My Thoughts: The Water Dancer

I’ve had an overdose of slavery writing lately, by virtue of having been enrolled last semester in an English class literally called “The Slave Narrative and the Novel.” So, goodness knows why, at the dawn of the decade, I thought it would be a good idea to go read yet another slavery novel.

For quite a while from the beginning, The Water Dancer was going, content-wise, the way I expected it to, and so I had thoughts of abandoning it until I felt capable of engaging with a slavery book again. The thing that changed my mind halfway through, which got me to commit to finishing, was this one narrative spin: superpowers.

I’ve read quite a bit of Coates’ nonfiction. I know, though, that he is also a comic book writer, particularly of one of Marvel’s Black Panther series. I still haven’t read any, like the disgrace that I am. Either way, just by knowing Coates’ reputation for writing superheroes, I sat up a lot straighter when I saw the hint of superpowers in The Water Dancer. This man knows the genre well, I thought. He’s about to give me a superhero slavery novel and I have never in my life read a superhero slavery novel. Turns out, however, that in this regard, the joke was on me. The Water Dancer turned out to be more of a coming-of-age story by way of magical realism, than a superhero story. So, there, I suffered from a bit of unmet expectation. It’s hard to say whether my expectations were even valid or not, seeing that I don’t actually know how Coates deals with superpowers in his other texts. Regardless, I enjoyed the book and am glad I finished it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an amazingly poetic writer, which made the prose a genuine pleasure to read. Now, this feature worked spectacularly in the narration and inner thoughts of the main character, Hiram. There was also something quite fascinating going on in the combination of racial and class-based language into categories unique to the world of The Water Dancer. Slaves were generally referred to as “the Tasked” and slavery itself as “the Task”; slaveholders and powerful whites were generally referred to as “the Quality.” I’m sure Coates would be able to give some brilliant explanations for his decision to use such language, which can scarcely escape the notice of any reader who may be desensitized to the more commonly used words/categories.

Where the language seemed to fall into awkward confusion was in the direct speech. The way slaves talk in The Water Dancer is very different from how slaves have talked in any other text I have read. It felt weird. Not necessarily a good, creative weird like with Toni Morrison’s characters, but weird like, “You can’t possibly expect me to believe they said this like that.” I don’t know what the difference is that made the words come off so, but I can’t deny that I felt uncomfortable with it sometimes. One critical reviewer said that all the characters sounded the same, and I can definitely see how that opinion came about.

There were many other things I loved, though. One of them was the recurrent messages of freedom and individuality, both in the institutional sense—regarding the Task/slavery—and in the personal sense of being allegiant to oneself. Two of my favorite quotes came from the characters Corinne and Hawkins.

“But freedom, true freedom, is a master too, you see—one more dogged, more constant, than any ragged slave-driver,” she said. “What you must now accept is that all of us are bound to something. Some will bind themselves to property in man and all that comes forthwith. And others shall bind themselves to justice. All must name a master to serve. All must choose.” –Corinne

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“But I think this is the lesson in it all. We forget sometimes—it is freedom we are serving, it is the Task that we are against. And freedom mean the right of a man to do as he please, not as we suppose. And if you have not been as we supposed, you have been as you were supposed to be.” –Hawkins

Another thing I found wonderful was the lexivist themes woven so integrally into the story. The novel presented the power of story, storytelling and memory as mediums for the supernatural, and the power of good, crafty writing as a liberating, dangerous tool utilized by the defiant Underground.

Besides these, I thought Hiram was a sufficiently complex character. His internal struggles, thoughts and moments of cognitive dissonance came across as extremely realistic. The dangerously potent attachment to his owner’s family, property and town, for one. Then there was his immaturity and then maturity, callousness and compassion, desire for proximate power, fear of freedom, complicated relationships with women.

Speaking of women, possibly my favorite thing about The Water Dancer was how the women in the novel refused to be owned. Especially Sophia and Moses/Harriet. I thought the Harriet character was very congruent with how she was portrayed in the recently released movie Harriet (which did the superhero slavery thing excellently, I might add!). As for Sophia, the hurt she harbored regarding men was so profound, I felt it in the depths of my soul. She seemed to me to represent how, after you have been traumatized by a man, being any man’s woman, even in love, is sometimes too terrible to contemplate. Her fear, which even Hiram picked up, was so powerful and relevant.

“What I did understand was that she was terribly afraid of something—something in me, and the thought that I would, in any way, exist to her in the way of Nathaniel, that she would fear me as she feared him, scared and shamed me all at once.” –Hiram

And I am glad Hiram was ashamed.

