The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  “All right, Otha,” I said.

  “Lovely. Just lovely,” he said. Then he tendered directions and said, “See you tonight.”

  The White family home was across the Delaware River. I caught the ferry that evening, then walked along a cobbled road until it turned to clay and then to dust. The heat of the city, the air damp and thick, faded behind me, and a refreshing breeze swirled up the road. It was good to be out. It was my first time in anything like the country since my arrival, and I now realized everything that I missed about my old Southern home—the wind in the fields, the sun pushing through the trees, the drawn-out afternoons. Everything happened at once in Philadelphia, all of life one ridiculous crush of feeling.

  The parents of Raymond and Otha lived in a large house with a porch wrapping around and a pond out front. I stood for some time on that porch, staring at the front door. Inside, I could hear children and mothers, fathers and brothers, their words and laughter mixing into a happiness that took me back to Holiday down at the Street. Even before I stepped inside the house, all their accumulated affection radiated out. I had felt something like it before. Under the Goose. Where I was in reunion with a mother whom I could not remember. Where I saw my cousins, and Honas and Young P. And no sooner did I recall this feeling than it all came upon me again. The summer breeze grew chill. I shivered. And everything before me went blue. The door to the Still home expanded into many doors all in a row, and these doors pulled away from each other like bellows. I felt myself falling away. A door opened. I looked in. I saw my mother’s hand reaching out from the smoke. She walked toward me, her hand reaching for mine, and when she grabbed it, the blue faded, and the yellow heat of that summer afternoon returned. And in the doorway I saw a woman, who was not my mother, but about the age she would have been. And just behind her I saw Otha, who, seeing me, stopped, waved, and smiled.

  “Hiram?” the woman asked. And before I could respond, she said, “That must be you. You look like you seen the devil himself.”

  She gripped my hand tight and then looked into my eyes. “Uh-huh. Hunger’ll do that to a man. What Raymond and Otha got you eating down there? Why, don’t just stand there—come on in!”

  I followed for a couple of steps until the woman stopped and said, “Viola White. I’m Raymond and Otha’s mother. But you just call me Aunt Viola, because that is who I am to you. Any man working with Otha and Raymond is family to me.”

  I followed Viola White—“Aunt Viola” would take some time with me—into the front parlor and found a crush of cousins and aunts. Raymond stood at the mantel talking with an older man. Mars, the proprietor of the bakery, rushed over and pulled me into a big scrum of family, rendering introductions and discoursing on the effects of that gingerbread.

  “That boy try make like he cool, like he wasn’t caught,” Mars told his wife, Hannah. “But soon as he stick his face in the paper, I knew I had him.”

  Hannah laughed and I, surprising myself, laughed too. Something was happening here. Walls were falling down, walls I had erected down on the Street. My silence, my watching, was a wall. There was love even on the Street, I tell you, some of the deepest and hardest I’d ever seen. But the Street was brutal and erratic. Passions transfigured into outrages and violence, even among us. But the demeanor that served me at Lockless seemed cruel and unnecessary among the Whites, so I found myself, awkwardly and haltingly, smiling, laughing, and, above all, talking.

  After supper, we took coffee and tea in the back salon. There was a piano there, and one of the younger girls seated herself and began to play. What I remember more than any virtuosity was the gleaming pride in all the eyes of the White family at the talents of this child. And I remembered how I had talents, too, as a child, but that my own father wished them to be in Little May. I was an amusement, a source of laughter. Watching that little girl encouraged in her pursuits, rewarded in whatever genius she had—and we all had some—I saw all that had been taken from me, and all that was so regularly taken from the millions of colored children bred to the Task. But more than this I saw, for the first time, colored people in that true freedom that Mary Bronson longed for, that I hungered for walking through the city, that I had glimpsed under the Goose.

  I had noticed, throughout conversation, the names “Lydia” and “Lambert,” and I knew from how they were spoken that these two were family still held down by the Task. After the young girl’s recital, I found Otha seated on the large porch, looking out past the road and into the lush green woods in the light of a summer’s twilight. I took a seat and said, “I want to thank you for having me here, Otha. It means a lot.”

