The Water Dancer: A Novel by Ta-nehisi Coates

disappearing into a blindness. I rushed back to my quarters with this panicked feeling in me and lay down across my bed.
    Again, by instinct, I reached in my pocket for the coin that was not there. I lay there for the rest of the day. I thought back to Hawkins’s story, of finding me on the shore. I was certain I had been in the high grass, I remembered it clearly, remembered seeing the great stone monument before falling under, and my memory never failed.
    As I lay there I heard the sounds of the house, this place of secret slavery, rising with the hours into the afternoon, and then falling away, indicating evening had come. When all was silent, I walked back out of the tunnel, past the lantern-light, into the night. The moon looked out from behind a spray of thin black clouds, so that it seemed a bright puddle against the sky pinpricked by the stars.
    At the edge of the bowling green, I watched as someone crossed the low grass, and as the distance closed, I saw that it was Sophia. She was wrapped from her head down in a long shawl.
    “Little late for you to be out,” she said. “Especially given your condition.”
    “Been in that bed all day,” I said. “I need air.”
    Sophia pulled the shawl tighter as a wind pushed gently out from the bank of trees to the west. She was looking down the road as though something else had taken over her.
    “I should let you be,” I said. “Think I’m gonna take a walk.”
    “Huh?” she said, now glancing back at me. “Nah, I’m sorry I have this habit about me, I’m sure you seen it. Sometimes a thought carry me away and I forget where I am. Come in handy sometimes, I tell you that.”
    “What was the thought?” I asked.
    She looked back at me and shook her head and laughed to herself.
    “You say you walking?” she asked.
    “I did.”
    “How bout I walk with you.”
    “Suit me just fine.”
    I said it as though it were nothing, but had she seen me at that moment, she would have known it was much more. We walked silently down the winding path, past the stables, toward the Street, the same path I had run up all those years ago in search of my mother. And then the path opened and I saw the long row of gabled cabins that had once been my home.
    “You used to live down here, huh?” she said.
    “In that cabin right there,” I said, pointing. “And then later when I took up with Thena, farther down.”
    “You miss it?” she asked.
    “Sometimes, I guess,” I said. “But if I’m honest, I wanted to come up. I had dreams back then. Big dumb dreams. Dead and gone.”
    “And what do you dream of now?” she asked.
    “After what I just came up from?” I said. “Breathing. I just dream of breathing.”
    Looking down toward the cabins, we watched as two figures, barely shadows, emerged, stopping just outside. One shadow pulled the other close, and stayed that way for a minute or two, until they released each other, slowly, and one shadow went back inside, while the other turned toward the back side of the cabin, disappeared, then reappeared in the fields, darting now toward the woods at the far edge. I was certain that the shadow now running was a man, and the shadow gone into the cabin was his wife. It was a normal thing to see back then because so many marriages extended across the wide miles of the county. When I was small, I would wonder why any man would impair himself so. But now, watching the shadow bound through the fields, and standing there with Sophia, I felt that I understood.
    “You know I’m from somewhere,” she said. “I had me a life before all of this. I had people.”
    “And what was your life?”
    “Carolina,” she said. “Born there the same year as Helen, Nathaniel’s woman. But it ain’t about her or him, you know. It’s about what I had down there.”
    “And what was that?” I asked.
    “Well, in the first place, I had a man. A good one. Big. Strong. We used to dance, you know. Go down with the folks to this old broke-down