The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Lucy was no longer crying now. Unburdened, she walked back to the cave, where the rest were beginning to rise. Hawkins gave me a wary a look. I saw him but paid no heed. I focused on Lucy, who had by then walked over to a smiling Parnel Johns and laughingly embraced him.

  We made good time that night. By midnight the moon was high, and I could see the mountains in the distance. And I knew then that we were near Bryceton. We kept going right past it. An hour or two later we found ourselves at a small cabin. Smoke rose from the chimney and fire-light flickered in the window.

  Hawkins whistled. He waited, then he whistled again. Waited. Then whistled one last time. The fire went out inside. We waited a few minutes longer. Then we followed Hawkins around to the back. A door opened and out came an old white woman. She walked over to us and said, “The two-fifty been late all week.”

  Hawkins said, “No. I believe the schedule changed.”

  At that the woman said, “You said it was only one of them.”

  “Sure did,” said Hawkins. “Not my notion. You do with ’em what you will.”

  She studied the group for a second and said, “All right, y’all get in here quick.”

  We walked inside and we helped this old woman start up the fire again. Hawkins stepped outside with her. They talked for a few minutes and then returned. Hawkins said, “I reckon it’s time for us to make our way home.”

  Micajah Bland turned to Parnel Johns. I could see the tenderness of his face against the fire-light. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

  Johns nodded. And then as we walked out he said, “When we safe, can I send word to my daddy?”

  Hawkins laughed to himself and turned back. “You most certainly can,” he said. “But if the Underground find out, it’ll be the last word you ever speak.”

  * * *

  —

  With this now done, and with my actions against Georgie Parks, it was felt by Corrine and by others that it was time for me to see more of the Underground’s work, to journey out of the country of slavery and into the North. Philadelphia would be my new home.

  I was given a few days’ notice, and was lucky to have even that. The Underground would give me no chance to reconsider, for though we all dreamed of going north, all sorts of fears might overrun a man when the dream descended into the real. There is always a part of us that does not want to win, wants to stay down in the low and familiar. And so there was no time to think and submit to the cowardly parts of me. I spent my last days in counsel and reflection. I talked with Micajah Bland about what to expect. I walked the woods and thought of all that I once took for normal, but would soon be without.

  Those of us working in some new terrain had to take up a new identity and be furnished with papers. The house agent never made his own. They were furnished by other house agents from other stations, for it was thought that no man could author his own life. They began with the root of my occupation—woodworking at a local company that was a cover for the Underground’s operations. I was to be a man who’d purchased his freedom, and fled in the wake of certain recent laws that choked the rights of the free coloreds in the South. I was given two sets of working clothes and another set for church. My name stayed the same with one addition—the surname Walker.

  There was still the matter of how, precisely, to get there. Ryland’s Hounds trawled the roads, harbors, and railways. We were aided by the fact that there would be no runaway report for me, and thus no Ryland searching for a man of my description. We decided on the train. I would be joined by Hawkins and Micajah Bland. Our plan was simple. I was a freeman. Hawkins, a slave belonging to this Bland, a white man, his proprietor. Should I, at any point, find my papers under challenge, Bland would offer testimony as to the identity.

  “Act like a freeman,” Hawkins advised. “Lift your head. Look them in the eye—though not for too long. You are still colored. Bow before the ladies. Be sure to bring some of them books of which you are so fond. Remember, own the acre, or they will see right through you.”

  On our day out, I held these notions, and when my nerves came upon me, as when procuring my ticket, as when handing my trunk to the boy for stowing, as when the train pulled off and the South, and everything I had known, fell away, I simply told myself this thing that must become my truth. I am free.

