![]() ![]() ![]() When an accident occurs on a bridge, Maynard drowns in the river while Hiram survives. It is a role Hiram disdains in a world at once utterly dependent on and terrifyingly savage to his own kind. He is born of an enslaved woman, Rose, sold wrongly south, and the white Lockless master who casts him in a protective role over a bumbling half-brother named Maynard. The narrator Hiram is a brooding, brilliant man with a near-photographic memory. This passage amounts to the perfect premise for “The Water Dancer,” which is set mainly on Lockless, a plantation in Virginia where “the earth was dying and the tobacco diminishing.” “The elevation of being white,” he argued, “was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land through the flaying of backs the chaining of limbs the strangling of dissidents the destructions of families … and various other acts meant … to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our bodies.” Reverberating throughout Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel, “The Water Dancer,” are the haunting words that he wrote to his teenage son in his first book, “Between the World and Me.” ![]()
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