The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  “It’s true,” she said, looking straight ahead. “It’s all true. I can tell you how it happened if you like.”

  “I most certainly would like,” I said.

  “Well, it’s as I told you, you know? I’m Thena’s baby—her oldest one. We lived down on the Street and I have some fond memories of that time. My daddy was a big man in those days, a headman on the tobacco team, and that is to say he was about as big as you can be when you was Tasked.

  “We had our own house at the end of the Street, set off from the others and bigger too. I thought this was all on account of my daddy and the high esteem in which he was held by those up top. He was a hard man. I do not remember him speaking much, but I recall that when the Quality came down to address him they spoke with him in a kind of respect that they accorded no other tasking man.”

  And Kessiah paused here, and a look of realization came over her. Then she said, “Or perhaps that is all in my mind. Perhaps it is the memory of a child, trying to recall things as I would have liked it to have been. I do not know. But I do have it that way, I tell you. I remember the games we used to play. I remember the marbles. I remember the ball and string. I remember playing the Knight and the Whistle. But mostly, I remember my momma, who was as warm and lovely a woman as I ever did know. I remember Sundays, just laying up in her bosom—all five of us—like kittens. My daddy was a hard man, but I think I knew even then that something about him had protected us, that he was doing something, or had done something, for all of us to have that cabin, set off at the end. We had our own garden out back, our own camellias. And that was my life.”

  Kessiah was looking out over toward the tents we had just left, lost in a reverie. I was lost in my own, remembering Thena all those years ago, puffing on her pipe and recalling that man she loved, Big John. It seemed incredible to me that this Kessiah could be their daughter, could be here of all places.

  “But I got bigger and was soon put to work—at first carrying water out to the folks in the field, and then after that in the fields myself. But I did not mind, all my friends were there too and I was close to my daddy. It was hard labor, that I knew, but I was always inclined to hard labor, it’s what put me here on the Underground. But back then my world was the fields and the Street, and the Street is how I knew you, Hi, and knew your mother and knew your aunt Emma. On weekends the older folks would go down to the woods for their little dances and would leave me to watch over the babies, and you was one of those. I am not so surprised to find you here. You were always different. You just watched, watched everything, and I was thinking when I spotted you up here how you have not changed, how you were just watching. It is my blessing to find you, to meet you again out here, so far from the Task.

  “It was such a different time, and it amazes me, shames me almost, to say that I was happy back there, but I do believe I was, for a time, and I recall when the feeling changed. It was when my daddy fell. Fever, you know. That hit my momma hard. She was still warm as ever, but she was so grieved. Would cry every night and call us to her, ‘Come in and rest with your momma,’ she would say, and we—all of us kittens—would lay there with her and she would just cry, and all of us would cry with her. But I tell you, Hi, this was nothing measured against what was coming. Least when my daddy passed, we had each other. But, well, soon we ain’t even had that—was like all of us passed from each other, like all of us died and was damned to a different hell.”

  Kessiah now turned to me and said, “They say you knew my momma, a little.”

  I nodded and intended to say no more, for I could not yet bring myself to fully accept the story. But I could see Kessiah regarding me with expectant eyes. An expectation I knew well.

  “She was not exactly as you say it here,” I said. “But I believe it was the same woman. And more I believe she had reason to be as she was, as I knew her. But I don’t think that much matters. What matters is that she was good to me. That, for me, Thena was the best part of Lockless.”

  Kessiah cupped her hands and brought them to her face so that they covered her nose and mouth and she cried gently and quietly.

  And then she said, “So you know about the racetrack?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Imagine that. All of us, my brothers and sisters, taken out there and sold. Do you know I never saw them again? Do you know how hard I have tried to find them? But there are so many gone, Hi. Like water between my fingers. Gone.”

  “I…I know,” I said. “I did not always know. But I know now. Your mother, she tried to tell me. But I did not always know what it meant to be handled as such. But I am seeing it now.”

  “They used to say your daddy was a white man.”

  “He was,” I said.

