modern sentiment of love and heart-
break. The novel’s prose is faithfully dat-
ed, marked by the linguistic formalities
and trends of the time; it authentically
reads as if an educated man from that
time period is speaking to the reader.
But as I mull his declaration over, I
understand it. That sense of longing is
ever present. Coates references a story
from The Black Family in Slavery and
Freedom, about a man sold away from his
love, who later writes to her. “He’s like,
‘Listen, I never wanted to be parted from
you, I always wanted us to be together,
but it happened, and the best thing now
is for you to find somebody and get mar-
ried.’ And he ends it. And he’s talking
about these kids he’s never going to see
again. He says, ‘Send me a lock of the
children’s hair.’ I said, ‘Goddamn!’ ”
Both Hiram and Sophia are enslaved by
an older Virginia planter whose estate is
in decay. As the overworked land of his
plantation yields smaller and smaller
crops, the plantation owner, who is
Hiram’s father, sells the people he hasenslaved south, to Natchez, to live and die
in the brutal cotton fields of Mississippi.
In Between the World and Me, Coates
tells his son Samori, who is now in college,
that every slave is a person. This fact is one
of the great powers of The Water Dancer,
that nearly each enslaved adult we meet
is a person. They are in love, have been in
love, have had children or made a make-
shift family along with other dispossessed,
displaced people. Later in the conversa-
tion, he asks me if I miss my characters as
he misses his; I respond by talking about
writing rough drafts and revising and get
lost in a terrible tangent. I never answer his
question. Days later, I realize that’s okay,
because we’veeditors, Kenyatta, and himself. “That’s
so hard to talk about,” says Coates. “It’s
really hard to say what you had a hard
time doing. Because you’re talking about
the place where you know you felt your
weakest.” It is the chief pursuit of a novel-
ist to imbue those written about with life,
with beating hearts and breath. And true
to the experience of most debut novel-
ists, this novel taught Coates how to write
it, again and again.
But that kind of feedback that he sought
out through the 10 years he spent writ-
ing and rewriting The Water Dancer only
made him want to tell Hiram’s story even
more, because not only is the story about
how one lives in spite of the dehumanizing
institution of slavery, to Coates, it is a love
story. When he was writing, he listened to
“a lot of sad-ass R & B,” he says. “A lot of
songs about longing. I played the Righ-
teous Brothers’ ‘Unchained Melody,’
Isaac Hayes, ‘Walk on By.’ ‘Look of Love.’
‘What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.’ ”
When I ask him why, he surprises me.
“My mom reads serious stuff, and she
also reads what people would refer to as
trash, right.” As a teen, he says, “I read
a lot of what people refer to as trash too.
And I told her years ago that I was going
to write her a romance novel. I told her
this when I was 20.” He shakes his head.
“And when I started researching the Civil
War, the most heartbreaking shit to me
was when these people would be divided
from each other. I tried to imagine loving
somebody the way I love my wife, and
somebody being like, ‘That’s it—and your
kid too, by the way.’ And I came across
these letters about it.”
When Coates curses, his Baltimore
accent thickens the vowels and conso-
nants, and I feel a strong sense of déjàvu. Once it settles into the conversa-
tion, it lingers, and I can’t shake this
sense that I know that man, that there
is something familiar about him to me.
That in some distant way, we are kin. I
decide to think more about this later and
instead settle in and listen.
“There’s something in black music,
and I guess music, period, that expresses
feeling that can’t be spoken or written.
And I felt like in writing about slavery, I
was going for a kind of emotion I didn’t
quite know how to express,” he says.
“Music was like an audio cue for me. It
would take me to the place I needed to
go.” What Coates has done in his novel is
meld the prose of the early 1800s with a CONTINUED ON PAGE 128“Coates has to resist the lure ofthe adventure story. He has to resist the
lure of the cowboy. He hasto resist the lure of the savior.”