A Pain Irresolvable
Even as I continue cutting through the classics of sci-fi, it’s refreshing to step away from those dusty, mid-century works and read something written in the here and now, written for the here and now. And unlike a lot of contemporary literature, I found something that spoke directly to me. This moving piece came in the form of The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, published in 2019. As of this writing, I have not read any of Coates’ other books like Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power. I am more familiar with his work as a journalist, public speaker, and with the Black Panther series. These credentials were more than enough to pique my interest.
The Water Dancer might be considered a work of historical fiction, a genre I’ve only lightly explored, but it’s so much more than a fictionalization of Antebellum America. The book includes historical figures as characters and adapts the real stories of runaway slaves to great effect. But beyond that, there is magic. Given Coates’ connection to the comic book world, or my own bias, I’m tempted to label the main character a superhero.
And though much could be gleaned by comparing the figures in this book to other heroic paragons, it’s the relationship between memory, storytelling, and pain that drew my attention. I’m particularly reminded of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. But when I read The Water Dancer, I stumbled on the shadows of trauma theory as described by Dr. Cathy Caruth, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. But synopsis before theory. Minor spoilers ahead.
As I mentioned, The Water Dancer is set largely in the pre-Civil War South, mostly Virginia. Our protagonist, Hiram Walker, is the mixed race son of an enslaved woman, Rose, and a plantation owner, Howell Walker. Hiram is a unique individual with an almost photographic memory, though he faces a curious block whenever he tries to remember his lost mother, sold away in his youth.
Despite (and, inevitably, due to) his parentage, Hiram grows up among the Tasked, slaves that work the field. But with his sharp mind, he’s eventually summoned to the house to serve as the manservant for his half-brother and Howell’s legitimate heir, Maynard, a foul man destined to ruin the plantation with his boorish extravagance. That all comes to an end when a curious accident costs Maynard his life. As the brothers cross a river on their way home from a day at the races, Hiram has a vision of his mother dancing. The next thing he knows, their entire carriage is cast into the Goose River with Hiram barely escaping with his life.
This is the reader’s first glimpse of Hiram’s other unique gift, a power called Conduction. Conduction allows the user to access memories as a power source to transport (teleport?) themselves and others across vast distances. Later in the book, the memory of a ginger sweet allows Hiram to teleport from one bench to another in a city park (p. 196). Not long after, thinking about a woman he loved and lost, he’s able to switch places at a table with one of his comrades in the resistance (p. 230).
The Underground [Railroad] notices these powers and after a failed escape to the North, they draft Hiram. He trains his body, with an emphasis on running, studies the means and manners of the Quality (i.e. plantation owners and their enforcers), and explores his powers of Conduction. One of his mentors in this process is the famous Underground agent Moses, more commonly known as Harriet Tubman. She, like Hiram, possesses Conduction magic and uses it to smuggle enslaved people out of bondage to the North. But she can only help him so far. Hiram must face the pain of his past before he can finally free those left behind.
The Water Dancer is a work of historical fiction insofar as it uses historical individuals and settings to tell a story. Coates supposedly said that he wrote this book while doing research on slavery and the Antebellum South. That work shines through in the writing, but its magical tinge imparts a fantastical feel to the world.
Magical powers aside, a lot of the language lends itself to this comparison. The people are divided into the “Quality,” southern slave-owning aristocracy, the “Tasked,” slaves, and the “Low Whites,” the white people that don't own plantations but often side with the Quality to supervise, harass, and punish the Tasked. Coates could have used more common labels, like “slave,” but that word is complicated, heavy; it weighs on the reader. Having recently read Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, where the roots of modern racism are explored through the institution of slavery, every page felt like a knife to the gut. The greed, the injustice, the suffering, it is a painful read. The hard work of facing those daunting stories is immeasurably important, don’t get me wrong. But it’s all very weighty. Page after page of painstakingly described examples of humanity's cruelty does not make for pleasant bedtime reading.
Coates, on the other hand, brings--if not levity or lightness--at least a distance from that ever present weight. Here, in The Water Dancer, we have the “Tasked” and “the Task”, the enslaved and enslavement. There are still vast and horrid injustices laid bare in Coates’ novel, but even moving the language away from words without so much baggage gives a reader primed to viscerally feel the pain of a slave a little room to breathe. The new vocabulary, the castes, the rules of the world must be learned like any fantasy novel, though it is a thin blanket of comfort that provides little warmth for the empathetic reader.
