under me.

  “They laughed at us, you know,” she said. “All of society cackled—‘the duchess and the buffoon,’ they called us. Perhaps you know something of ‘society.’ Perhaps you know something of men who mask their earthly aims in piety and pedigree. Maynard did not. He had no charm, no guile. He could not waltz. He was a boor at the summer social. But he was a true boor, my boor.”

  When she said this, her voice quavered in still another measure—a deeper grief.

  “I am broken, I tell you,” she said. “Broken.” I heard her weeping quietl
y under the mourning veil and it occurred to me then that maybe there was no device, that she was as she appeared, a young widow in mourning, that this urge to reach out to me was simply the need to touch those who had been close to him, and I was his slave but still his brother, and thus carried some of him with me.

  “You, I think, perhaps, have some sense of how it might feel to be broken,” she said. “You were his right arm, and without his guidance and protection, I wonder what you now make of yourself. I mean no unkind word. They say you safeguarded him against impulse and iniquity. I am told you counseled him in trying times. And I am told that you are an intelligent boy. And fools despise wisdom and instruction. And he was your instruction, was he not? And now, the good Howell Walker tells me that you can be seen wandering these grounds, all hands and no direction.

  “Are you taken as I am, marking your time in any activity, hopeful of moving your thoughts from him? Woman is not so different, you know? All have their task. And so I wonder if you, like me, see him in all your works. He is all around me, Hiram. I see his face in the clouds, in the land, in my dreams. I see him lost in the mountains. And I see him hemmed in by the river, in those last terrible moments, in noble struggle with the depths. This is how he was, was he not, Hiram?

  “It was you who last saw him, who alone can give account. I do not question his passing, for I lean on my Lord, and never my own daily understanding. But I am miserable in my ignorance and imaginings. Tell me that he died as befitting his name, honoring his station. Tell me he died in the true word in which he lived.”

  “He saved me, Miss Corrine, that is the fact of it.” I don’t know why I said this. I had spent very little time in the person of Corrine Quinn and everything about her rattled me. I was speaking out of instinct and what it told me was to soothe her, to ease her pain as best I could, for my own sake.

  She brought her gloved hands up and under the veil. Her silence forced me to speak again.

  “I was going under, ma’am, and I reached out,” I said. “I felt the water around me like great knives, and I surely believed I was done. But he pulled me up, until I was strong enough to swim on my own. When I last saw him he was right with me, but the cold and the tide was too much.”

  She was silent for some moments. When she next spoke, her quavering voice was an iron rod. “You told none of this to Master Howell?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I have spared him the details, for the very name of his departed son is hard upon his ears. The story grieves us all. I say it only now because you have so heartily requested and I hope that it shall bring you some portion of peace.”

  “Thank you for this,” she said. “You do yourself more credit than you can know.”

  Again, she said nothing for a moment. I stood there awaiting her next request. When she spoke, her voice shifted upward. “So your master has left you. You are young, still—but idling as I hear it. What shall you now make of yourself?”

  “I go where I am called, ma’am.”

  She nodded. “Then perhaps you will be called to my side. Maynard loved you so. Your name was the subject of anticipation. My champion was your champion. He gave his life for you. Perhaps, in due course, you too shall give of yourself. Do you see this, Hiram?”

  “I do,” I said.

  And I did see, if not in that moment, then in the hour of reflection after. The grief and weeping might be true, but more certain was her dark intent—to pry me from Lockless and claim my services, my body, as her own. You have to remember what I was: not human but property, and a valuable property—one learned in all the functions of the manor, of crops, read, capable of entertaining with my tricks of memory. I was known for my industry, for my steady disposition, for my rectitude. And it would not be hard. I had, through her union with Maynard, been promised to her anyway. And now she would simply appeal to my father to leave this portion in place, to have me given over as terms of bereavement and mourning. And where would I find my home then? It was known that Corrine had property in Elm County but also farther west, across the mountains in the less developed portion of the state. This was the seed of her fortune, for through the management of multiple interests—timber, salt mines, hemp—it was said she had avoided the fall that now overtook Elm County. Whatever it was, I knew after that meeting I faced a new danger, not Natchez, but a parting from Lockless, the only home I’d ever known.