My greatest discomforts with The Water Dancer come from, interestingly enough, how the novel reads as being extraordinarily nice to white people. Something in me is already weary of the whole biracial-slave-owned-by-his-white-master/father protagonist thing. On top of that, Hiram’s love for his father—whom he consistently referred to as, and wholeheartedly and delightedly claimed as his father—was a bit sickening to me. Furthermore, the white characters, particularly Hiram’s father and Corinne, only got called out a couple of times each, and none harshly enough that I really felt anything. The white characters felt kind of like heroes. I don’t know what that means for a slavery novel. I do know what that means in terms of being palatable to the mainstream publishing industry, though, so I don’t know what to think about that. The one time I was struck in a positive way by Hiram calling someone out was in this case:

All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave. –Hiram

I thought this a necessary and refreshing perspective to bring to the consideration of white abolitionists and Underground agents. But Coates definitely has the creative license to do what he wants, and I don’t know half of the crap that goes on in the publishing world before a book comes out, so I choose, this time, to refrain from any explicit judgment. Life is hard and weird.

Despite the many someway things, I did think The Water Dancer was a good novel and enjoyable read. And I really like when Black people have superpowers.

-Akotz the Spider Kid

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My Thoughts: The Nickel Boys

I owned The Nickel Boys for months before I dared read it, because I was afraid that it would be too heavy to engage with in the middle of an already challenging semester. I thought it would rip me apart and break my heart with all its potential horror. After reading it finally over break, I don’t know how else to say this, but it turns out that The Nickel Boys was not nearly as harrowing as I expected. Although I consider it a good read, I don’t feel anything particularly strongly about it.

For those unfamiliar, the book is about a boarding school in Florida that operates more like a detainment center for delinquent boys than an institute of education. Neither teachers nor administrators give a whit about the wellbeing of the boys. I don’t know whether the book really was written in a way that wasn’t as painful as I expected, or if my relative stoicism came from myself, being familiar with Ghanaian boys’ boarding house horror stories. The Nickel Academy certainly felt awful, but not even close to unimaginably so. Only once while reading do I recall being stunned enough to pause and reevaluate my decision to keep reading.

The Nickel Boys was my second ever Colson Whitehead read. The first was The Underground Railroad, which I read in 2018. The Underground Railroad was a bit of a publishing hit. Before all the publicity of its release, I didn’t even know who Colson Whitehead was. I suspect that book’s success was both a good thing and a bad thing for The Nickel Boys, published in its shadow. The fortunate part is that after the preceding book’s popularity, people were eager to get their hands on The Nickel Boys. The unfortunate consequence, though, is that too many people seem to want to interpret The Nickel Boys as another Underground Railroad­­­—essentially another American slavery novel—whereas I think it just isn’t.­

My reading experiences between The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad were vastly different. I experienced the former to be better than the latter, both in relevance and enjoyability. While I remember thinking The Underground Railroad was full of Black academic jargon that I only recognized because I myself am an Africana Studies major, The Nickel Boys used simple language which was beautifully lyrical while being easy to work through. The book itself was brief, but I also read it very fast in the way I can only do when I am able to swim through the writing style with barely any resistance. Additionally, there are many, many books about American slavery, both in fiction and nonfiction. But a topic such as this—the Nickel Academy being based off the very real Dozier School for Boys—is not one that you come across often. That alone made the subject matter more interesting for me.

I came across quite a number of The Nickel Boys reviews that treated it as a slavery novel, and for the life of me, after reading it, I couldn’t see it as one, no matter what the critics said. The main characters are certainly Black, and a significant portion of the time setting is the Civil Rights Era. The experiences of Elwood and Turner are definitely horrifying and the circumstances by which they landed in the Nickel Academy were specifically racial. But if the novel must be treated as a critique, I see it as more of a critique on the US’s way of dealing (or not dealing) with delinquency—or what a dysfunctional system thinks delinquency is—than of slavery or racism. The Nickel Academy, though segregated, is a house of horrors for unfortunate teenage boys, Black, white, and in Jaimie’s case, Mexican. Although the main character, Elwood, is Black, and his story and his friend Turner’s are consequently stories of Black horror, the Nickel Academy itself does not value any demographic of its boys. It’s a downright awful institution for all enrolled in it. If the novel must have a moral, I’d say it was this: something is very, very wrong with human beings. Too many characters seem to derive pleasure from gratuitous cruelty and operate with a stunning disregard for the value of life.

I have some idea of why some critics so badly want to turn this into a slavery novel, but I do not think The Nickel Boys becomes any less relevant than The Underground Railroad even if it is not explicitly about race. Sometimes, books suffer unreasonably from the shadows of their predecessors or the reputations of their writers.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the book, which showcases Colson Whitehead’s classical wit (and I’ve experienced him in person so I can verify that he’s hilarious):

“His constant dorm reassignments notwithstanding, Jaimie kept a quiet profile and conducted himself in accordance with the Nickel handbook’s rules of conduct—a miracle, since no one had ever seen the handbook despite its constant invocations by the staff. Like justice, it existed in theory.”

-Akotz the Spider Kid

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