The various settings likewise evoke an otherworldliness, though the Antebellum South is already another world removed from ours (though perhaps not removed far enough). Hiram spends most of his life on the Lockless plantation near the small city of Starfall. Large, grandiose names built by greed and pain. And there’s Natchez, a faraway city never visited but which serves as a byword for the worst place an enslaved person might be sent. Though it was unfamiliar to my eyes, Natchez is not a made up word. It originally referred to the Natchez people, an American indigenous group originally from the Lower Mississippi Valley. But Natchez in The Water Dancer likely refers to Natchez, Mississippi. The old phrase, “sold down the river,” refers to enslaved people literally being sold south along the Mississippi River. Supposedly, the further south an enslaved person was sold, the crueler the enslavers became. And Natchez is pretty damn south. But again, Coates didn’t choose Jackson or Biloxi or a more well-known city along the river. He chose Natchez, likely a French attempt to spell the name of a Native American tribe. He chose a word I’m not even sure how to pronounce. If that’s not a fantasy trope, I’m not sure what is.
Coates regularly injects fantasy into history. We have slavery and Virginia and the Underground Railroad, but we also have magic and spies and castes and adventure across fields and mountains and teeming cities. There are sweeping conspiracies, desperate flights for freedom, and nigh impossible family reunions made all the more improbable by being based on actual events. This isn’t the history of the South given to us by Roots and certainly not by Gone with the Wind. There’s an added sparkle that doesn’t diminish the hideousness of slavery, but does remind us that Black people weren’t just beasts of burden toiling in the fields or that drudgery consumed their whole beings. The characters in The Water Dancer are people: thinking, emotional entities with lives and hopes and dreams and families beyond the Task. They suffer great injustices, fighting as best as they can for a shred of self. Slavery, the Task, indisputably altered the course of their lives, but the fact of their forced servitude is not the totality of their identity. They are not just slaves. They are not empty footnotes in a forgotten history. They were people and they come alive again in ways not often seen in literature.
One of the ways we see this clearly is the way in which many characters share stories and memories, linking them across time and space. When I read The Water Dancer, I was reminded of Dr. Cathy Caruth’s work on trauma theory, specifically an early passage from her book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, originally published in 1996. In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth utilizes texts across the fields of literature, literary theory, and psychoanalysis to present a new theory of history where trauma--lasting pain from prior event--continues to manifest itself, sometimes unconsciously, in the lives of individuals and, at the macro level, throughout a people, ethnic group, culture, or society.
Very early, Caruth cites an epic poem Freud uses in his work Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The poem, Gerusalemme Liberata, is commonly known in English as Jerusalem Delivered. Focusing on one short passage, the hero of the poem unknowingly kills the woman he loves in a duel because she was wearing an enemy’s armor; later, when walking through a magical forest, the hero strikes a tree where blood flows from the wound followed by the voice of his lost love (p. 2). It’s important to note that her voice emerges from the gash in the tree.
Caruth unpacks a lot from this short passage. When we think about trauma, it’s important to note that it often has two phases. The first is the initial act in which we feel pain. Very often, in those moments, we are too busy trying to stop the pain, to survive, to stay alive, to spend much time considering anything else. The second phase comes after, once we have escaped immediate danger. This psychological pain “returns to haunt the survivor later on” (p. 4).
This is a very relatable experience. Imagine a driver on an icy road and hitting a slick patch that sends their car spinning. In that moment, the driver is doing all they can to regain control and not hit anything or swerve into oncoming traffic. If they die, then that’s it: no more pain. But later, out of danger, their car embedded safely in a snowbank, they have time to think. It’s only then, when the specter of death has passed us by, that we might reflect on how we almost died. That sharp reminder of the delicate ephemerality of life is what traumatizes us after the fact.
