THE WATER DANCER by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Review by Perrin Lovett

Back in March, Professor Hamid Dabashi wrote an article for Middle East Eye wherein he recommended four books related to Gaza and the plight of the Palestinian people. Of the two I read, The Message (2024) by Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke to me the most. While reading it—and I recommend others read it as well—I was struck by Coates’s writing talent and storytelling ability. Naturally, I wondered if he had ever written a novel. Yes, he did! It is now my pleasure to give you, gentle reader, a very brief glimpse of that novel, The Water Dancer.

(Cover design by Greg Mollica.)

*Coates, Ta-Nehisi, The Water Dance: A Novel, New York: One World (Random House), 2019.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an extraordinary writer with a grand imagination. A graduate of Howard University, one who considers his alma mater his “Mecca,” he currently serves as Sterling Brown Chair at the school’s Department of Writing and Literature and as Writer-in-Residence. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, his work has been distributed in a wide array of publications. He is the author of six books. The Water Dancer is available in multiple formats at Amazon. 

Early in my reading, I privately remarked to someone that The Water Dancer was kind of like Alex Haley’s Roots mixed with some spirit of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It is like that, kind of, but with many other good and endearing qualities. The book is Southern historical fiction with a unique dose of fantasy. 

Coates’s story is told through the eyes of Hiram “Hi” Walker, a slave on an antebellum Virginia plantation. An excellent—sometimes cursory, sometimes in great depth—look at the various lives of that mid-nineteenth-century society is provided from a vantage point many readers might not expect or be familiar with. Hi repeatedly makes decent and even poetic observations about the races, ranks, and classes of that society, both in and of themselves and as they relate to each other. And because of his rather unusual parentage, Hi’s outlook and interrelations are exceptional to say the least.

His mother, a Black African-American slave, leaves him a mystery and a powerful gift. His White father, the master of the plantation, does something similar, giving Hi a classical education while also tasking him with the burden of playing manager and batman to his White half-brother. A tragedy opens the process of revealing Hi’s hidden ability, the art of “Conduction,” a starkly fantastic power that requires water and memories. 

The book is blessed with repeated human touches and reflections. There is a universality about it, something that reaches beyond the very interesting and compelling story and even past notions of freedom, honor, trepidation, and responsibility. Part of the rare appeal—amid drama, history, adventure, and fantasy—concerns Hi’s romantic prospects. Coates works a deep, meaningful romance into the narrative, one that, like so many in real life, bends with the ups and downs of living. In the end, there is a scene and a sense not unlike Odysseus’s homecoming to Penelope (minus, of course, the competitive Greek violence).

I drifted into the novel as described above. And I found Coates’s debut fiction refreshingly, even alarmingly good. Accordingly, I highly recommend The Water Dancer.