The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  In the farthest corner there were two large secretaries, the pigeonholes of which were filled with various papers pertaining to the Underground, tools of the house agents who, some nights, I saw down there, at the long table, quietly executing their stealthy craft. I would sit at the table with Mr. Fields, who took up our studies as though nothing had ever occurred between us, as though the span of years had not even happened.

  My curriculum now expanded, and I was happy for this: geometry, arithmetic, some Greek and Latin. And then for one remaining hour, I was given the free run of the offices and left to choose among the volumes. I think now that my own volume, the one that you now hold here, began there in those moments—in that library. For eventually I began not simply to read but to write. At first it was merely a record of my studies. But soon this record expanded to my thoughts, and then from my thoughts to my impressions, so that I now possessed, not merely a record of my head, but of my heart. From where did such an idea originate? I guess I must thank Maynard. Among the effects he pilfered from my father’s own pigeonholed secretary was an old journal kept by our grandfather, John Walker, who, in keeping with his generation, believed himself to be in the midst of a grand struggle that would alter the face of the world. I didn’t have such pretensions, but I did sense, however dimly, that I had, however incidentally, caught on to something significant beyond my small life.

  I continued this routine for a month, with little alteration, until one evening, when I went down underneath the house and there was Corrine in place of Mr. Fields.

  “And how are you finding things here?” she said.

  “Most strange,” I said. “It is another life.”

  Corrine yawned quietly and sat down. She put her elbow on the desk, and her chin in her palm, regarding me with tired eyes. Her hair was pulled back in black curls. The lantern-light tumbled shadows onto her face. Her aspect was of an ancestress though she barely outranked me in years. I recalled her time with Maynard and felt myself becoming enthralled by the breadth of her deception. How little I had known of her then, her intelligence, her savvy, her cunning. Then I felt a shock of fear roil through me. Corrine Quinn, who wore the mask of Quality, was mysterious and powerful. And I had no real notion of her capacities.

  “Even you,” I said. “It is a lot to consider. I just…I would never have imagined. Not in a thousand years.”

  “Thank you,” she said. And she laughed, clearly delighted in the grand sweep of her deception. “Do you enjoy the writing?”

  “I have seen so much lately,” I replied. “I have felt a need to record it, especially my experiences here.”

  “Careful with that,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “It dies with me. It does not leave here.”

  “Hmm,” she said, her eyes now alight. “I have heard that you have made the library your quarters,” she said. “And that some nights, you have to be practically dragged from its depths.”

  “It reminds me of home,” I said.

  “And would you go back, if you could? Home?” she asked.

  “No. Never,” I said.

  She studied me for a moment now, for what I could not be sure. They were always studying me down there. I could feel it, even my fellow agents in training, it seemed, always probing me with questions, watching me when they thought I was not looking. I answered them with as much silence as possible. But there was something about Corrine that compelled me to speak. There was something to her own silence that communicated a deep and particular loneliness, and though we never spoke directly upon the origins of this feeling, I felt it to be cousin to my own.

  “When I was down, back there, back at Lockless,” I said, “I had my freedoms—more than most, I should say. But I was still property of another man. Even speaking it as such, here right now to you, lowers me.”

  “Indeed,” she said. “And some of us have been down since the days of Rome. Some of us are born into society and told that knowledge is rightfully beyond us, and ornamental ignorance should be our whole aspiration.”

  She chuckled and paused a moment, waiting for me to catch her meaning. And when it was apparent that I did, she said, “The mind of woman is weak—this was the word, you see. But now they say that any and all who would aspire to the rank of lady must have some touch of the book. But not too much. No hard study. Nothing that might injure the delicate and girlish mind. Novels. Tales. Proverbs, that sort of thing. No papers. No politics.”

  Now Corrine stood and walked over to the desk. And from the desk drawer she retrieved a large envelope.

  “But I have not let them dictate to me, Hiram,” she said, holding the envelope. “And I have not simply read, my boy. I have learned their language and custom—even those that should be beyond my station, especially those that should be beyond my station, and that has been the seed of my liberty.”

  She walked back over and placed the package before me.

  “Open it,” she said.

  This I did and found inside of it the life of a man. There were letters to family. There were authorizations. There were certificates of sale.

  “This is yours for one week,” she said. “We can’t hold on to this man’s effects forever. What we have here is a selection, random enough so that its absence should not yet alarm him.”

  “And what am I to do?” I asked

  “Learn him, of course,” she said. “This is a lesson in their customs. A way of comprehending all of those things beyond your station. He is a gentleman, of some education and schooling, as are many of the great slave-holders in this country.”

  I must have looked confused because Corrine now said, “What do you think you’ve been studying down here?”

  I said nothing. She continued on, “What we do is not idle exercise, nor Christian improvement. First you learn what they know, in the general. And then you learn them in the specific—their words and their hand. Own the man’s especial knowledge and you shall own the measure of the man. Then you might fashion the costume, Hiram, and make it yours to fit.”

