The Water Dancer (Oprah's Book Club)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  “I do,” I said.

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “This is war. Soldiers fight in war for all kinds of reasons, but they die because they cannot bear to live in the world as it is. And that right there was the Micajah Bland I knew. He could not live. Not here, not like this. He put it all on the line—his life, his connections, his sister’s heart—because he knew that that is exactly the line on which all the rest of us must live.”

  We stopped walking here for a moment.

  “I know that you don’t understand,” Harriet said. “But you will adjust yourself to these facts. You will have to. There will be more. Could be you. Could be me.”

  “No, never you,” I said, now smiling.

  “Someday it will be me,” she said. “Just hoping that the only hounds I answer to are held by my Lord.”

  The talk quickly turned to the business at hand.

  “So you’re with me, friend,” said Harriet. “It ain’t the coffin, this is true, but Maryland is still Pharaoh’s land. I know what they say about me, but understand that this is never what I say about myself. We all the same when the hound got the scent. That axe swing and any man might be lumber. And with that, all that I have learned shall be nothing, shall be dust upon the long road. You will not find me believing in my own miracles, but in the strictest principles of the Underground.”

  And then she smiled softly and said, “But there are so many miracles. As when I was told of a man who did not merely conduct but self-resurrected, who hoisted himself out of the ice, a man who, pursued by the hounds, felt a longing for home so fierce that he blinked and he was there.”

  “That what they say, huh?” I asked.

  “That’s what they say,” she said. “I never told you what happened with me, did I?”

  “You don’t tell much of nothing about yourself at all. Ain’t much for giving out stories, as you said.”

  “Yeah. I did say that. So we’ll wait on that one. Don’t matter much, either way. What I am asking is that you put more trust in me than your own failings.”

  We turned around and headed back toward Bainbridge Street, again walking mostly in silence. When we got back home, we sat in the front parlor.

  “So, Maryland,” I said.

  “Maryland,” she said. Then she reached into her bag and produced a file of letters.

  “I need two things: First a pass, drawn from the shadow of this hand. I need the pass to be for two.”

  I started scribbling notes.

  “Then I need a letter in slave-hand. Remit it to Jake Jackson of Poplar Neck—Dorchester, Maryland. From his brother Henry Jackson. Beacon Hill, Boston. Give him all the loving tidings a brother would, and do it whatever way should come to you. But note this portion particularly: Tell my brothers to be watchful unto prayer and when the good old ship of Zion come along, be ready to step onboard.

  I nodded, still scribbling.

  “Have that letter off by tomorrow’s post. We got to give the thing time to land and make its effect. Then we are on our way. We leave in two weeks. One night’s journey.”

  I stopped and gave a puzzled look.

  “Wait,” I said. “One night? Ain’t enough time to get to Maryland.”

  She just looked back and smiled.

  “Nowhere near enough time,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  But two weeks later, in the dead of night, I walked out of the Ninth Street station, down Market Street, where all was asleep, and met Harriet at the docks of the Delaware River. We headed south past the coal depot, past the South Street pier where the Red Bank ferry bobbed in its moorings, until we stood before an array of older, battered piers that were little more than rotted wood groaning and creaking as they swayed in the night-black river. I looked farther down the docks and saw that these shadowy ruins diminished into mere stakes jutting out of the water.

  The October wind blew up off the river. I looked up and saw that clouds obscured the stars and moon, which so often guided us. Fog rolled up. Harriet stood at the pier, looking out into the night, out through the fog, toward the invisible banks of Camden, but in fact far past them. She was leaning on her trusty walking stick, the one I’d seen her with on our way to New York. She said, “For Micajah Bland.” And then she began to walk on the shattered pier before us directly out into the river.

  That I followed, and did not question, tells you exactly how much faith I had placed in Harriet by then. She was our Moses and I believed even in my fear that she would somehow split the sea that now stood before us. And so I walked.

