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Ta nehisi coates the water dancer review5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() Hiram is the mixed-race son of the owner of a Virginia tobacco plantation called Lockless and a mother who was tragically sold away when he was 5. ![]() “America understands itself as God’s handiwork,” he writes in “Between the World and Me,” which is structured as a letter to his teenage son, “but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.”įor “The Water Dancer,” his first novel, Coates ventures into the perspective of Hiram Walker, a slave born under “the Task” who serves as the story’s narrator and fulcrum. ![]() Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines the furthest reach of that power as a means to transcend borders and bondage in “The Water Dancer,” a spellbinding look at the impact of slavery that uses meticulously researched history and hard-won magic to further illuminate this country’s original sin.įor Coates, whose epistolary quasi-memoir “ Between the World and Me” won a National Book Award in 2015, this trip to the past was foreshadowed in his vividly drawn examination of what it means to be black in today’s United States. The best writers - the best storytellers, in particular - possess the enchanting, irresistible power to take the reader somewhere else. ![]()
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