  “Didn’t save you, did it?”

  “No. Don’t save none of us.”

  “No, it don’t, and I am here before you only on a chance. Most of mine was taken Natchez-way, but I was carried off up to Maryland and put to work out in the timbers, and not so long after, I met this man, Elias, and we took a shine to each other. Elias was a freeman who worked for his own wage and he planned to buy me off so that I might live free too.

  “Timbers was hard labor, but I found me another family. I refashioned myself for that new life, formed myself around that man, and I got to something close to happy. I knew that I could never again be a girl. And I knew that I was marked, very harshly, by what had come before. But I found something, and just when I did, Hi, I tell you they endeavored to put me right back on the block. But I had something for them this time, you see. I had married into a family of a particular sort, and among that family there was the one who you know as Moses.”

  And Kessiah was now laughing to herself at the thought of it. “You should have seen it. Me and Elias had said our farewells. It had been so hard. And then the day of, he shows up in the auction and starts bidding. And my heart is leaping because it’s him and some other man all the way from Texas. And they go back and forth until my Elias look at me with the saddest eyes. And I know he done lost, and Texas done won. And Texas pays his money and shuts me up in a cell. You should have heard him and all his intentions. He was so high and mighty. Sunrise we’ll be off, he tells me. Hah! Sunrise. He don’t know. Sun came sure enough. But Moses got there first.”

  Moses, I thought. Conduction.

  Now Kessiah looked at me. “It was a plan, you see. They bid me up as high as they could. Made the man pay and then got me out. My Lord, after I seen that, after I seen what Moses had done to them, I could not go back to that life. I thought of all the hell they had given to me. And I thought of how good it felt to give some back in good measure. And I thought of all my pains and how many more there were like me, and all I wanted thereafter was to be on this Underground.

  “I been with Moses ever since. Was how I heard about you, Hi. Some boy, they tell me, come up from Virginia—Elm County, my county. And I start to checking and I hear your name, and I could not believe it, but my God, it was you. Soon as I seen you here wandering and watching, I knew it was you.”

  At that she threw herself on me and embraced me, and when she did, much to my surprise, I was warmed. I had been away from home so long. And now, there I was with some memory of it, with someone else who had made the same journey. It was getting late and we each had to find our people. We stood and embraced again and she said, “We’ll have more time, you and I. We will have more days here.”

  Then she looked at me and said, “Oh my, I don’t know how I forgot to ask, been talking so much myself. How is Momma Rose? How is your mother?”

  * * *

  —

  Soon I was walking again among the tents and saw that exhortation had given way to amusements. There were teams of jugglers who tossed fruit and bottles amongst each other. There were daredevils who extended a thin cable between the heights of two trees and walked across once, and then danced their way
back again while singing a tune. There were acrobats who tumbled and twisted and leaped in mid-air.

  And how was my mother? How fared Momma Rose? I still had no recollection of her, only the stories assembled from those like Kessiah who’d known her, so that when I thought of her, it was like a scene sketched of some ancient myth, not like I remembered Sophia, not like I remembered Thena—Thena who had never been more alive to me than she was in that moment with Kessiah, with the recollections of the daughter mixing with my own. And I felt that I now understood so much, that I knew why she had been so hard with me. Her injunction: I am more your mother standing right here now than that white man on that horse is your father.

  We all joined for supper—Otha, Raymond, Kessiah, Moses, and I—and afterward, with the sun now low in the sky, a group of colored folk assembled around a bonfire. They began, in the slowest, most haunting voices, to sing the songs that could only be made down in the coffin. I had not heard these songs since I had left, and hearing them now, I felt them tugging at me, I felt myself swaying in the August heat. It was all too much. I left and went to roam, with my thoughts, among the muddy byways between the rows of tents.