  I heard Harriet say, “For all those who have sailed off to the port from which there can be no return.”

  I heard the wet wood of the pier groan under my weight, but the planks felt sturdy beneath my feet. I looked back, but a fog had encircled us on all sides, and thickened so that I could no longer see the city behind me. I looked forward and saw Harriet still walking out.

  “We forgot nothing, you and I,” Harriet said. “To forget is to truly slave. To forget is to die.”

  And at that Harriet stopped in her tracks. There was a light growing now, out of the darkness. At first I thought Harriet had lit a lantern, for the light was low and faint. And then I saw that the light was not yellow but a pale spectral green, and I saw that this light was not in Harriet’s hand, but was in Harriet herself.

  She turned to me, with eyes of the same green fire that had grown up out of the night.

  “To remember, friend,” she said. “For memory is the chariot, and memory is the way, and memory is bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom.”

  That was when I saw that we were in the water. No, not in it, over it. We should have been under it, for I knew that the pier was gone and there was no longer anything of this world beneath our feet. The Delaware River is deep enough for a steamer to come into harbor. But the water barely lapped against my boots.

  “Stay with me, friend,” Harriet said. “No exertions needed. It’s just like dancing. Stay with the sound, stay with the story and you will be fine. And the story is as I have said, offered up for all those given over to the maw of the Demon. We seen it all our lives, yes we have. Starts when you young, with but the barest sense of the world, but mayhaps even then, you got some sense that it is wrong. I know I did.”

  What happened then was a kind of communion, a chain of memory extending between the two of us that carried more than any words I can now offer you here, because the chain was ground into some deep and locked-away place, where my aunt Emma lived, where my mother lived, where a great power lived, and the chain extended into that selfsame place in Harriet, where all those lost ones had taken up their vigil. And then I looked out and saw them, phantoms flittering, flittering like that baleful day out on the river Goose, and I knew exactly what the phantoms were and what they meant to Harriet.

  So when I saw the boy off to the side of us, out in the mist, wrapped in spectral green, no older than twelve, I knew that his name was Abe, and I knew that he was among those gone Natchez-way, sent across “the river with no name.” And now I could hear Harriet’s voice again, in that deep place where the chain was anchored and rooted.

  “You were not acquainted with this Abe,” she said. “But by the light of this Conduction, you shall know him right well. I regret that he will not be joining us on the way back. It is regrets of Abe that sent me to the Underground.”

  Now the light of Harriet opened with some brightness, and I saw a path before us, across the water that was not water. There was no dock in the distance, but in and out of the darkness I saw the phantoms of Harriet’s memory—dancing about, as they would have been in that time when they were known to her. And as we approached and passed each one, the phantoms fell away.

  “You know me well, friend,” she said. “I was made under the lash. I was only seven when Master Broadus sent
me trapping varmints in the swamps. I might like to lose a limb out there. But I come back whole—out the cage, not the jungle. When I was nine, they call me up to the Big House and I was given the entirety of the parlor’s care. My errors were many. My mistress beat me, every day, with a rope. I began to think that this was God’s plan. That I really was the wretch they made me out to be, and deserved no more than the abuses I received.

  “Now, for all my humiliations, the fact of it is that there was some corners of hell to which I, thankfully, received no invitation. I speak now of the crossing of the nameless, of the long walk to Natchez, the mournful march to Baton Rouge. I saw it all, friend. Why, my uncle Hark lost half an arm just thinking of the nameless, just watching them white men watch him a little too closely. So one morning he got up, and thinking how hard it’d be to sell a cripple, raised his axe with one hand, and gave the other hand over to the Lord. ‘I might be lame,’ Hark say. ‘But I shall not be parted.’

  “Hark was uncommon. Most just took the walk, leaving in their wake wailing wives, broken husbands, and orphans. And then there was our boy Abe—whose wide wondrous face I see before me right now, easy as I did in that other life—a well-mannered boy who done only as he was told. His momma died in the birthing, and his daddy was long sold away. Whatever pains he felt over these partings, he never shared. He spoke only as a child should—when induced by elder folk—and these elders, knowing his pain, however hidden, were soft upon him.

