Hiram Walker is born into bondage on a Virginia plantation. But he is also
born gifted with a mysterious power that he won't discover until he is
almost a man, when he risks everything for a chance to escape. One fateful
decision will carry him away from his makeshift plantation family - his
adoptive mother, Thena, a woman of few words and many secrets, and his
beloved, angry Sophia - and into the covert heart of the underground war on
slavery. Hidden amidst the corrupt grandeur of white plantation society,
exiled as guerrilla cells in the wilderness, buried in the coffin of the
deep South and agitating for utopian ideals in the North, there exists a
widespread network of secret agents working to liberate the enslaved. Hiram
joins their ranks and learns fast but in his heart he yearns to return to
his own still-enslaved family, to topple the plantation that was his first
home. But to do so, he must first master his unique power and reclaim the
story of his greatest loss. Propulsive, transcendent and blazing with
truth, The Water Dancer is a story of oppression and resistance, separation
and homecoming. Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines the covert war of an enslaved
people in response to a generations-long human atrocity - a war for the
right to life, to kin, to freedom.