  Otha looked to me and smiled. “It’s nothing, Hiram. I’m glad you came. The work can be such a weight.”

  “Your mother,” I said, looking back inside. “I gather she knows.”

  “They all do. The babies only a little, of course. But how could they not know? They the reason we in the work to begin with.”

  “Well, you’ve got a beautiful family,” I said.

  At that he went quiet for a moment, and his gaze returned to those woods.

  “Otha,” I asked, “Lambert and Lydia?”

  “Lambert was my brother,” said Otha. “And Lydia is my wife. Lambert died while I was still down. And Lydia is still there, though I have not seen her in some years.”

  “Children?”

  “Yup. Two girls. One boy. You?”

  I paused for a moment.

  “Naw, just me.”

  “Huh. Don’t know what I’d do without my young ones. Don’t know who I’d be. This whole thing, this Underground, starts with my babies.”

  Otha stood and looked through the door inside. We could hear the gentle clanging of dishes, rumbling and somber talk broken by the occasional giggling of children. Then he walked to the side of the porch and seated himself there against the wooden railing.

  “I’m not like them. Wasn’t raised up here,” he said. “My daddy is old and stooped now but he was something in his day. Born to the Task. But in his twenty-first year he walked up to his old master and told him straight—‘I’m grown now. And I shall sooner die as have the yoke.’ And the old master thought on it for a day, and when he next saw my pappy he had a rifle in one hand and Pappy’s papers in the other. And he told my pappy, just as straight as my pappy had told him, ‘Freedom is a yoke, boy. You’ll soon see.’ Then he handed Pappy the papers and said, ‘Now get off my land, for the next time you and I meet, only one of us shall walk away.’ ”

  Otha laughed at that. “But there was this girl Viola—Momma—who was tasking there too. There was two of us by then—myself and my brother Lambert. Daddy had it figured that he would get up North, get some work, and then buy us our freedom. He started out at the docks, saving for the day he could get us all out. But Momma had her own notions. She ran with me and Lambert, took the Underground as it was back then. Shocked the life out of Daddy when she showed herself down at the city docks.

  “They married proper and two more was born—Raymond and Patsy. That’s Patsy’s daughter who was at the piano. Girl can sing like a bird. The old master let my daddy walk—don’t ask me why—who can figure white folks? But for my mother—a girl—to take mastery of her life, as she did, well, it was too much. Maybe it was how she did it—just up and leaving. Or maybe it was us. Momma was the goose. But we was the golden eggs.

  “That man sent the hounds up to the city. They bagged me, my brother Lambert, my momma, Raymond, and Patsy—the whole family save my daddy. We was carried back. When we got there Momma made it out as though the escape was all Daddy’s idea. Told the old master she never wanted no part in running anyway. Flattered him into believing he was good white folks. And I guess the old master believed her. Maybe he needed to believe her, needed to think that he was doing some kind of good, dividing a family and holding ’em down.

  “Anyway, wasn’t long after tha
t Momma ran again. Went different this time, though. She woke me up in the dead of night. I must have been about six, Lambert about eight, but I can still see it, like it’s all right in front of me—the memory is sharp as an axe. She was at our bedside when she told us. ‘Baby, I got to go. I gotta go for Raymond and I gotta go for Patsy. They gon die down here. I am so sorry, baby, but I gotta go.’

  “I know why she done it, now. I knew why she done it, even back then. But it burned in me, a low heavy hatred. Can you imagine hating your own mother, Hiram? After that, the old master sold us south—two lost boys sent down into the deep. They did it to punish my momma, to show her that whatever plans she had of coming back for me and Lambert was done. I had a whole other life down there. I met a girl—my Lydia—and we made a family. I tasked hard. I was a man well regarded in slavery, which is to say I was never regarded as a man at all.

  “Lambert knew. Maybe ’cause he was older, he knew all that was taken from us. And the hate in him was so strong, it just ate him. So Lambert…Lambert died down there, far from home, far from the mother that birthed him and the father that reared him.”

