The Water Dancer

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-9

Part 2, Chapters 10-15

Part 2, Chapters 16-27

Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Part 1, Chapters 5-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Chapter 5 Summary

The narrative shifts back to the immediate aftermath of the accident. Hiram believes he has drowned and is headed into the afterlife, but when he comes to, he is back on Lockless Plantation, on the ground beside the stone monument to the Walker ancestors. At first, he thinks he is in a special hell designed for slaves, but he regains consciousness three days later when the sound of Sophia singing wakes him. Hiram is in Maynard’s room, and one of his first encounters after regaining consciousness is with Howell, who is so devastated by Maynard’s death that he whitewashes Maynard’s character. Howell has convinced himself that Maynard died to save Hiram from drowning.

Eager to escape Maynard’s room, Hiram descends to the Warren as soon as he can stand. Thena grudgingly tells him she is glad to see him, and Sophia tells Hiram that the story is that Hawkins found Hiram face-down in the muck along the banks of the Goose. This story doesn’t match with Hiram’s memory, however, and he has a moment of deep panic when he leaves the Warren to step outside. He goes down to the Street, where he ends up visiting with Sophia. He learns that she is from South Carolina and that while she was a slave there, she had a husband, Mercury, with whom she loved to dance. Still reeling from his experiences, Hiram walks down to the stone monument to the Walker ancestors. He discovers his copper coin near the monument. This discovery confirms his memory of waking up near the monument after he nearly drowned. Hawkins’ story of finding him in the muck cannot possibly be true.

Chapter 6 Summary

Rocked by his realization that something strange did lead to his survival, Hiram decides that he needs to keep himself busy to keep from going crazy. Against the advice of Roscoe and Thena, he takes to restoring damaged furniture for something to do. He notices during this mournful time in Lockless that Corrine is around frequently. She even calls him in for an audience one day, and her concern for how he feels and her brutal honesty about the shortcomings of Maynard make Hiram uneasy: White people never think of the Tasked as having feelings. Hiram does not trust her as a result. He decides that this attention is the precursor to Corrine gaining ownership of him and taking him away from Lockless.

At Christmas, the Quality, including Walker relatives and locals who had such contempt for Maynard, gather to mourn the man and have a big holiday meal. The Tasked, as is usual, have a parallel holiday celebration during which the conversation is about how these relatives are after Howell’s land. Hiram also listens to stories about Santi Bess. Santi Bess was Hiram’s grandmother, a native-born African woman who apparently helped 48 slaves escape by walking with them into the Goose and taking them back to Africa. Later in the night, Hiram is mesmerized when Sophia dances the water dance with jars atop her head. Afterward, the two walk and drink together. Hiram realizes that he is falling in love with Sophia, an event that makes his possible departure from Lockless even more urgent.

Chapter 7 Summary

Hiram’s days settle into an uneasy rhythm of restoring furniture and driving Sophia to her weekly visits to Nathaniel’s plantation. During one of these visits, Sophia tells him a story that parallels his own. Sophia played with her mistress Helen like a playmate when young, became her body servant as the two aged, accompanied Helen when the woman married Nathaniel, and then was forced to become Nathaniel’s mistress. Hiram feels even closer to Sophia when she tells him that her natural desire for children, but she cannot imagine bringing children into a world in which they will be slaves. By the end of their talk, Hiram knows that he and Sophia are going to run away and do so together.

Hiram goes to Parks again and tells him that he is running away no matter what. Parks agrees to help him and arranges for Hiram and Sophia to meet him a week later. After the meeting with Parks, Hiram bumps into Hawkins and Amy, who pop up so frequently that Hiram begins to wonder if they are among those slaves who spy on their peers for the masters. Hawkins’ nosiness about what Hiram is doing in town angers Hiram. His uneasiness grows even more when Mr. Fields, the tutor, joins the group to talk to Amy. Looking back on these seemingly coincidental encounters, Hiram realizes he should have them as a sign that his plot to escape was doomed. Despite these worries, Hiram agrees with Sophia the next day when she tells him she must escape from the Walkers.

