I have to go; this is what it has to be.’
Everything proceeded from there.” He
half-grins when he says it, and I believe
his ruefulness is tempered by years of
writing articles on deadline, of having his
work line-edited and purged, of getting
the kind of ruthless feedback that jour-
nalism engenders. But still, I imagine, it
had to hurt. “It was deflating,” he said. “I
was nowhere close, and he let me know,
which is exactly what a good friend and
good reader is supposed to do. I think
so much of writing happens in those
moments. Talent is important, but per-
severance and high threshold for humili-
ation is maybe even more important?”
Coates also sought writing wisdom
from the women in his life. His wife,
Kenyatta Matthews, is his first reader.
“She reads everything,” he says. “She
reads more than I do.” Coates is aware
that critics have seen a deficiency in
his work regarding women, that their
absence as fully realized people has
been notable and noted. Even though
The Water Dancer is told from Hiram’s
perspective, Hiram would not survive
without the women who protect him,
care for him, teach him, and partnerwith him: his lover, Sophia, his mother,
Rose, sold away from him; his adop-
tive mother, Thena; and finally Har-
riet Tubman, whom Hiram meets and
befriends. “I feel like there was a great
danger of writing this book as a kind of
save-the-girl cowboy thing. So how do
you prevent that? First of all, you try to
muddy the whole saving thing as much
as you possibly can. And secondly, you
try really, really hard not to make the
person an object of the protagonist. You
just try to make them as full as you pos-
sibly can.” The women characters are the
people he thought of the most. Everyone
important to his writing life read with an
eye toward this—Jackson and two otherW
THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS
Coates at the Hungarian Pastry
Shop, near Columbia University, where
he has done much of his writing.