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"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he's ever known. So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind--but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss. This is a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery, written with the narrative force of a great adventure. Driven by the author's bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, The Water Dancer is the story of America's oldest struggle--the struggle to tell the truth--from one of our most exciting thinkers and beautiful writers"--… (mere)
bibliovermis: Two books of wildly, vastly different genres and tones, but with an overlap in period, character traits and characterization, and cultural analysis that's frankly kind of weird.
I read this for the "Literary Fiction" part of my 2020 reading challenge. I expected to like this, I wish I had liked this, but I really didn't. I usually like historical fiction and fantasy and everything, but this was just really slow and lackluster. The second half was easier to get through than the first half, but I still felt really let down by this book. ( )
In similar fashion to the way Colton Whitehead used magical realism in The Underground Railroad to fictionalize the account of slaves who escaped the horrific conditions of slavery in antebellum America, Ta-Nehisi Coates employs that device in his telling of African-American agency in the heroic efforts of the agents of Underground Railroad, including Harriet Tubman, to save many, but also to destroy the institution itself. In a much more profound way, The Water Dancer excavates the soul of slavery through so many layers of love and horror, goodness and evil, and examines its psychological effects, the conflicts of the slavers and the enslaved. I took issue with his conclusion that white people who helped were doing it because the white enslavement of African-Americans — the “Tasked” — offended the nobility they believed they possessed: “All of these fanatics [that were part of the Underground] were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. . . . Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the best practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do they 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 live of the slave.” While I don’t pretend to understand what was in the the minds of white people who were brought up in this system, I don’t think Mr. Coates understands that either, but it is his story. It was the only moment that I felt misplaced in an otherwise brilliant book. ( )
Very good. Tight and tender. Not gratuitous, but more moving in its allusion, connotation, and control. A little magical realism-esque. A hopeful fantasy. But I can’t be so cynical as to begrudge. So nice to hear a tale told from a empowered hero. Still, it’s heart wrenching to contemplate.
The prose isn't always easy to read, but this story is powerful and unforgettable. Hiram was born with a gift he doesn't know how to use or control; but it has the power to change his future. He was born into servitude at Lockless, a Virginian tobacco plantation. His mother and his memory of her is long gone; all he has is his half brother, Maynard, the heir to the estate, and the plantation owner, his father. He is afforded some liberties but when you're born to the tasked; the only liberty that matters is freedom. Little does he know that his gift will soon help him on the underground. Heartbreaking and powerful! ( )
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
My part has been to tell the story of the slave. The story of the master never wanted for narrators. -Frederick Douglass
Tilegnelse
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
For Chana
Første ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life, and though there were other bridges spanning the river Goose, they would have bound her and brought her across this one, because this was the bridge that fed into the turnpike that twisted its way through the green hills and down the valley before bending in one direction, and that direction was south.
Citater
Sidste ord
Oplysninger fra den engelske Almen VidenRedigér teksten, så den bliver dansk.
"We are what we always were," she said. "Underground."
"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he's ever known. So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind--but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss. This is a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery, written with the narrative force of a great adventure. Driven by the author's bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, The Water Dancer is the story of America's oldest struggle--the struggle to tell the truth--from one of our most exciting thinkers and beautiful writers"--
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