Chapter 8 Summary

Sophia stops by to visit Hiram later in the week in the shed where he does his work. He is puzzled by a certain distance in the way she interacts with him. The two meet later to discuss their plan to escape, and Sophia tells Hiram that she likes him, but that “[a]in’t no freedom for a woman in trading a white man for a colored” (111). He tries to reassure her that he respects her right to make her own choices. Meanwhile, Thena looks on with increasing disapproval at the relationship between Hiram and Sophia. She tells Hiram later that night that consorting with a white man’s concubine is a mistake. Hiram rebukes her, an act of disrespect that surprises and upsets her. Hiram will regret his actions, she tells him. Her premonition is completely accurate. The escape plan fails spectacularly. When Hiram and Sophia meet Parks at the appointed place and time, he comes with Ryland’s Hounds in tow. Parks has betrayed them.

Chapter 9 Summary

The Hounds take Sophia and Hiram to the jail in Starfall and chain them both down. Hiram is devastated that his plan has resulted in Sophia’s capture and her exposure to possible harm and abuse by the Hounds. He wishes he could kill himself. Sophia manages to use almost superhuman strength to stretch her chains so that she and Hiram can at least touch each other.

Part 1, Chapters 5-9 Analysis

The two most significant developments in this section are the deepening of the relationship between Hiram and Sophia and Coates’ exploration of the gendered dimensions of slavery. As a system of oppression, slavery had an impact on even the most intimate interactions between masters and the enslaved and relationships between the enslaved. Coates’ focus on what happens when two young people attempt to negotiate physical attraction and romantic feelings in such a system is designed to show the corrosive psychological impact of slavery on what is a usual rite of passage for many young people.

Sophia’s difficulties illuminate how the challenges faced by enslaved women differed from those faced by enslaved men. Hiram’s desire for Sophia is dangerous to both Hiram and Sophia because Nathaniel has claimed her as a sexual “partner.” As Sophia’s owner, Nathaniel exercises control over Sophia’s body and thus ostensibly has power over the disposition of Sophia’s desire, sex, and attraction. Sophia is her own person, however, so her interactions with Hiram place her in direct conflict with Nathaniel’s power over her. Nathaniel also exercises power over Sophia’s sexual reproduction: To produce children is simply to make more property for her master and to create more impediments to her own freedom.

Sophia’s placement in Lockless is a result of the hypocritical nature of slave society, which allows men such as Nathaniel to engage in sexual exploitation of enslaved women but only if it is done under cover. The surreptitious nature of Nathaniel’s use of Sophia is just one more instance in which slave power and white supremacy are exercised in the dark to cover over the violence inherent in owning other people as moveable property.

Beyond the heavy weight of participating in a sexual relationship in which she does not have the power to say no, Sophia also must negotiate patriarchal notions in her interactions with Hiram. Hiram struggles to accept, for example, that he cannot assert his masculine prerogative to claim Sophia as his because he is enslaved; such an assertion will always be subject to the whims of Nathaniel. Hiram’s sense of being wronged is one that Sophia repeatedly calls out because it fails to acknowledge that it is she who is wronged and that there are limits on how closely she can hew to notions of monogamy and sexual purity. When she tells Hiram “[a]in’t no freedom for a woman in trading a white man for a colored” (111), she is asserting her limited autonomy to at least exercise a little control over the terms of her oppression. That quote also makes it clear that she is keenly aware of the intersection between being oppressed as a woman and being oppressed as an enslaved person of color.

In some sense, The Water Dancer is a novel about the education of an enslaved man about the reality of the world around him. It is to Coates’ credit that—despite the protagonist being male—an important part of that education is understanding the multiple oppressions that enslaved women face. Coates’ decision to highlight this aspect of slavery reflects his commitment to telling more expansive stories about the meaning and reality of slavery.