  * * *

  —

  Maynard’s body was never found. But it was decided that all the far-flung Walkers who were able would assemble at Lockless that Christmas to share their memories of the departed heir. The whole month before, we prepared. We cleaned out, swept, and mopped the upstairs salon, which had fallen into disuse in the years after Maynard’s mother died. I dusted mirrors stored in the shed, repaired two old rope beds, and had them, along with a small piano, moved into the house. At night I worked down in the Street with Lorenzo, Bird, Lem, and Frank. It was good to be back there, for they had been my playmates as a young boy. We worked restoring cabins that had gone empty as the number of Tasked declined. We fortified roofs, swept out birds’ nests, and brought down covers for pallets, for we knew that we would have to house not just Walkers but all the Tasked who came with them.

  I let my mind go numb with the labor, which now assumed a kind of intimate rhythm, so strongly felt that it compelled Lem to call out:

  Going away to the great house farm

  Going on up to where the house is warm

  When you look for me, Gina, I’ll be far gone.

  And then he called it back again, this time leaving space for his chorus, which was all of us, to repeat each line. And then we took turns adding on from other renditions or from lines all our own, building the ballad out, room by room, like the great house of which we sang. When it came to me, I hollered out:

  Going away to the great house farm

  Going up, but won’t be long

  Be back, Gina, with my heart and my song.

  And then it was decided by the elders that we too must have a feast, and a table fit for one. A tree was brought down, stripped and finished and then installed with legs, and in that fashion we had a feasting table. It was hard work, but forced all the difficult and thorny questions from my mind.

  On Christmas Eve morning, I stood on the house veranda, looking out, and just as the sun peeked over the mountains, which had turned bare and brown, I saw, arriving with sunrise, the long snaking train of Walkers coming up the road. I counted ten wagons. I walked downstairs exchanging greetings and then began, with the tasking folk who’d come up, to help unload the baggage. I remember this time as happy, because there was, in this train of Walkers, colored people who’d known me as a child, who’d known my mother, and spoke of her with a great fondness.

  As was the Holiday tradition then, we were all given an extra share of victuals—two pecks of flour, and of meal, thrice the share of lard and salted pork, and two slaughtered beefs for the whole of us to do with as we wished. From our gardens, we brought up cabbages and collards, and all chickens fit for eating were slaughtered and plucked. On Christmas Day we divided ourselves, half preparing their feast up at the house, and the rest working together for our feast, that night, down in the Street. I worked most of the morning chopping and hauling wood, both for the cooking and for the bonfire. Then in the afternoon, I walked up through the woods and brought back ten demijohns of rum and ale. By early evening the sun had set, and the savory smells of our late supper—fried chicken, biscuits, ash-cake, and potlikker—hung over the Street. Men and women from Starfall, with relations still at Lockless, brought up pies and treats for dessert. Georgie and his wife, Amber, smiled as they unveiled two freshly baked apple-cakes. I helped the men haul out the long benches that we had hewn only days earlier, but we had more people than seats. So we retrieved boxes, hogsheads, logs, stones, and whatever else we could find
and positioned them around the bonfire. After the kitchen staff had made its way down, prayers were said, and we ate.

  Then, by the light of the bonfire, with everyone stuffed and bursting at the seams, the stories began of the ghosts of Lockless, of all our lost and gone. Zev, my father’s first cousin who’d gone to Tennessee, returned with his man, Conway, a child-mate of mine, and Conway’s sister Kat. They’d seen my uncle Josiah, who now had a new wife and two little girls. They’d seen Clay and Sheila, who, through some incredible magic, had been sold off the land but sold together, and so had that as comfort. And there was Philipa, Thomas, and Brick, who’d been carried off with Zev and were now old, but still alive. Then the talk turned to Maynard.