  “But for those who were hard, for those who worshipped the seven and nine, Abe was a caution. I tell you, friend, that boy could not be held. Would have made a hell of an agent, for he ran like he had the lungs of a lion. The moment Master Broadus even thought of correction, the boy would fly.

  “Sometimes the headman would call us up to help hold him. We might make some motion as such, but in our hearts we were with Abe. You know what it is—the Tasked must take they victories as they come. And if you saw Abe, as we did, blazing through the wheat field, hurtling through the high corn, you would have seen our deepest unspeaking—freedom, friend, freedom. In those moments running, he was free, unweighted by the partings, unbroken by the seven and nine. And watching him is how I got my first taste of Conduction, of the great power in even the smallest of escapes.”

  Harriet paused here for some moments and we moved again in silence. I was gripped by her telling and could see the events of her narrative open up before me. And so full was the brilliance beaming out from her that all features of our path stood in green relief.

  “I stood outside the town emporium, minding my own. And like lightning, I seen young Abe streak by. He bounded a bench, shot under a wagon, got himself proper, and flew on. And then right behind him, I seen old Galloway, stumbling over himself, panting with every trot.

  “Galloway called out to a tasking man, ‘You there, boy! Come bind this fellow.’ They cornered Abe, but might as well have cornered the air. He dashed out and slid right under Galloway’s legs, easy as the boat under the bridge, and Galloway cried out, cursing his very hands. I should have been going on then, but I was fixed on the story now playing out before me. And the longer it went, the more men came, until I seen the Tasked, the Low, and Galloway all bent over, panting, heads bent over in their humiliation.

  “Now, Galloway would like to give the thing up, but there was a crowd now and so his pride kept him going. Can’t no slaver have his niggers in defiance. So Galloway gathered himself and bounded on. I watched them dance a little more, and then Abe turned toward me. My particular feelings upon slavery were not yet whole. Surely I would like to be a gal working on her own time. But I was young. I had no religion but felt Abe in flight to be my own jubilee.

  “So Abe darted my way. And then I heard Galloway call to me, as he called to all the others, ‘Bind that boy!’ I could not. I would not. I was nobody’s headman. And if I was, I should know better than to make my marbles upon the taking of a boy like Abe. He cut away, ran, and then cut back toward me again. And out of his own unthinking frustration, Galloway grabbed a weight and hurled it at Abe. Don’t know what he was thinking, for Abe had eyes in the back of his head.

  “No such luck upon young Harriet.”

  By now Harriet burned with the brilliance of twenty lanterns, and the pale green extended out into a full white. There was no water. I could not feel my legs. I could not truly feel any part of me. I was now merely a presence, an essence following a voice.

  “The weight sailed right past Abe and caught me in the head. Crashed through my skull. And then the Lord’s long night came all over me.

  “I did not wake in Dorchester but in some other time. I saw Abe racing across the land and his foot-tracks set the trees to fire. The forests burned to cinder. The ash fell to the ground. And then the ash rose with the wind, until it formed itself into a whole company of black men in blue, black men with rifles upon their shoulders. And I was there with them, Hiram. And we were a multitude. In the eyes of this army assembled before me, I beheld the humiliations of slavery burning like fire. And each of these men had the face of young Abe.

  “I stood upon a high bluff, soldiers arrayed around me. Below we saw the great range of our shackled country, its crops, rooted in flesh and watered with blood. And a song rose up among these men—this legion of Abes—as they stood in ranks, and the song was that old feeling put to hymn, and on my sign we fell down upon this sinful country, and our battle-cry was as mighty as a great river conducted through a high and narrow valley.

