The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Leafing through the pages, I felt the stories come alive before me. I saw them as though I was right there, so that on the walk to the ferry, on the ferry itself, and then all the way to the Philadelphia station, legions of colored people, panoramas of their great escapes, overlay the geography, so that I saw them all before me, saw them coming up from Richmond and Williamsburg, from Petersburg and Hagerstown, from Long-green and Darby, from Norfolk and Elm. And I saw them fly from Quindaro, to take haven in Granville, then bed down in Sandusky, and rejoice just west of Bird in Hand, not so far from Millersville, a small pass to Cedars.

  And I saw them fleeing with Irish girls, absconding with mementos of lost children, running with salt pork and crackers, running with biscuits, flying with cuts of beef, inhaling the last of the master’s terrapin soup, taking drags of his Jamaican rum, and then out into winter, thoughtless and shoeless, but freedom-bound. Black maids running with dreams of holy union, running with double-barreled pistol and dirk, so that when confronted by hounds, they pulled out, yelling, “Shoot! Shoot!” They fled with young children dosed into slumber, with old men who shuffled out into the frost, who died exposed in the wood with these words on their lips: “Man made us slave, but God willed us free.”

  And in all of these words, and each of these stories, I saw as much magic as anything I’d seen in the Goose, souls conducted as surely as I was out from its depths. And I saw them coming up on railroads, barges, river-runner, skiff, and bribery coach. Coming up on horseback over hard snow and March melting ice. They were fitted in ladies’ dress and came up, in gentry clothes and came up, in dental bandage and came up, in sling and came up, in rags not worth the laundry lady’s washing, but came up. They bribed low whites and stole horses. Crossed the Potomac in wind, storm, and darkness. Came up, as I had, driven by the remembrance of mothers or wives sold south for the high crime of standing contrary before lust. They came up devoured by frost. They came up with tales of hard drinkers and overseers who took glee in applying the lash. They came up stowed like coffee in boats, braving turpentine, scarred and singed by salt-water anointing, guilt-racked for finding themselves so broken that they should bow before their own flogging, for having held their brothers down under the master’s lash.

  In the stories that day, I saw them running out into the forest, clutching a Brussels carpet bag, yelling, “I shall never be taken!” I saw them boarding ferries, singing low and only to themselves:

  God made them birds and the greenwood tree

  And all has got their mate, but soul-sick me.

  I saw them that day at the Philadelphia docks, praying, “Hide the outcast, betray not him that wandereth.” I saw them wandering on Bainbridge and crying for all their dead, those who had taken ship for the final harbor from whence none shall return. All of them came to me, from the papers, from the memories, all of them drawn up from Pandemonium, up from Slavery, up out of the jaw of the Abomination, up out from under the juggernaut’s wheels, singing before the sorcery of this Underground.

  * * *

  —

  The following evening, I went to Micajah Bland. I was still shaken from being stolen off the streets of the city. I analyzed everyone from afar. When people walked close behind, I stopped to let them pass. Low whites of a particular style and dress became particularly suspicious to me, as hounds so often drew allies from their ranks. And there were low whites all over Philadelphia, indeed they were the largest class—and they were found especially near Bland’s home, by the Schuylkill docks. There were coloreds here too. I stood catercorner from Bland’s house, watching for a full ten minutes. I saw a shabbily dressed colored man dart out of the row house next door. He moved down the hot street with speed, and right behind him I saw a colored woman chasing and yelling all manner of vulgarity. And then behind her an older black woman yelling after and giving chase, and finally two little colored girls standing in the doorway wailing. I thought that I might should do something, and then the older woman—a grandmother perhaps—returned and shooed the little girls inside, the door still open.

  I had heard stories of coloreds like this, different than Raymond and his family, living penny to penny, beaten and run off jobs for daring to apply themselves to that which was held to be “white man’s work.” I had not noticed them at first because it was the relative opulence of all the other coloreds that struck me. But watching there, across the street, I remembered that Otha had warned clients of the Underground of this fate, for these coloreds were usually runaways themselves, men and women who made no connection with society, with certain churches, and thus found freedom hard upon them. And it occurred to me then that this fear that I felt, this study I put on every face, was their lifetime and worse, for if they were caught by the hounds, no Bland would rally to them.

  As for the man himself, I found him at home expecting me. A young woman answered the door, smiled, and then called out his name. She introduced herself as Laura, and mentioned that she was Bland’s sister. It was a modest house—one of the better ones in the quarter but not as nice as Raymond’s or the White family home on the other side of the river. But it was clean and well-appointed.

  We shook hands and there were the usual pleasantries. I felt a deep relief at having completed the small task of walking to Bland’s home unmolested. And having done that, I was now aware of a gnawing impatience to set upon the work of freedom for Lydia, and thus, in turn, freedom for Sophia, my Sophia. She existed in my mind not as one with her own notions and ideas but as an idea herself, a notion herself, so that to think of my Sophia was to think of a woman for whom I possessed a true and a sincere feeling, but, too, was to think of my dreams and my redemption. It is important that I tell you this. It is important that you see how little I knew of her dreams, of her redemption. I know now that she had tried to tell me, and I, who so prided himself on listening, simply could not hear.

