![]() ![]() Everything, that is, except his own mother.Īs a cultural analyst, Coates is noted for his stylish prose, but in The Water Dancer the writing is spare. Like Douglass, he is an exceptional child who has a gift for remembering everything. Born in Maryland to a raped, enslaved woman whom he barely remembered after she was sold to another plantation, Douglass was a child prodigy, famous for his extraordinary biography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which told of his escape from slavery to become a great orator and an advocate for emancipation.īorn on an antebellum plantation in Virginia named Lockless – whose community consists of the Quality (masters and mistresses) and the Tasked (enslaved) – Hiram is also the son of a slave master and slave, Rose, who is sold “down river”, leaving Hiram orphaned. ![]() For one, there are parallels between the protagonist, Hiram, and the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In common with Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which draws on the life of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman who hid for years in a low-ceilinged attic in which she couldn’t stand, The Water Dancer makes use of a number of real-life narratives. As a cultural analyst, Coates is noted for his stylish prose, but here the writing is spare Little wonder, then, that slavery is the subject of his first novel. Like Baldwin, Coates’s elegant nonfiction is haunted by the dark legacy of the American civil war. ![]()
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