94 | Rolling Stone | September 2019
JORGE^ SILVA/RE
UTERS/
NEWSCOMBooks
TA-NEHISI COATES’ AMERICAN ODYSSEY
The author of ‘Between the World and Me’ explores the burden of
slavery from the inside with his masterful debut novel By DAVID FEART
A-NEHISI Coates is the
most important essayist
in a generation and a
writer who changed the national
political conversation about race
with his 2015 memoir, Between
the World and Me. So naturally
his debut novel comes with
slightly unrealistic expectations
— and then proceeds to exceed
them. The Water Dancer, Coates’
meditation on the legacy of slav-
ery, is a work of both staggering
imagination and rich historical
significance.
The novel opens with two men
crashing a horse-drawn carriage
into the Goose River in mid-
1800s Virginia. One man drowns;
the other finds himself envel-
oped in a blue mist and then
jolted awake miles away, dazed
and confused and unharmed.
The man who emerges from that
would-be watery grave is Hiram
Walker, a slave, the product of
a white master’s rape and the
servant to his wastrel half-brother. Those forced to
give their bodies, their free will, and their lives on Hi-
ram’s father’s plantations are known as “the Tasked.”
Their owners, the aristocrats of the antebellum
South, are “the Quality.”
Hiram is a little different from the rest of the
Tasked, however. He has a photographic memory,
which earns him privileges, if not full personhood,
among the gentry. And in a supernatural twist, he
also possesses the extraor-
dinary gift of “conduction”
— an ability to move through
space and time. There’s talk of
another person up north who
has the same talent, a woman
they call the “Moses” of the
Underground Railroad. And
when Hiram attempts to escape
Virginia, he’ll eventually find
himself recruited to use his
conductive powers for a vast
abolitionist network that will
eventually take him in search
of answers, a loved one, and
maybe even a way to liberate
his people.
Coates re-creates the world
of the pre-Civil War South —
from the plantations’ cramped
slave quarters and ornate
parlors to abolitionist gatherings to the jails run by
Southern militias — with a journalist’s eye and ear
for detail. His years as a contributor at The Atlantic
and other publications have paid off; so has his
tenure writing the Marvel comic Black Panther, given
the way he invests his narrative with a compelling
forward momentum.
What’s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his
notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to
probe a wound that never seems to heal. “To forget
is to truly slave,” one character says. “To forget is to
truly die.” There’s an urgency to his remembrance
of things past that brims with authenticity, testifying
to centuries of bone-deep pain. It makes The Water
Dancer feel timeless and instantly canon-worthy.The Water
Dancer
Ta-Nehisi Coates
ONE WORLD
$Untangling the Threads of the Trump-Russia Scandal
DEEP LISTENINGIt’s hard to keep up with a story like Donald Trump and Rus-
sia — especially since the audiobook of the Mueller report
works better as an Ambien alternative than as an informa-
tive listen. So it’s a good thing we have The Asset, a new
podcast on the scandal, hosted by Max Bergmann, who
served in the State Department from 2011 to 2017. Bergmann has the natural
ease of someone explaining foreign policy over dinner so that the information
sticks. He gets into Trump’s shady business past, Vladimir Putin’s rise in the KGB,
and how Trump’s ego made him a perfect mark. By the time it’s over, you’ll have
only one question left: How do we get out of this mess? ELISABETH GARBER-PAULTWIN SISTER indie-pop duo
Tegan and Sara’s debut mem-
oir is a lot like their songs:
complexly intimate, smartly
crafted, and packing a subtle
emotional wallop. The pair co-
wrote High School, alternating
authorship between chapters
and focusing exclusively ontheir teenage years as they map
out their symbiotic coming-of-
age chaos. “There is... great
comfort that comes from travel-
ing through life with a witness,”
Tegan writes. They grew up in
Calgary, Alberta, during the
mid-Nineties, fighting like Ray
and Dave Davies, worshipping
Nirvana, and going to raves
and punk shows. One day,
they come across their mom’s
boyfriend’s guitar in a storage
nook (“The weight of the wood
felt intimate, touching almost
all of me at once,” Sara writes).
They start writing songs, and
eventually win a local battle-of-
the-bands that leads to a record
deal. The emotions that fuel
those songs echo their expe-
rience falling for girls and strug-
gling with worries about being
judged by the people around
them. Some of the book’s most
heartbreaking moments come
as they navigate a tense space
where friendships end and re-
lationships might begin. “There
could be nothing worse than
being called a lesbian,” Sara
writes. “Especially if you were
one.” What emerges is a quietly
heroic origin story. JON DOLANHow Tegan
& Sara Found
Their Voice
High School
Tegan and Sara
MCD
4The Asset
Center for Amer-
ican Progress
4Putin
and
Trump,
2017