  At all events, this was the spirit, anxious and rash, that I brought to Micajah Bland, so that no more than five minutes after taking my seat I said, directly and abruptly, “So how we gonna do it?”

  “Get to Sophia?” Bland asked.

  “Well, I was thinking about Lydia and the kids. But we can start with Sophia if you like.”

  “Sophia is the easy one. I have to prevail upon Corrine and marshal some resources, but it will be done.”

  “Corrine…” As I said her name, my voice trailed off. “She’s the one who left Sophia there.”

  “It is her station, Hiram. She deserves notice, and more, deserves consultation.”

  “Corrine…” I shook my head.

  “You know the full story on that woman?”

  “No,” I said. “Except that she has left Sophia down in the coffin.”

  And now something happened, something that I was not aware of at the time. I do not know if it was a kind of possession, but I know that I felt an anger rising in me, an anger related to me, related to my violation, related to the jail and what had been done to me. But it was not my anger. And the voice that now spoke was not mine so much as one recently imprinted upon me. And the voice now said, You know what they did to us back there. You done forgot? You don’t remember what they do to the girls down here? And once they do it, they got you. They catch you with the babies, tie you to the place by your own blood….

  At that moment, the usual calm repose of Bland’s face broke and gave way to something in him I had never seen before and never saw again—fear. And then the walls fell away and in their place there was a great and borderless nothing. The table and chairs were still there and they, along with Bland himself, were wreathed in a now-familiar blue. I was aware of myself, and aware of a deep anger—but more I felt a low guttural pain—one that had been with me since the day I’d left Maynard to the deep. Most important, I was, for the first time, aware of exactly what was happening as it was happening, so that I now thought to try to steer it, direct it, t
he way you might direct a dream. But the moment I did this, the moment I attempted to directly affect my surroundings, the world reverted back. The great nothing shimmered, until the outlines of walls returned. The blue faded and I saw now that we were seated again, except that we had changed places and I had taken Bland’s seat while he had taken mine. I stood and touched the walls. I walked out of the room, stumbled into the foyer, then leaned against the wall. There was that same disorientation, though the fatigue was less. I returned to the dining room and took my seat.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” I said. “That’s what Corrine wants.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said.

  “Have you seen it before?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But not like that.”

  For long minutes, I said nothing. Bland himself now stood and left the room, and I took this as charity for it seemed to me that he knew that I needed a moment to collect myself. When he returned, his sister Laura was with him. She mentioned that it would be time for supper soon and asked me to stay.

  “Join us, Hiram,” said Micajah Bland. “Please.”

  I agreed.

  After the meal, we took a walk together, silently strolling through the evening Philadelphia streets. And then I finally asked, “Who’d you see do it? Moses?”

  He nodded.

  “And that was her, the other night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that was how you saved us?”

  “No. We didn’t need anything so otherworldly for that bunch.”

  “Bland, if Moses can do this, why not send her after Otha’s family?”

  “Because she is Moses, not Jesus. She has her own promises to keep. There are limits to everything. I respect Corrine. I respect what she wanted to do with you. But she does not really understand the power, nor how it works.”

  We walked some more, wordlessly. The sun was setting behind us. I had not been out for an evening walk since Ryland’s Hounds had tackled me near the docks. But I felt a kind of safety with Micajah Bland. The fact was he was my oldest friend on the Underground, to the extent that I had any. And it was he who had, in his own particular ways, believed that there was indeed something in me.

  “How in God’s name did you get tangled up with Corrine?” I asked.

  “You have it backward,” Bland said. “When I met Corrine she was a student, a girl at an institute in New York, where these Virginians of a certain class would often send their daughters for a lady’s education—French, housekeeping, art, a little reading. But Corrine was precocious and the city entranced her. She would often sneak out and attend the lectures of abolitionists. That is how she and I met.

  “You see, there were those of us then who’d long felt that we’d like to expand our war into the South. She was easily recruited, and then cultivated as our chief weapon to stab at the heart of Demon Slavery itself. And she was a weapon—their prim Southern belle, an ornament to their civilization, turned back against them. She has proved herself repeatedly, Hiram. You cannot imagine the sacrifice.”

  “Her own parents,” I said.

  “Sacrifices, Hiram,” he said. “Tremendous sacrifices, the kind that Raymond and Otha, and even our Moses, would never approve of, nor would I ever ask them to. This was about the time I met you. I was then in the business of reconnaissance, under the guise of Mr. Fields. It was there at Lockless that I first heard the stories of Santi Bess, but even then I did not make the connection between you, the boy with the invincible memory, and Conduction. Lockless was one among the ancient houses that Corrine targeted, but the only one featuring an heir who we believed could be deceived with relative ease. But as she closed in she realized that the Virginia station stood to gain control not just of an ancient Elm County estate but of one who could bring a great power into our control.”