Every time we drive down that road, every time we’re speeding along expecting black ice, that’s the trauma we carry with us. As Caruth states, “The story of trauma [is] the narrative of a belated experience” (p. 7). Trauma isn’t about escaping the jaws of death but realizing how much of a presence death plays in our lives; death is always waiting, hiding in our blind spot. We may occasionally forget it’s there, but trauma--the lingering, haunting pain--serves as a constant reminder of the inevitable shade. It is the, “oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life” [emphasis the author’s] (p. 7). It is the staggering impossibility of this near-death experience as well as a similarly impossible story of survival.
Another important reading of the passage from Jerusalem Delivered is that it is the wound in the tree that finally addresses the knight (p. 4). Again, the hero does not know he accidently slew his beloved. It is only when her voice emerges from the gash that he recognizes what he has done. Trauma requires a voice to be understood, or at least to approach understanding. In the basest sense, the dead tell no tales. Even a body tortured and disfigured can only say so much, and what it does outline a story of possible physical pain, not the psychological trauma the victim endured. We cannot know the depth of another’s pain without being a witness to it in some capacity; indeed, we can never truly know another’s pain. Someone may write a thousand million words about a painful experience, and we may read every single one of those words, but we cannot know another’s mind, feel what they felt, see the same ghosts that haunt them through trauma.
Caruth goes on to talk about exodus, about departure, and, rather on the nose, about Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. I think books could be filled matching Coates’ work with Caruth’s theory of trauma. But as a writer, I couldn’t help but feel drawn to the power of Conduction particularly as it is fueled by storytelling and shared memory of trauma.
For lack of a better word, Conduction is teleportation. Harriet Tubman teleports Hiram from the docks of Philadelphia to rural Maryland. That’s a short drive by today’s standards, with only 100 miles separating Baltimore and Philadelphia, but the Underground’s best agent manages to get them there in the time it takes to tell a short story (p. 270-276).
Coates uses a fair amount of ink when describing conduction. With his final breakthrough, Hiram states that Conduction requires, “The summoning of a story, the water, and the object that made memory real as brick” (p. 358). As his mentor, Harriet Tubman presses the point that memory is key: “We forgot nothing, you and I . . . To forget is to truly slave. To forget is to die . . . For memory is the chariot, and memory is the way, and memory is the bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom” (p. 271).
Here is a brief passage that Hiram uses when Moses leads him through Conduction:
“What happened then was a kind of communion, a chain of memory extending between the two of us that carried more than any words I can now offer you here, because the chain was ground into some deep and locked away place, where my aunt Emma lived, where my mother lived, where a great power lived, and the chain extended into that selfsame place in Harriet, where all those lost ones had taken up their vigil” (p. 271).
As Harriet Tubman leads Hiram through a supernatural fog, she spins a long tale stretching several pages where she shares the pain of her children torn and sold away from her, of daily violence at the hands of the Quality, and a young child of the Task, Abe, who ran so fast that, “his foot tracks set the trees to fire” (p. 275).
Hiram, when he finally utilizes Conduction to free his adopted mother and reunite her with her lost daughter, tells his own story of pain and freedom. He shares the memories, long since locked away, of fleeing into the woods with his birth mother, spending days there, before finally being captured by his Quality father; it is an act of rebellion the plantation owner cannot bear and he sells her away in anger (p. 396). Before she leaves, Hiram’s mother, Rose, gives him a necklace of shells and says the following: “No matter what shall happen, you are remembered to me now. Forget nothing of what you have seen. I am soon a ghost to you. I have tried, best I could, to be as a mother should. But our time has now come” (p. 396).
Returning to Caruth, she identifies the two phases of trauma: the crisis of death and the crisis of life. The crisis of death is that horrific moment where someone’s life is at risk. It’s fair to say that this is the continuous condition of any member of the Tasked. Perhaps Hiram’s lowest point is when he’s caught trying to flee from his father’s plantation. He’s stripped of his clothes, thrown in a pit, and his new owners, “The flesh-traders, vultures of Natchez, entered and had their way with [him]” (p. 126). Beatings, rape, degradations, these are the crises of death. But the crisis of life is after the fact. It is well after that horrific moment where life hangs in the balance and the traumatized individual has time to consider how close they came to death and what the cost of survival--of surviving a horrendous moment—truly is.