  “I awoke. I saw my momma crying. I had been down under for months. All thought me lost. None knew that I had been found. All that year my body recovered. Whole weeks would pass, and I would not speak. But there were words aplenty in my head. And I knew, at that young age, that someday the season of running would pass, we would take our victories as we wanted, not as they were given, and we would fall upon this country in the spirit of all those taken over the nameless. And we would scourge this Natchez. And we would burn this Baton Rouge.”

  The light of Harriet began to dim now, gradually as it had arisen. And I felt my body slowly coming back to me—my thumping heart, my heaving lungs, my hands, my legs, my feet, all now landing, not on water, but solid ground.

  “Young Abe. I have not forgotten you. Before Undergrounds and Conductions, before agents and orphans, before Micajah Bland, when I was but a girl you gave me the first feeling of what it might mean to be free. I heard they captured you by Hampton’s Mark, not so far from Elias Creek. They say you were at last worn down, but still and all, it took a town to tackle you. I do not believe them. All who have seen you know the truth. You might be lamed, but you shall never be parted.”

  Now the light had fallen back to palest green. My eyes were restored. I looked out. The docks, the river, the piers, were all gone, and looking up I saw, where there had once been clouds, a clear sky and the North Star blinking out. I was on an outcropping with a small bank of woods behind us and a large empty field in front and below. I looked back along the path to see from where we had come, but there was nothing but the woods. I heard Harriet moan and I saw she was leaning on her walking stick. With a trembling voice she said, “Horse…Saddle.”

  She took a step back and tumbled backward to the ground. I ran to her and held up her head. Her eyes rolled back and she moaned softly. That was when I heard the horn. I laid Harriet softly upon the ground and turned and looked out across the field and I saw them there, if only as shadows—tasking folk making their way out. And I knew we were not in Philadelphia anymore. A door had opened. The land had folded like fabric. Conduction. Conduction. Conduction.

  24

  I WAS IN NEW COUNTRY—THE trees, the smells, the birds—and just then I saw the sun breaking, and all of it coming alive. I could not take to the roads. Ryland would be watching. And too there were tasking folks of uncertain loyalties who might want to claim the grand bounty that forever hung over the head of Moses. I s
tood there for a moment, looking down from the outcropping. The sun was just beginning to blow yellow over the horizon. I gathered up Harriet and slung her, gently as I could, over one shoulder. Then I squatted down and took her walking stick in hand. I pushed back into the woods, slowly but deliberately, clearing the branches and brambles with the stick, then walking into the space I’d opened. After an hour of this, with some intermittent rest, I spotted a dry gully beneath some shrubbery. I saw that there was just enough space here to lay Harriet, but not enough for me. Her safety was uppermost. I could be left to chance. I pushed deeper into the woods, thinking that should I be taken, I would like to be taken alone. At nightfall, I would return for Harriet, who I hoped would have roused herself by then.

  In the early afternoon, I heard woodsmen from a nearby timber camp come out for scouting. I was perfectly still, which was nothing when measured next to the time I’d spent confined in that Virginia burial pit. Later, I saw two low whites and their hounds out for hunting. But I had sprinkled graveyard dust all around, which I knew would conceal my trail. I saw a group of children—some Quality, some Tasked—out at play and wondered if they might take my hiding place for their own. But they scooted on. And then, after the longest day I had ever lived, I rejoiced as the shade of night drew over the earth. The moon flew up high, and its rise was carried as much in the firmament as in my nervous heart.

  I walked back to the gully, and pulling away the brush, I saw Harriet still lying there, as I left her, walking stick across her chest, like a pharaoh entombed. I reached to touch her face, as she had so often touched mine. It was cold to the touch. I looked down and saw her lungs heaving strong, and when I found her face again, I saw that her eyes were open. She smiled and said, “Evening, friend.”

  She was up in minutes. It was as if the whole thing was but a nap. We walked for some time, following a dirt road, but keeping ourselves to the woods, so we would see any patrol long before it was upon us.