  “But you had Moses,” I said.

  “No, Hiram,” he said. “No one has Moses. Certainly not Corrine. Moses has her loyalties and they are tied most strongly to the station here in Philadelphia. Corrine sought similar power, but tied to Virginia.”

  “So everyone clean, huh? No one to blame?” I said.

  “No, Hiram. She is not clean. She is right. Have you ever thought about what they would do to her if she were found out? Do you realize what, particularly, they would do to a woman like that, who’d mocked their most sacred principles, and sought to destroy their whole way of life?”

  We had by now wound our way back to the front of the Ninth Street office, my home. It occurred to me, then only emerging from my feelings, that Bland was seeing me home. I looked at him, laughed quietly, and shook my head.

  “What?” he said. “We cannot have you getting blackjacked and bound yet again.”

  I laughed again, a little louder this time. At this Bland threw his arm around my shoulder and laughed with me.

  19

  THAT NIGHT, I SAT up replaying the small Conduction I had brought about in Bland’s home. The power was within me, but it was not in my hands so much as I was in the hands of the power, for when it made itself known, when the blue glow came over and the curtains of fog fell upon me, I was but a passenger in my own body. I needed to understand, and for that I needed someone who already understood, and the only such someone was Moses.

  But first, the fate of Lydia White and her children. I found myself, the next day, with Micajah, Otha, and Raymond in the parlor, discussing the various means by which we might bring them out.

  “We need a set of passes,” Bland explained. “And they need to be in the name of this man Daniel McKiernan. Hiram, it was McKiernan who once held Otha, and now holds his family. We need these as precise as we can make them. They have a long way to travel, and our agents, they fall on the smallest things—being out on the roads at an hour forbidden by obscure law, confusing the arrival time for the local ferry, or just bad luck.”

  “I can fabricate the passes,” I said. “But I need an original sample of his style. As many as possible. Perhaps Otha’s free papers?”

  “Nah,” Otha said. “That don’t work. I intrigued with another man to have myself bought from McKiernan, and it was that other man who gave me my papers.”

  “There is another way,” said Raymond. “There was a time, not too distant, when just across the river, it was legal to own a man—in some ways, it still is. Nevertheless, among the men who most advantaged themselves through slavery, there was one of particular importance to my family—Jedikiah Simpson. Mr. Simpson owned me, my mother, my father, and Otha.”

  “This was the man your mother ran from?” I asked. “The one who sold Otha south?”

  “The same,” Raymond said. “Now Jedikiah Simpson is long dead. But his son has taken possession of the old place. He also owns a home here in the city, just north of Washington Square. Elon Simpson, on account of his wealth, is held to be a gentleman in the city’s most respectable circles. But we know that he is not respectable at all. We know, for instance, that he kept his investment in slavery by selling his slaves farther south.”

  “Have you ever crossed paths with him?” I asked.

  “No, not yet,” Raymond said.

  “But we got eyes on him,” Otha said. “Both here in the city and on his place down South. And from that we know Elon Simpson still has business with Daniel McKiernan.”

  Everyone was quiet for a minute, waiting to see if I had yet seen the plot. But they need not have waited, it was forming as they spoke. So I looked to Otha and nodded to confirm my comprehension.

  “A letter, a receipt of sale, anything,” I said. “I just need some correspondence between Simpson and McKiernan. A break-in, perhaps?”

  “No,” Raymond said. “Bland has a more delicate option.”

  They were all three smiling now, like children holding on to a secret.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “How bout I show you,” Bl
and said.

  * * *

  —

  And so that night I found myself standing in an alley with Bland, watching the street through the glow of gas-light, positioning ourselves in such a way that the street could not watch us. Our eyes were set on the home of Elon Simpson. We were right off of Washington Square, a part of the city marked by well-appointed brownstones with shuttered windows and a park hailing back to this country’s birth. Here was the seat of this city’s Quality—and the seat of our dead.

  I had, by then, done my share of reading on Philadelphia, so I knew that, in another time, when the Task was here in Pennsylvania, the city had fallen victim to a wave of fever. And among the men who combatted this fever was Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor, which is hard to countenance given the theory he put forth in defense of the city. Colored people were immune to the fever, he told Philadelphia, and more than immune, their very presence could alter the air itself, sucking up the scourge and holding it captive in our fetid black bodies. And so tasking men were brought in by the hundreds on the alleged black magic of our bodies. They all died. And when the city began to fill with their corpses, its masters searched for a space far from the whites who were felled by the disease. And they chose a patch of land where no one lived, and tossed us into pits. Years later, after the fever had been forgotten, after the war had birthed this new country, they built rows and rows of well-appointed houses right on top of those people, and named a square for their liberating general. It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.