  And here Otha caught up. I could not see his face, but I heard the halting in his voice, and I felt a halo of agony burning all around him.

  “There are so many holes in me, so many pieces cut away. All those lost years, my mother, my father, Raymond and Patsy, my wife and my kids. All my losses.

  “Well, I got out. My master needed the money more than he needed to hold me, and through the kindness of others, I got out. I came up to this city searching for my family, for I was left with rumors of where we had been. And soon I heard from the coloreds that this man Raymond White was a good one to know, should you be searching for family. I sought him out.”

  “Y’all recognize each other?” I asked.

  “Not even a little bit. And I had no surname. He sat with me, just like we sat with Mary Bronson a few weeks back, and I gave him my whole story. Later, Raymond told me that he trembled with every detail. But you know Raymond, he is a rock. So I’m sitting there telling him all that I know. And I’m wondering how he’s taking it, because the whole time, he just real quiet. Then he tell me come see him again tomorrow. Same time.

  “Next day I come back and there she was, Hiram. I knew her right away. I didn’t even need to search myself or think no time on it. It was my momma. And then Momma tell me that this man, this rock, was my brother. It’s the only time I seen tears in Raymond’s eyes.

  “When we was young Lambert and me had all kinds of schemes for seeing our way out. We knew our people were somewhere free. But when all of our plans fell to pieces, despair fell over us like a shadow. You see, we was different than men such as you, Hiram. We had known, since the day our mother vanished, that we were born to the title of freedom. And if freedom was my momma’s right, and freedom was my daddy’s right too, then somehow it must be ours.”

  “I think we all got it fixed that way,” I said. “For some it’s just buried far deep.”

  “But it was never buried for us. Lambert remembered everything from that last night. He remembered Momma’s caress upon his forehead, the last stroke of her hand. When Lambert died, Hiram, I knew that I could not. I knew that I must, somehow, live and then get back out. And I knew that any anger in that venture was a waste. I think back to my momma’s words the night she left. I think about them all the time in this work, in my time on the Underground. ‘I gotta go for Raymond and I gotta go for Patsy,’ she said. ‘I am so sorry, baby, but I gotta go.’ And I, being young and loving my momma, I said, ‘Momma, why can’t we go with you?’ And my momma she said…she said, ‘ ’Cause I can only carry so many, and them only so far.’ ”

  17

  THE CONDUCTIONS WERE MORE frequent now. The world would suddenly and randomly fall away and moments later I would return, dumped into back-alleys, basements, open fields, stock rooms. Every Conduction seemed activated by a memory, some whole, some mere shards, like the vision of a woman who snuck me ginger snaps. But with the glue of tales swapped down in the Street, I assembled a rough picture: The woman who’d slipped me ginger snaps was my aunt Emma. I remembered the stories of her prowess in the Lockless kitchen. And I also thought it was no mistake that this Aunt Emma was the same aunt who would water dance out in the woods with her sister, my mother.

  I began to feel that something was trying to reveal itself to me, that some part of my mind, long ago locked away, was now seeking its liberation. Perhaps I should have greeted the unraveling of a mystery and new knowledge with relief. But Conduction felt like the breaking and resetting of a bone. Each bout left me fatigued and with a somehow deeper sense of loss than the one I’d carried into it, so that I was in a constant low thrum of agony, a melancholy so deep it would take every ounce of my strength to rise out of bed the next morning. For days after each Conduction, I would still be working my way through the most sullen of moods. This no longer felt like freedom, not anymore.

  And so one day I walked out of the Ninth Street office set upon the intention to leave Philadelphia and the Underground, leave the triggers for these memories that threw me into depression. I did not meditate on this decision. I did not gather any effects. I simply walked out the door with no view of ever coming back. I reasoned that my initial exit would alarm no one, since it was known that I enjoyed walking through the city. But then I would just keep walking.