Later in the novel, Hiram tells his adopted mother, Thena, that he met her long lost daughter, Kessiah, in the north. Thena bore several children and watched all of them be sold off to no one knows where. When Hiram tells the story of meeting Kessiah, Thena does not react with joy but with sorrow: “the tears came, slow and silent, and without a cry or wail. [Thena] said her daughter’s name again and again . . . Why did you bring this back to me? Why you do this? You and your Underground? Hell I care. I have settled up with it” (p. 383).
We can only guess at the suffering of Thena, a dead husband and a family of lost children. But it’s clear she’s buried her feelings deep, and set them aside, locking those bitter memories away forever. That’s what survival costs: the complete and utter rejection of the pain she might face were she to consider her lost children. But here, when Hiram shows her even the glimmer of a possibility of reunion, we see Thena grappling with that obscured pain. The cost of her survival was paid with her loving memories of her own flesh and blood. They haunted her, these lost feelings, and she buried them until Hiram broke into that crypt.
Again, it’s no stretch to state that the Tasked are traumatized in every sense of the word. But Caruth illuminates the way Coates allows them to work through that pain. The story of the knight striking a tree, and hearing the voice of his slain lover emerge from the gash, represents the way in which we become aware of trauma through an open wound; the wound addresses us, makes us a witness to its pain. Conduction happens in a very similar way. Every time we see either Hiram or Harriet Tubman teleport, they are sharing a story about their lives, of joy and pain. In this way, Conduction carries the Tasked to freedom much as the sharing of a traumatic story allows the speaker to consciously address the crisis of life.
Throughout The Water Dancer, Hiram regularly finds a mysterious block clouding his mind whenever he tries to summon memories of his mother. It is only after he recovers her shell necklace from his rapist father that he finally remembers her and comes into his own. His conduction story begins with, “I have told you much about me, but I have never revealed the essence of all that has guided me, for all of it has been for so long tucked away, hidden in a fog as thick as what surrounds us. It had to be as such, for I was too young to bear what happened, too young to survive with the memory” (p. 394). Like Thena, Hiram’s own mind conspired to lock those memories of his crisis of death away until the time came to face that wound. In this case, he managed to reunite Thena with her daughter, Kessiah. And he does this by telling his passenger how much he loved his mother, and how it hurt to lose her (p. 396).
Conduction, in Coates’ The Water Dancer, is a path to freedom in both the literal and figurative senses. Conduction literally allows the Tasked to escape bondage. But it also allows the conductors--Harriet Tubman and Hiram--to tell stories about pain and suffering and loss. They tell stories not about how wonderful the North is or how freedom is divine, but instead share the trauma of those family and friends that suffered and vanished before their eyes. Their wounds, their memories--good and bad--and their trauma, compel them to strive forward. They are impelled by trauma of the past rather than pulled to the future's freedom. I said earlier that Conduction is powered by memory and shared storytelling. Here we see how trauma is a rocket fuel. Caruth’s crisis of life is not just a recognition that death is with us always, but an opportunity for us to reflect on the pain of existence and find ways to allow ourselves to move forward and, hopefully, heal.
But I also said that this book, draped in history, is for the here and now. Coates is not just telling a story of slavery and adding magic to weave a fairy tale. Memories, storytelling, Conduction itself is one way to address trauma. And this is something we as individuals, as a people, and as a country desperately need to do. History books are being rewritten to portray enslaved people as “involuntary migrants” and “indentured servants”, something that’s hardly a new trend. This sanitized story, and the entire whitewashing of American history, is a horrendous, downright criminal form of intentional forgetting. It erases the past and allows the problems created then--the trauma--to fester under the surface.
Coates with Conduction shows America a way forward. Only through addressing trauma, by sharing painful memories and stories, can we as a people move forward. History--that which we might call a national memory--has the capacity to push us forward to real freedom, rather than the false peace doomed to failure through sanitized falsehoods.
It may not seem like it to most, but a story about enslaved Black folk seeking freedom is the exact story for the here and now. It pushes back against the lies that would drag us further into the darkness while simultaneously showing us a method to address our national trauma and move forward. I am energized by Coates’ writing and his message and look forward to more stories and more memories, painful though they may be, because these are things upon which we might create a new and better world.
