Long before The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates was announced as the next Oprah Book Club selection, I have anticipated this novel. Back in June of this year Coates read an excerpt of the book adapted as a short story for The New Yorker Fiction podcast, a short story entitled “Conduction,” and his solid speech told the story of protagonist Hiram Walker’s first days in the free city of Philadelphia. In the short story, Hiram is gifted with a slice of fresh gingerbread from a free black bakery owner in Philadelphia, and the warm treat jogs memories that Hiram, whose gift is the gift of memory, had forgotten in the shock of losing his mother to a slave sale in Virginia at a very young age. The short story left me holding my breath for months, amazed at the imagery and word play that sculpted a magical story of memory as transportation. I found myself grateful when the entire novel was finally released for publication.

Hiram’s story speaks to similar histories of thousands of slaves before the Civil War; born of a slave mother and a white plantation owner father, Hiram is spared field work shortly after his mother’s sale to another owner and summoned to work at a series of odd jobs within the house of a plantation called Lockless in Virginia. His father is impressed by Hiram’s powers of memory, both visually and in knowledge, and often summons him to perform mind tricks at house parties as well as providing Hiram with an education that his half brother Maynard neither absorbs nor appreciates. As the brothers approach manhood, both are subject to a carriage accident that Maynard succumbs to and that spares Hiram; Hiram takes that opportunity to try and escape slavery and is captured, only to be saved by Maynard’s fiancee, who recruits him to help her in clandestine efforts of “conducting” on the Underground Railroad. Coates teases and hints at magic within the story up to this point, but once Hiram is introduced to work in the Underground Railroad and travels from Virginia to Maryland to Philadelphia, Coates opens up the magic to full steam. Hiram is introduced to not only the wonders of free states, but the wonder that was Harriet Tubman, who demonstrates to Hiram how he can use his powers of memory to move slaves safely to free states. At first she shows only him how to conduct with the power of memory and of personal history, even though the practice is severely exhausting:

“My apologies, friend. I thought I had enough spirit to make it without one of those bouts,” she said. “The jump is done by the power of the story. It pulls from out particular histories, from all of our loves and all of our losses. All of that feeling is called up, and on the strength of our remembrances, we are moved. Sometimes it take more than other times, and on those former times, well, you see what happened. I have made this jump so many times before, though. No idea why this one socked me so.”

Tubman later includes Hiram on a trip on the “Zion train” to bring members of her own family to the North, and it is there that he starts to see what he needs to do to harness his own history and memories in order to bring out the love of his life and the woman who stepped in to raise him when his mother was sold. But he must take on these tasks with care, because he is endeavoring to steal from his own father by delivering both women to free states. Coates takes the reader to a level of torment that divides the pull of freedom with the pull of family, a family that is in its last days of solvency in both spirit and money. The gentle approach of this division keeps both sides of the struggle sure without confusing the reader, presenting the sharpest yet most subtle of conflicts that could only be delivered with the history of Hiram.