The Water Dancer

Down in his pit, Hiram loses all sense of time and identity. At first, he is consumed with a vision of years before when Maynard was so bored that he made Hiram assemble the Tasked for a footrace. After everyone was gathered, Maynard forced Hiram to run in the race as well. Hiram ran as fast as he could to beat out everyone, but he fell and injured himself. The pain of the injury and the humiliation of having been made to run forced Hiram to see himself as one of the Tasked. Down in the pit, Hiram realizes that this vision is an actual memory of a key moment in his life after moving to Lockless as a boy.

After a seemingly long time, Hiram’s buyer takes him out the pit. The man gives Hiram bread and water, which Hiram devours out of extreme thirst and hunger. A wagon arrives, and Hiram is forced to board it. The wagon is filled with other black men whose body language indicates they have been completely broken. Hiram knows he belongs among these men because “all [his] disparate motives had been reduced to survival” (141). Hiram sees himself as having been “reduced to an animal” (141).

What comes next is a hunt that completes this process of dehumanization. The hunt is brutal. It goes the same way every time. Slaves are set to run as prey for low whites as punishment for crimes—including stealing themselves—against their masters. The slaves are given a head start by the master of the hunt. If a slave manages to outrun the low whites all night, the master of the hunt will free him. If the hunters catch him, he will be thrown into the pit again, and his life may well be forfeit.

On the first night, Hiram runs to the point of complete exhaustion. His captors beat him and place him back in the pit. As time goes on, however, Hiram grows stronger, faster, and clever enough to turn the tables by ambushing his pursuers. Eventually, whole teams of hunters follow Hiram, bringing him back every time. Hiram realizes that running alone will not allow him to escape; he needs to gain control of the power that pulled him from the Goose on the night Maynard died. Hiram is uncertain of how the power works, but the large gap in his memory from the first time the power manifested—the day Howell sold his mother—makes Hiram suspect that the power has something to do with recovering that memory. In the dark times in the pit, Hiram therefore spends all his energy solidifying what he can remember of his mother.

One night in spring, this memory work pays off during the hunt. Hiram is almost on the edge of a pond when he falls and injures his ankle. A blue door opens back to Lockless on the day Maynard made Hiram run the race with the other Tasked. Hiram watches his younger self cry out in pain, and he does the same in the present. To Hiram’s shock, Hawkins, Corrine’s manservant, is there in the present and tells him to be quiet.

When Hiram wakes up in the present, he is surrounded by luxury and dressed in fine bedclothes. Corrine and Hawkins are standing over him. Hiram is immediately puzzled because Corrine and Hawkins are on terms of equality, even though Hawkins is a black, Tasked man, and Corrine is a white woman of the Quality. Corrine explains everything to Hiram, however. She tells Hiram that she and Hawkins are part of the Underground. Corrine was supposed to marry Maynard in the furtherance of the Underground’s plans, but Hiram’s accident destroyed this plan. The revelation of Hiram’s power has now opened other options for the Underground, Corrine argues.

The only other person who had such power in the past was Santi Bess, Hiram’s grandmother. The Quality created Freetown and secretly connived with Georgie Parks to prevent such an escape from ever happening again. Corrine then explains that she made a deal with Howell to prevent Hiram’s destruction. She purchased Hiram after the failed escape. Hiram is stunned by all this information and then angry when he realizes the hunt and the time in the pit were all at Corrine’s command. Corrine explains that this dark time was designed to see if Hiram could Conduct back to Lockless. Corrine assures Hiram that he is a free man. Nevertheless, she thinks that learning more about the Underground while he recuperates will convince him to bind himself to the Underground’s mission.

Later that evening, Hiram is further shocked when Mr. Fields and Amy come to the house where he is staying. He is even more amazed by the ease and equality with which these black and white members of the Underground interact with each other. Looking outside, Hiram figures out that he is on Bryceton, the Quinn family plantation on the very edge of Virginia.

Amy later joins Hiram and orients him to life in the Underground. She explains that Bryceton Plantation is really a station of the Underground. It is the hub of an army of field agents who steal the Tasked from their masters. House agents who serve as spies, intelligence analysts, and forgers of the paperwork that allow the Underground to function work at their headquarters at Bryceton. Amy is a field agent. In an aside, Hiram notes that he was trained as an agent during this time but explains that what follows has some omissions designed to protect the anonymity of the organizations and its agents.

