The Water Dancer

The opening of the blue door on the bridge over the Goose River is not the first time something uncanny happened around Hiram. Hiram was always a strange child: He has a perfect memory of everything he has ever seen or heard, except for the day he was parted from his mother. He is nine when she is sold off. He wakes up one morning fully aware that she is gone forever, but he can’t remember her departure. Going on some flashes of memory that he retains, he rushes from the family’s cabin to the stables where he thinks the parting happened, but they are empty. Hiram stares into the water trough he finds there, and a blue door opens. Hiram thinks the blue door will reconnect him with his mother, but it does not. Instead, he loses consciousness.

When Hiram comes to, he is back in his family’s cabin. After he wakes, Hiram goes to the cabin of Thena, an enslaved woman known for her moodiness and anger since she lost her entire family to illness and slavery. She adopts the orphaned boy, and the two mostly live in peace for two years. Hiram, whose perfect memory and mimicry make him an excellent performer, comes to the attention of Howell, his biological father and master, as Hiram performs a song in the Street, the slave quarters of Howell’s Lockless Plantation. Impressed with his son’s skill, Howell tosses Hiram a copper coin. Hiram is certain that this recognition will allow him to escape life in the fields and on the Street. The copper coin becomes a talisman that he carries with him everywhere.

The next day, Thena has a talk with Hiram after she receives a visit from the overseer and his assistant. Hiram will be moving to the big house, she tells him. She attempts to impress on the boy that living so closely with the masters means less freedom and more danger for an enslaved person. She also tells him how important it is for Hiram to remember that no matter how much blood he shares with Howell, this white man is not his true family. She wants him to be careful. Her warnings are lost on Hiram, who imagines that Lockless Plantation is his birthright. The reality of Thena’s warnings becomes clearer as soon as Roscoe, Howell’s butler, takes the boy to Lockless. Rather than immediately ascending to the house, Roscoe takes Hiram to the slave lodgings, aptly named “the Warren” because they are dark, airless, and hidden beneath the house. Afterward, Hiram goes up top, where he meets his father and half-brother.

Four months later, Hiram is a server at a party Howell hosts for the local gentry one weekend. A drunken female guest demands to be entertained and slaps one of the Tasked servers when no one immediately responds to her. Like his peers, Hiram is on edge with this group of guests because he has learned by now that “[b]ored whites were barbarian whites” (27). Eager to dissipate the tension, Hiram entertains the woman by extemporaneously creating rhymes based on alphabet cards Maynard’s tutor (unsuccessfully) uses to attempt to teach the boy to read. The guests, including Mr. Fields, Maynard’s tutor, are enchanted. The party ends.

On the Monday after the party, Hiram has an interview with Mr. Fields and Howell, during which the boy’s memory is tested. Satisfied with what he sees, Howell decides that Hiram will now have regular tutoring sessions with Mr. Fields in addition to his regular duties. Hiram’s mental quickness and intelligence allow him to outstrip Maynard quickly, and everyone involved knows it. Hiram has boyish fantasies of supplanting Maynard as a reward for his quickness and carrying on the lineage of his white ancestors, John and Archibald Walker, whose places in family lore are celebrated with a stone monument on the corner of the plantation.

Nevertheless, Hiram is increasingly aware that all is not well in slave country. The plantation-owning families are less prosperous because the soil is exhausted with overplanting. The big slave owning families, known as “the Quality” in this timeline, are heading out west, where the land is fertile and society is less strict. The immediate impact of these changes is that slaves, known as “the Tasked,” may be sold at any time to pay off debts or liquidate property to fund moves to the west. There is a sense of unease among the Tasked because of these changes.

As Hiram because more literate and familiar with Howell and the Quality, he comes to understand that the entire society of the Quality is built upon the labor of the Tasked and the need to hide the Quality’s dependence on the Tasked. The Quality’s dependence on the Tasked makes the Quality weak, lazy, and incapable of initiative, while necessity makes true genius so common among the Tasked as to be unremarkable. Maynard embodies all the worst traits of the Quality.

Howell eventually tasks Hiram with being a manservant to Maynard, to be a competent counterweight to Maynard’s worst impulses. The lessons end, and Hiram spends seven years serving closely at Maynard’s side. By the time Hiram is 19, it is clear that Maynard is good for nothing but gambling on horses and spending money on good-time women; Maynard’s peers hold him in contempt, and Howell is now hoping to marry Maynard off to Corrine, a woman of good family and who has an excellent grasp of what it takes to survive in the exhausted lands of Virginia.

The night before the accident, Hiram realizes while reading about Oregon, the western territory that is the land of freedom for most Americans, that Lockless is doomed and so is Hiram, so long as his fate is tied to that of his feckless half-brother. That night, Hiram dreams about running North to avoid being chained to Maynard for the rest of his life.

Hiram is disturbed by his thoughts about the dream when he wakes up in the morning, and he reflects on one of the most damning things about slavery, namely that the Quality readily break up Tasked families for profit. Hiram’s mind has turned to family and love because he has a crush on Sophia, a Tasked woman who is the concubine of Nathaniel, Howell’s brother. Sophia lives on Lockless to avoid the appearance of impropriety, but everyone knows her role. Sophia and Hiram engage in flirtatious banter that morning, but Hiram’s unease grows as he heads up top because he realizes that despite his feelings for Sophia, he can never give into his desire for her, never gain anything from his own labor, and never truly be himself. Giving in to his natural impulses will only enslave him even further.

Hiram drives Maynard to Starfall, the county seat and location of the racetracks, where Maynard encounters the obvious disdain of women of the Quality and contempt from their male counterparts. Maynard is happy that day because he wins at the races. Rather than heading home afterward, Maynard goes to a brothel. Hiram wanders around the town thinking about his recognition of the awful trap he is in as a slave. Hiram knows that the only way to escape the trap is to gain his freedom by running away or purchasing himself. Runaways are almost always captured and severely punished by Ryland’s Hounds, the slave patrol in this Virginia. Buying one’s freedom, on the other hand, is increasingly unlikely: Slaves are at a premium now as Virginia’s families are leaving for the West and South.

The only free Tasked person of any consequence that Hiram knows is Georgie Parks. Parks, who somehow managed the seemingly impossible task of gaining his freedom, is the informal mayor of the small enclave of people of color in Starfall. He is rumored to have connections with the Underground, a shadowy society of ex-slaves and abolitionists who have so far managed to avoid detection by Ryland’s Hounds.

Intent on getting out of his impossible situation, Hiram visits Parks to ask for help in escaping from Lockless. Parks tells Hiram that life as a manservant to the heir of Lockless is a good one and denies any involvement in the Underground. He tells Hiram to go home, get married, and accept his life. Frustrated, Hiram leaves. He runs into Maynard, a woman from the brothel, and Hawkins, the manservant of Corrine. Maynard and the woman board the coach, and the accident happens shortly after. Reflecting on his ability to open the blue door, which Hiram dubs “Conduction” (64), Hiram says the essential thing to realize is that “you have to remember” (64) in order to do it.