  I sat down on a patch of dry grass just beyond the tents, where I could still hear my people singing in the distance. I was reeling from the day—Kessiah, the memories of Thena and Big John, the arguments and ideas about women, children, labor, land, family, and wealth. It occurred to me that an examination of the Task revealed not just those evils particular to Virginia, to my old world, but the great need for a new one entirely. Slavery was the root of all struggle. For it was said that the factories enslaved the hands of children, and that child-bearing enslaved the bodies of women, and that rum enslaved the souls of men. In that moment I understood, from that whirlwind of ideas, that this secret war was waged against something more than the Taskmasters of Virginia, that we sought not merely to improve the world, but to remake it.

  I was pulled out of my thoughts by a man milling around nearby. I was greeted by a messenger who handed me a parcel, with a seal, which I immediately recognized as the mark of Micajah Bland. My heart leapt. My greatest urging then was to open this letter. But it was Otha’s family, and it should be he who first understood their fate. I found him with Raymond, still near the bonfire, still enraptured by the slave songs that were ringing out. I handed the letter to Raymond, who was the better reader. On Otha’s face, alight with the bonfire’s glow, was all the trepidation we could expect. But then Raymond smiled and said, “Micajah Bland has Lydia and the children. They have passed out of Alabama. At the time of this letter, they were traversing Indiana.”

  “My God,” said Otha. “My God.”

  He turned to me and said, “It’s gonna happen. After all of these years, my Lydia, my boys—all of them—my God, I wish Lambert had made it to see this.”

  Otha then turned back to Raymond and burst into tears. Raymond broke his usual solemn mask, and held Otha close as they wept. I turned away, thinking they needed their time, overrun by a day filled with more wonders than I could fathom.

  21

  ONCE I’D DREAMED OF ruling, as my father had done, back at Lockless, and it is tough to say it as such, that it was my dream, even if I had not thought it all through. But I had found the Underground, or the Underground had found me, and for this fact I was at last happy. On the Underground, I found meaning. In Raymond White, in Otha, in Micajah, I found family. And now in Kessiah, I felt that I had even found some lost part of myself.

  The next evening, after another day of exhortations and amusements, I decided to walk through the woods, high into the hills above the field, and that’s where I saw her, Moses, seated on a large rock, her legs folded. She was still and at peace and I thought perhaps to leave her to her thoughts, but when I began to walk away I heard her voice cut through the quiet night air.

  “Evening.”

  I turned and saw her already walking toward me, her eyes fixed on my head. When close enough, she reached out to feel the spot where I had taken Ryland’s blow. Then she stepped back, smiled, and said, “I knew we would have our time to speak, and it is good to do so out here, far removed from them. Heard a lot about you,” she said. “And then Kessiah said you spoke more just yesterday.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re from the same home-place, as it happens.”

  “Uh-huh, she told me as much. Good to see someone from home, ain’t it? Give you some sense of roots. It must be hard on you to be so far from your roots.”

  “Aren’t we all?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Me, I’m home fairly often, even if the masters would like it different. I work in one place, and it is the place I know best—the far shore of Maryland, my home. Someday I shall return there for good, but not like this, not as no agent, but in the bright and open sun. But in the by-time, I am there fairly often and it is good to get back, good to remember.”

  “I remember plenty,” I said.

  “I know you do. Way I hear it, your talent is such that you are as good working in the house of Philadelphia as you were in the fields of Virginia. And I have heard it whispered that you, particularly, might be able to work even more.”

  “I’ve heard that too,” I said. “But it’s all horse and no saddle.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Give it time.”

  “I think it ain’t really up to me. I want my people out. But I see it. There are so many people. And I can see them all now.”

  “Oh, I am so glad to hear you say that,” she said. She was smiling at me mischievously. And I felt, in fact knew, that I had just then enrolled myself into something. “Here is the thing, friend, I work small and I work alone. I move by my own time and my particular vigilance. But for this one job I need a man who runs least well as he writes, and I am told that you are one of the few, this side of the Underground, who qualifies.”

  “Can’t see why you need any help from me. I know they call you Moses. And that name comes out of a majestic power, don’t it?”

  “Majestic,” she said. “That’s a big word for something so simple.”

