EDITED BY →
DAVID CANFIELD @DAVIDCANFIELD97
Books
He’s written Marvel comics, groundbreaking
essays, a National Book Award-winning mem-
oir—and now, his debut novel. Can TA-NEHISI
COATES do everything? BY LEAH GREENBLATT
“ALL WATER HAS A PERFECT MEMORY,” THE LATE TONI MORRISON
once said, “and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
The young narrator of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ richly mystical fiction
debut is blessed with a perfect memory too; born into Virginia
slavery, Hiram Walker is 19, with uncommon gray-green eyes and
a knack for holding every moment in his mind like a photograph.
There’s only one incident he can’t recall, and isn’t at all sure that
he wants to get back to: the day his mother was taken away.
In The Water Dancer’s opening pages, she returns—this time
as a phantasmal figure on a stone bridge, her hips dipping and
swaying to invisible music, an earthen jug “fixed on her head like
a crown.” The reason for her sudden reappearance eludes Hiram,
though it seems to portend what comes next: a plunge off the
bridge into the unforgiving river
below, and the drowning death of
his doltish half brother and future
master—a man placed above him
merely by the grace of his white skin.
If dabbling in magical realism
feels at first like a strange turn for
a writer and essayist considered to
be one of the leading voices of black
intellectualism in America, it’s actu-
ally a pretty neat fit for his résumé:
After the release of the searing 2015
memoir Between the World and Me—
and the avalanche of awards and
genius grants that followed—Coates
chose, out of everything, to write
a Black Panther comic-book series
next. (Can you blame him for want-
ing to get lost for a minute in pure
Walking on
116 OCTOBER 2019 EW ● COM