  15

  I DEPARTED WITH FEW EFFECTS to my name and no real farewells. I saw neither Corrine nor Amy that last evening, and assumed them both involved in some mischief of their own. I left on a hot summer Monday morning, four months after my arrival at Bryceton. We walked most of that day, Hawkins, Bland, and I, and spent that night in a small farmhouse of an old widower sympathetic to our cause. Then, that Tuesday, we set out separately for the town of Clarksburg, where the first leg of our journey would commence. The plan was to cross through the state, by the Northwestern Virginia Railroad, and then in western Maryland we’d link up with the Baltimore and Ohio, proceed east and then north up into the free-lands of Pennsylvania, and find our destination in Philadelphia. There was a shorter route due north, but there had been some recent troubles along the rail there with Ryland’s Hounds, and it was felt that the audacity of this direct approach right through the slave-port of Baltimore would not be expected.

  When I reached the Clarksburg station, I spotted Hawkins and Bland sitting beneath a red awning. Hawkins was fanning himself with his hat. Bland was looking down the track, in the opposite direction from where the train would approach. A flock of blackbirds sat on the awning. On the platform I saw a white woman in bonnet and blue hoop dress holding the hands of two well-dressed toddlers. Some distance away, outside the shade of the awning, a low white with what I guessed to be all his possessions in a carpet-bag smoked a tobacco. I stood off to the side, not wanting to inspire suspicion with any presumption of cooling shade. The low white finished his tobacco and then greeted the woman. They were still talking when the blackbirds flew from the awning, and the great iron cat roared around the bend, all black smoke and ear-splitting clanking. I watched as the wheels turned slower and slower and came to a screeching stop. I had never seen anything like it outside of a book. I presented my ticket and papers to the conductor gingerly. He barely looked at them. It may be hard to believe now, in these dark days, but there was no “nigger car.” Why would there be one? The Quality kept their Tasked ones close the way a lady keeps her clutch, closer even, for this was a time in our history when the most valuable thing a man could own, in all of America, was another man. I headed to the back, walking in the aisle between the two rows of seating. The train idled for a few minutes. I tried not to look nervous. But when I heard the conductor yell, and the great cat roared again, I felt every inch of me loosen and relax.

  The entire journey took two days, so that I arrived at Gray’s Ferry Station, overlooking the Schuylkill River, on Thursday morning. I stepped off into a crowd of people searching for friends and family. I saw Hawkins and Bland as soon as I was off the train, but they gave me a wide berth, for it was known that even here in the city, Ryland prowled searching for runaways. I had been given no description of my escort. I was told to merely wait. There was an omnibus across the street, hitched to a team of horses. Several of the train passengers stepped on board.

  “Mr. Walker?”

  I turned and saw a colored man in gentleman’s clothes before me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Raymond White,” he said, extending his hand. He did not smile.

  “This way,” he said and we walked over to the omnibus and boarded. The driver cracked a carriage whip and we pulled away, in the direction opposite of the river. We did not talk much during the ride, and this was to be expected given the business that had brought us together. Nevertheless, I was able to take the measure of this Raymond White. His dress was impeccable. He wore a perfectly cut gray suit that angled down from his shoulders to his cinched waist. His hair wa
s neat and parted. His face seemed a stone with features cut into it, and for the whole of that ride no expression of pain, annoyance, joy, humor, nor concern moved those features. Yet I thought that I saw a sadness in his eyes that—despite all Raymond’s forbearing elegance—told a story, and I knew, if not how, that his life was somehow tied to the Task. And from that sadness I drew that his high manner, his nobility, was no simple matter of birth but of labor and struggle.

  The omnibus cut away from the river and into the heart of the city. There were people everywhere on the streets. I could see them out the windows, so many people, so that it seemed to me as though race-day had gathered a hundred-fold, as though the whole of the world had gathered there, gathered to heave between the workshops and fur dealerships and druggists, to walk the stone-chipped streets, to inhale the acrid air. Every rank of person in every configuration—parent and child, rich and poor, black and white. And I saw that the rich were mostly white and the poor mostly black, but there were also members of both tribes in both classes. It was a shock to see it directly, for if whites held the power here, and they did, they did not seem to hold it exclusively. And I tell you, I had never seen more miserable specimens of the white race, and never more luxurious specimens of the colored race, than I saw that day. The coloreds here were not merely surviving, as they did in Starfall, they were sometimes dressed in garments more elegant than anything I’d seen on my father. And they were out there in the churning city, in their hats and gloves, and their ladies under their parasols, moving like royalty.