  “But the stories,” I said. “I know what they say. Moses tamed oxen as a girl and harrowed the fields like a man. Moses talk to the wolves. Moses brought the clouds to earth. Knives melt upon the garments of Moses. Bullwhips turn to ash in the slave-master’s hand.”

  She laughed. “That what they say, huh?”

  “That and a lot more.”

  “Well, here is what I will tell you,” she said. “My methods are not for the offering. It’s the Underground, not the Overground. This ain’t no show. I don’t advertise like Box Brown. Put before something they can’t understand, people got a tendency to talk—and also to make something bigger than what they actually saw. However it play, understand that talk don’t come from me. I speak no more than required, and leave the passenger to their colors and wide tales. And as for names, I answer to one—Harriet.”

  “So no Conduction, then?” I asked.

  “Big words. Big words,” she said. “All I want to know is you ready to work. I’m headed back home. And you have been recommended to me as one who could well do a turn. So do you wish to work, or do you want to while away the hours quizzing me?”

  “Of course I want to work. When do we leave and who are we after?”

  It was only then that I heard the eagerness in my own voice, the powerful desire to work with this woman of whom I had heard so many stories.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I stand ready whenever you would have it.”

  “Go on back to the camp,” she said. “Enjoy the show.”

  She then walked back to her boulder and, turning away from me, said, “We be moving soon enough. Might even get you that saddle.”

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, I woke up to a grand commotion outside the tent. I heard Otha’s voice, lost in a kind
of hysteria. And then I heard Raymond and some others, whom I did not recognize. They were trying to calm him and I think right then I must have known, because no matter our troubles, Otha almost never was one for such commotion. Something truly terrible must have come. I stepped outside the tent. It was barely first light, but I could clearly see Otha’s head buried in the shoulder of his brother, and he was swaying almost, barely able to stand.

  Raymond saw me first. His eyes widened and he shook his head. Otha, perhaps sensing me there, broke away from his brother and turned to me. I saw an entire funeral on his face.

  “Have you heard?” Otha asked me. “Have you heard what they done did?”

  I did not answer.

  “Hiram,” Raymond said. “We can explain it all later. We have to…” And at that Raymond just shook his head in disbelief, and tried to guide Otha away. “Come on, Otha,” he said. “Come on…”

  “Come on where?” Otha said. “Where can we go, Raymond? For the doing of what? It’s over. Can’t you see that it’s over? They got Lydia in the coffin. Where we gon go? Micajah Bland is dead. Where can any of us go?”

  And then Otha turned to me. “Did you hear that, Hiram?” he asked. And I saw that his face had gone from pain to rage. “Did you hear what they did? They killed him. Chained his body, bashed in his head, and threw him in the river.”

  And Otha burst into tears as he said this, and Raymond and several of the men pulled him away from the tent. He nearly came to blows with them at first. He yelled and screamed and kicked, until Raymond took hold of him. Now they led him, almost carried him, away and I could hear Otha yelling the whole time, “Did you hear what they done did? Micajah Bland is in the water! And what we gon do now?”

  I stood there rooted, until I could no longer see them. And then I stood there longer, struck wholly dumb. When I came out of it, I saw that there was a commotion all around me. The news was spreading across the camp. I could see people talking amongst each other in groups and those groups shifting among others to share whatever rumor or intelligence they’d garnered of Micajah Bland’s fate. And then I looked down and saw a satchel not far from where Otha and Raymond had stood. On instinct I reached for the satchel and carried it back into my tent, and when I opened it, I found a collection of newspapers, detailing the saga of Micajah Bland and Lydia White. The first item told the tale—“Runaway Negroes Taken.” The second confirmed that it was, indeed, the family of Otha White. My hands trembled as I thumbed through the third—“Thief of Negroes Returned to Alabama.” And then finally a dispatch from an Indiana agent, who wrote with great sorrow, communicating the news—the body of Micajah Bland had that morning washed up on the shore. Head stove in. Hands bound behind him in chains.