  I began my study the very next day. Quickly I ascertained that all the documents were drawn up by the same hand. Studying them, a portrait began to emerge. From the artifacts of the author’s life—the balance of his ledgers, his communications with his wife, his journal entries upon certain deaths, the accounting of consecutive harvests—the man, in all his traits and foibles, was summoned before me. I saw his daily habits, his routines, his particular philosophy, and by the final hour, having never known him, I could render nearly all of his features.

  Corrine met me again, a week later, in the library. I provided her with all I had ascertained, and under her rigorous interrogation, I provided even more. What was his wife’s favorite flower? How regular were their departures? Did this man love his father? Had he yet turned gray? Where did he stand in society? And how ancient was his fortune? Was he given to the infliction of random cruelties? I responded to every query—I had, with my gift of memory, inhaled all the facts of the man’s life. But Corrine pushed on to questions that went beyond the facts that might be committed to memory to matters of interpretation. Was he a good man? What did he covet in life? Was he the sort to revel in perceived wrongs? The next night she picked up this line of inquiry and pushed me to construct the man down to the last loose thread of his waistcoat. On the following night of interrogation, I found that the more speculative questions came easier, and then by the last night they were so easy that I felt them to be matters of my own life. And that was the point of it all.

  “Now,” she said. “You have read well enough to know this man to be in possession of a particular property of which he is most fond.”

  “The jockey, yes,” I replied. “Levity Williams.”

  “The same,” she said. “This man will need a day-pass for the road, a letter of introduction for the further portion, and finally free papers signed by hi
s master. You will provide these.”

  She pulled from her case a tin and handed it to me. Opening it, I saw a fine pen, and by handling it, I knew it was the same weight as the one so often employed by the object of my study.

  “Hiram, the costume must fit,” she said. “The day-pass must be done with the same hurried disregard, the letters must have all that official flourish, and the freedom papers the same arrogance that is surely the right of these vile people.”

  There was still the practical fact of copying his signature and penmanship. But here my memory and gift for mimicry triumphed. It was no different than what I’d done all those years ago, when Mr. Fields showed me the image of the bridge. Harder were the man’s beliefs and passions, and my ability to convey them with confidence and ease, as though they were my own. I never forgot that lesson. It was essential to what I became, to what I unlocked and saw.

  I don’t know if those documents ever loosed Levity Williams. Everything we did was done under so much secrecy. But still, in forging these documents I felt something new arising in me and the new thing was power. The power extended out from my right arm, projected itself through the pen, and shot out through the wilderness, right at the heart of those who condemned us.

  Soon this became regular labor. Every few weeks, Corrine presented me with a new package. And each week I fitted myself to the costume, so that when I finished, I was sometimes unsure of where I ended and where the Taskmaster began. I knew them. I knew their children, their wives, their enemies. Their humanity wounded me, for here too were the bonds of family, and here too were young lovers overrun by the rituals of courting, and here too lay a sorrow, a grim understanding of the sin of the Task. And here too were fears that in the last calculation they too were slaves to some Power, some God, some Demon of the old world, which they had unknowingly unleashed upon the new. I nearly loved them. My work demanded no less: I must reach beyond all my particular hatred and pain, see them in their fullness, and then, with my pen, strike out and destroy them.

  Every soul sent to freedom was a blow against them. And we did much more than that. We returned the documents edited and augmented. Our forgeries encouraged feuds. We altered inquests. We lent proof of fornication. My anger was now free and ranged beyond Maynard and my father, aimed now at all of Virginia, an anger I sated each night, under the lanterns, at the long library table.

  When done, I would retire to my bed, all worn. In sleep I escaped the men I studied every day and instead dreamed of some far place, a small plot, a stream running to carry away all troubles. I dreamt of Sophia. Those were the good days. On the bad days my dreams were hot, and I saw the jail, the boy, his mother raining down the wrath of God upon Ryland’s Hounds—“Ryland’s Hounds! May black fire scorch you down to your vile and crooked bones.” I saw a man who’d loved a woman and lost his name. And I saw all of my own betrayal, the cackling, the moaning, the rope. On those days I woke up nursing a different feeling, particular and direct, for I awoke thinking of all the things I would do should I ever again cross the path of Georgie Parks.

  * * *

  —

  But I had not been brought to the Underground for vengeance, nor even mere forgery, but for the power I was believed to bear. If we could only learn to trigger it, to control it and harness it. There was one who knew, one like me, but unlike me she had mastery of this power. In her section of the country, she had become so beloved and famed for fantastic exploits that the coloreds of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York had given her the name Moses. The power she wielded had been dubbed “Conduction”—the same word Corrine used to describe my own power—for how it “conducted,” seemingly at will, the Tasked from the shackled fields of the South to the free lands of the North. But this Moses kept her own counsel and declined to give the Virginia Underground any notion of how she worked. And so I was left to my own devices, or more properly stated, I was left to their devices.