  This astonishing portrait was set against the most offensive odors known to man. I did not smell the air here in this city so much as feel it. It seemed to be born in the gutters, then rose up to mingle with the dead horses in the street, and finally joined the fumes of manufacture and production, until the odor—an orchard left to rot—was an invisible fog that hung over the whole city. I was used to all the malicious odors of livestock, but alongside the gardens, the strawberry bushes, the woods. But the smell of Philadelphia offered no such balance; it hung everywhere, over every street, in the workshops and taverns, and, I would discover, if care was not taken it drifted into homes and bedchambers.

  We got off the omnibus after twenty minutes or so and entered into a brick row house on the corner, where we found Bland and Hawkins already installed. They were just past the foyer, in a small parlor drinking coffee with another well-dressed black man. Seeing us, the whole party smiled and looked up. The man whom I did not know stood, strode over, and gave a big handshake and bigger smile. I could tell from his features that he was kin to Raymond White. He had the same stone-face, but not the stoicism.

  “Otha White,” he said, introducing himself. “No trouble on the rail, right?”

  “Not that I can tell,” I said.

  “Here, have a seat,” said Otha. “I’ll bring y’all some coffee.”

  I sat while Raymond and Bland made small talk. Otha returned with coffee and then the conference began.

  “Take care of this man, you hear?” Hawkins said, drinking his coffee. “He is the genuine article. This is not idle talk. Seen him buried under a river and dig himself out. He done suffered everything we could throw at him, and he still standing. Should tell you something.”

  This was the kindest thing Hawkins had ever said to me.

  “You know my commitments,” Raymond said. “My whole life is given to this. And we gladly welcome his aid in our business.”

  “We could really use you,” said Otha. “I don’t know you, Hiram Walker, but I wasn’t raised here either. But I learned and I think you will too.”

  Hawkins nodded, took a drink from his coffee. Hawkins seemed more at ease with Otha, born in slavery, than Raymond, a creature of the North. I think now, through the lens of years, that it was a matter of how we worked. In Virginia, we were outlaws, a matter that soon became our honor, so that we reveled in being beyond the morals of a world we believed to be premised in Demon law. We were not Christians. Christians plied their trade in the North, where the Underground was so strong as to not be an underground at all. I can recall now many nights, sitting in some Philadelphia tavern, listening to men, conducted only days earlier, boasting of the details of their flight. Whole city blocks teemed with fugitives, and these fugitives populated congregations, where they were organized into vigilance committees who guarded each other and watched for Ryland. In the North, the agents of the Underground were not outlaws, indeed they were very nearly a law unto themselves. They stormed jails, attacked federal Marshals, and shot it out with Ryland’s Hounds. Men like Hawkins plied their trade in the shadows. Men like Raymond shouted in the town square.

  But for Otha, it was different. There was something about him, something about his implied roots and rough manner, that compelled deference from Hawkins, however deeply buried and unacknowledged, for Hawkins was a man given to saving souls, not peering into them, least of all his own. I know enough of what Bryceton was before Corrine’s transformation, of its atrocities, to know that “soul-peering” was a luxury.

  “All right,” Hawkins said, now rising. “The boy don’t know nothing. I am relying on you to fill him in. We have done our part. May he serve the cause here as well as he done served it down there.”

  I rose and Hawkins turned to me, shook my hand, and said, “Doubtful we’ll be seeing each other again anytime soon, if at all. All I can say is be good.”