In the weeks that follow, Hiram engages in physical training that improves his endurance and strength. Mr. Fields resumes tutoring Hiram as well. Beyond this intellectual work, Hiram sits with the house agents as they sift through information and create documents. Finally, Hiram begins journaling to keep track of his learning and document his life (including the events that eventually make up this narrative). A month later, Hiram has another interview with Corrine. She gives him a packet of documents stolen from a member of the Quality who owns Levity Williams, a Tasked man Corrine wants freed. Hiram studies the packet until he knows the master so thoroughly that he can write a day pass that will allow Williams to escape. This assignment is the first of many, and Hiram is soon deeply engaged in the work of a house agent. He’s good at it.

Despite this work, the Underground’s main interest in Hiram is his ability to Conduct. Harriet Tubman, called “Moses” in popular culture, is the only other living person said to have this power. She knows how to control her power, however. Despite many experiments, Hiram still cannot use Conduction at will. Corrine tells him that his gifts as a house agent are an unexpected gift, so he is welcome to continue as a member of the Underground despite not having learned to control his power. Hiram says he wants to serve as a house agent but also wants to get out in the field to see how the field agents’ missions work. He also asks if there is any way to free the people he loves or even find his mother. Corrine tells him that the Underground doesn’t just free any person. Afraid that Hiram will simply leave if she does not at least let him see how a field agent leads a Tasked person out of slavery, Corrine eventually agrees to let him go out on a mission.

Corrine extracts one promise from Hiram in exchange for his participation in field missions: He must help kill Georgie Parks. The plan is to use documents to implicate Parks as a member of the Underground. Knowing the violence that will be visited on Parks and anyone ex-slaves living in Starfall, Hiram feels deeply troubled by the plan. He comes to understand at this moment that the war between the Quality and the Underground is an asymmetrical one in which the Underground “instigated,” “sabotaged,” “poisoned,” and “destroyed” (176) instead of fighting with arms against an enemy with much greater numbers and resources. Hiram creates the documents that send Parks to his death.

A month later, Hiram begins preparation to accompany Mr. Fields, whose real name is Micajah Bland, on a field mission. The mission is to liberate Parnel Johns, a productive field hand who has gotten on the wrong side of his master and peers by stealing his master’s goods and selling them to the Tasked. The master still has not caught the thief but makes everyone on the plantation work twice as hard to make up for the stolen goods. Hiram tells Bland that it doesn’t make sense to rescue a lowlife like Johns, but Bland explains that Johns’ liberation is strategic: The point is to damage the master by stealing a valuable hand, not free a deserving person.

Hiram sets out with Bland to liberate Johns, but when they arrive, Johns has with him Lucy, a woman he claims is his daughter, despite having been told explicitly to take nothing and no one else with him. Hiram learns during a conversation with Lucy that she is Johns’ girlfriend; she forced Johns to bring her along when she figured out he was running away. The mission is successful. Hiram’s next stop is Philadelphia, where he will begin life as a free man and learn more about the Northern operations of the Underground. It is likely about 1850 in this timeline, the year that the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which forces even Northerners to help carry out the recapture of slaves who fled North for freedom.

Four months after his arrival in Bryceton, Hiram is on his way to Philadelphia. After a nerve-wracking trip through slave country, Hiram arrives in Philadelphia, where he Raymond White, another black agent of the Underground, meets him. Hiram is astonished by the variety of people, including rich Tasked and poor Quality. The city has the overwhelming smell of offal and the slaughterhouse. Even more striking is that the people working against slavery and whole neighborhoods of fugitive slaves are out in the open, having organized themselves to protect their communities against recapture after the passage of the new slave law. Hawkins, who accompanied Hiram on the last part of his journey, entrusts Hiram to the care of the White family, including Otha White, Raymond’s brother. Hiram will be boarding in the same rooming house as Otha.

The next morning, Hiram has a strange experience. Eager to see the city, he goes on a walk and ends up inside a bake shop owned by Mars, another formerly Tasked man who knows the White family well. Mars gives Hiram a piece of gingerbread, which Hiram bashfully takes. Hiram then walks down to the riverfront to sit down and eat the gingerbread. The sensory experience of the gingerbread causes one of Hiram’s uncanny doors to open. The gingerbread takes Hiram back to the past at Lockless on a day when a Tasked cook secretly gave Hiram gingersnaps because he was her family. Hiram cannot remember who she is, and she and the Lockless in the vision disappear. When Hiram returns to the present, he realizes that he is sitting three seats down from where he was when the vision began. Without intending to do so, Hiram has Conducted himself. He feels completing exhausted in the aftermath, however.