  We decided to experiment. First, we all agreed that to trigger the power, I needed some kind of stimulation, some kind of threat or pain, even. And too it was thought, from my own testimony, that the power was tied to the indelible moments of my life—and in my own mind I remembered that it might be connected specifically to my mother. But how to summon those memories up and make them serve? Corrine and her lieutenants employed all manner of tricks to draw me out. Hawkins shackled me and asked me to recount, in every detail, the betrayal of Georgie Parks. Mr. Fields blindfolded me, then took me out into the forest and asked for every detail of the day I plunged into the Goose. Amy and I met at the stable and I recounted everything I knew of the crime my father had put upon my mother. I drove Corrine in a carriage, one Saturday, and recalled all that I felt while taking Sophia to meet my uncle. But no blue light of Conduction came to me, and when I finished my story, though my hosts might well be riveted and my own heart in tatters from the memories, I was always exactly where I had begun.

  The afternoon after the drive, after another aborted attempt at Conduction, Corrine and I walked together up to the main house and into the dining area. Mr. Fields and Hawkins were there drinking coffee. They greeted us both and then departed. Summer was well upon us with its long days, which meant less cover for our rehearsals. I remember the earth waking up that year and the transcendent feeling that I was waking up with it. But still no Conduction.

  We sat at the table and continued our conversation until we had exhausted all the small things. And then Corrine said, “Hiram, the truth is that by the lights of any other standard, you have made yourself into a fine agent. This will be a particular boon to us, because you shall be deployed according to our needs, and not your limits. Perhaps this means nothing to you—but it should. Not everyone makes it here, you know.”

  In fact the compliment did mean something to me. I had lived the whole of my life in service of my father and brother. Every step I took, any accomplishment fulfilled by me, even those made possible by my father, was received as a threat to the rightful order of things. For the first time in my life, I was aligned with the world around me.

  But I wondered what became of those who did not make it, those who’d been entrusted with all the secrets of the Virginia Underground but revealed themselves to be liabilities. I knew so much now—too much, I thought, to ever be released back into the world.

  “The truth is we expected none of this,” she continued. “We knew you were read. We knew of your gift of memory. We knew you had been raised proximate to society. But we had not counted on how easily you would assume the mask. We knew you had been hunted. But we had not known how much guile you’d truly taken up in your time down under.”

  She paused here, and I knew that we were entering into the darker portion of her conversation. She was looking down, struggling for her words. I thought then of the mastery she once displayed over me, back at Lockless, back in my father’s library, and how it had, in this moment especially, fled from her, and it occurred to me then that it really was all an illusion, that this entire order was engineering, was sorcery, all of it held up by elaborate display, by rituals and race-day, by fancies and parades, by powders and face-paint, it was all device, and now stripped of it I saw that we really were just two people, a man and woman, sitting here. I suddenly wanted to alleviate her obvious discomfort, and so I did that which I so often declined. I spoke.

  “And that is not enough,” I said. “The running, the reading, the writing, it is not why I was brought here. So it is not enough.”

  “No,” said Corrine. “It is not. Hiram, there are enemies in this world that cannot simply be outrun. And there are a whole assortment of our own held deep in the coffin of slavery, too deep for us to reach—Jackson, Montgomery, Columbia, Natchez. But this power—this ‘Conduction’—this is the railroad that might turn a week’s journey into an instant. Without it, we can menace our enemy. With it, distance is nothing to us and we might strike at him wherever. In short, we need you, H
iram—not just as Hiram the forger of letters and Hiram the running man, but as one who can return these people, our people, to the freedom given to all.”

  I understood her well. But I was still thinking of those who failed to meet the expectations.

  “And what will you do with me should I never again achieve it?” I asked. “Hold me here forever amongst your forgeries? Haul me back down into the hole?”

  “Of course not,” Corrine said. “You are free.”

  Free. There was something in how she said this that caught me. It rankled, though I could not then quite say why.

  “ ‘Free,’ you say. But I will serve. You said it yourself—and serve as you decide and determine. I do what you want. I go where you say.”

  “You assume too much of me,” she said.

  “Who else is there?” I asked. “What is this Underground beyond what I have seen here? Who is being moved? I have not seen them. What about my people? What about Sophia? What about Pete? What about Thena? What about my mother?”

  “We have rules,” she said.

  “Rules for what?” I said.

  “Rules for who can be gotten out and how,” she said.

  “Right,” I replied. “Then let me see them.”

  “The rules?” she replied, puzzled.

  “No,” I said. “Let me see the action. Let me see these people we are bringing out. No. Much better. You say I have exceeded all expectation. Then let me do the thing myself.”