  I nodded. Hawkins shook hands with the others, Bland included, who it was decided should remain in Philadelphia a few weeks for business of his own. After Hawkins left, Otha took me upstairs to my quarters while Raymond and Bland remained below to talk. It was a small room, but after months of living in common, and before that living in the hole, and before that the jail, it was heaven. After Otha left, I lay across the bed. I could hear the muffled intercourse of Bland and Raymond floating up from below, and the sounds of what seemed to me boisterous laughter. Later, I took my supper with Otha at a local tavern. He explained that I would have a long weekend to orient myself in the city. Planning the next day to explore, I came straight home and slept. Otha slept here too, in a bedroom next to mine. Raymond stayed outside the city with his wife and children.

  * * *

  —

  I rose early the next morning to see Philadelphia. I walked out onto Bainbridge Street, one of the city’s great thoroughfares, just adjacent to our office on Ninth Street, and watched the variety of human life, a menagerie of wants, needs, and intentions, teeming in the streets, and it was only 7 A.M. On the other side of the street, I saw a bakery, and through the window I could see a colored man at work. I walked in and was greeted with a sweet smell, the perfect antidote to the fog of the city. On the counter there was a pleasing array of treats—cakes, fritters, and dumplings of all kinds—laid out on parchment. Behind the counter, more still, stacked on trays suspended in slotted shelves.

  “New around here, are you?”

  I looked up and saw the colored man smiling at me. He was perhaps ten years my senior and regarded me with a look of pure kindness. I must have recoiled at his question, because he said, “Don’t mean to snoop. In fact not snooping at all. I can see it in all the new ones. Just dazzled by the smallest things. It’s okay, son. Nothing wrong with being new. Nothing wrong with being dazzled.”

  I said nothing.

  “Name’s Mars,” the man said. “This is my place. Me and my Hannah. You from over near Ninth Street, right? Staying with Otha over there? Raymond and Otha—they both my cousin—blood to my dear Hannah—and you with them, so that make you family to me.”

  Still I said nothing. How rude I was back then. How wide my suspicions sprawled.

  “How about this,” he said. And then, reaching behind him, Mars ripped off a piece of parchment from a roll and went into the back. He returned with something wrapped in the paper. And when he handed the package over to me, it was warm to the touch. />
  “Go on,” he said. “Try it.”

  I opened the paper and the scent of ginger wafted out. The smell evoked a feeling, all at once, sad and sweet, because the feeling was attached to a lost memory that I felt lurking somewhere down a winding foggy path in my mind.

  “What I owe you?” I asked.

  “Owe me?” Mars said. “We family. What I tell you? We all family up here.”

  I nodded, managed a thanks, and then backed out of the bakery. I stood on Bainbridge for a moment watching the city, the gingerbread wrapped in paper still warm in my hand. I wished I had smiled before I left. I wished I had said something to reward his kindness. But I was fresh out of Virginia, fresh out of the pit, Georgie Parks still on my mind, Sophia still lost to me. I walked across Bainbridge, west, across streets that counted up, pondering the absurd size of a town with so many streets they’d apparently run out of names. I walked on until I was at the docks, where I saw a mix of colored men and whites unloading and working on ships.

  I followed the river as it bent inward then curved back out. Its banks were crowded with workshops, small factories, and dry docks. The oppressive scent of the city eased some against the cool river breeze. Now I came upon a promenade. There was a large green field dissected by walkways, themselves lined with benches. I took a seat. It was about nine in the morning now. Friday, the end of the working week. The day was clear and blue. The promenade was filled with Philadelphians of all color and kind. Gentlemen in their boaters escorted ladies. A circle of schoolchildren sat in the grass hanging on the words of their tutor. A man rode past on a unicycle, laughing. It occurred to me just then that this was the freest I had ever been in my life. And I knew that I could leave right then, right there, that I could abandon the Underground and disappear into this city, into this massive race-day, float away on the poisonous air.