  I turned away from the office and made my way over toward the Schuylkill docks. Of all the people I saw in the city, the sailors seemed the most free, tied to nothing save each other, bound by boyish jabs and indecent mockery that always elicited a host of laughter. Sometimes they fought. But whatever their quarrels, these men seemed a brotherhood to me. Even in their freedom they still somehow reminded me of home. Maybe it was their hard black faces, their rough hands, bent fingers, bruised and worn-down nails. Maybe it was how they sang, because they sang as the Tasked did.

  I stood at the dock watching them work, hoping one might call out to me, perhaps asking for a hand, and when no one did, I left, and that whole day I just wandered. I crossed the river, passed a cemetery and some railroad tracks, and stopped before an alms-house to watch the indigent of the city gather. I walked more until I stood before Cobbs Creek and a forest at the south-westerly recesses of the city. By now it was late. I had no plan and it was getting dark. I really had no way out, no way to escape the Underground nor the binds of memory. So I turned around, and these were the thoughts that clouded me on my way back to Ninth Street, back to my fate, the notions that kept me from watching as I had been trained to do. Suddenly I was face to face with a white man who seemed to materialize out of the night itself. He asked me something, but I could not hear. I leaned closer, asking him to repeat himself. And then I felt a sharp blow fall across the back of my head. There was a bright flash. Another blow. And then nothing.

  * * *

  —

  When I awoke I was, once again, chained, blinded, and gagged. I was in the back of a drawn cart and could feel ground moving beneath me. I cleared my head and knew exactly what had befallen me, for I had heard all the stories. It was the man-catchers—Ryland’s Hounds of the North—who’d gotten me. They were known to simply grab colored people off the street and ship them south for a price, with no regard to their status as free or in flight from the Task.

  I could hear them laughing with each other, doubtlessly counting up their haul. I was not alone in the cart. Someone near me was weeping, quietly—a girl. But I was silent. I had wanted out of the Underground and now I had it. There was some small part of me that felt relief, for I was, at least, returning to the Task I knew.

  We rode for several hours, across the back-country roads. Ryland, I reasoned, would like to avoid towns, toll-roads, and ferries, for as sure as we feared Ryland, Ryland feared the vigilance committees, allies of the Underground, which stood watch for man-catchers who sought to drag free
dmen down. We stopped to make camp and I felt rough hands around my arms—I was pulled along for a moment and then tossed to the ground. “Take care, Deakins,” I heard one of them say. “Damage that boy and I’ll damage you.” This man, Deakins, propped me up against a tree. I could move my fingers but nothing else. I was listening to their voices, attempting to calculate their number, when I saw a brightness through my blindfold. A campfire. The men gathered around and traded their small talk. I now counted four voices, and from their words and general commotion, it became clear that they were eating. Their last meal.

  I never heard him approach and doubtless neither did Ryland. There was the crack of a pistol shot—twice—a scream, a struggle and then two more cracks, then a bit of whining, like a child’s but not the child I’d heard in the wagon, another crack and then nothing for a moment. And then I heard someone rummaging for something, and again I felt hands upon me. The click of a lock and the chains loosened. With a furor that shocked me, I pushed the hands away as well as their possessor and pulled off my blindfold and gag, and by the fire-light I saw him—Mr. Fields, Micajah Bland, regarding me with the most stolid and unmoved face.

  I stood and leaned against the tree to settle myself. There were two others, bound and manacled as I was. Bland worked quickly, moving among them. I looked away and saw four bodies on the ground. How do I explain what happened in that moment, the blinding, unconscious rage I felt? It was as if I had been lifted out of myself to behold the scene. And what I saw was me kicking one of the corpses with all the power I could muster. Bland came over to stop me, and I pushed him away again and kicked the dead man—Deakins perhaps—even more. Bland did not try to stop me this time. In that moment all the rage of everything from my mother to Maynard to Sophia to Thena to Corrine, all the lies, all the losses, all that they had done to me in the jail parlor, all the violation, all my impotence for the little boy in my cell, for the old man who loved the wife of his son, for the days they’d chased me into the woods—all of it came up there and vented itself on a dead man.