Tubman, who is herself a Conductor, explains the supernatural ability to Hiram: “The jump is done by the power of the story. They challenge and assist him as he attempts to secure the safety of Thena, a maternal figure, and Sophia, the woman he adores. Along the way, he meets real-world figures such as William Still and Harriet Tubman. Like the mother he cannot remember, the young man has a water-driven power called Conduction, which enables him to traverse great distances. The Water Dancer infuses Hiram’s tale of escape with an air of magic. “The light of freedom had been reduced to embers, but it was still shining in me, and borne up by the winds of fear, I kept running, bent, loping, locked, but running all the same, with my whole chest aflame.”
“Even in this terror and despair, I didn’t think to fall down in the road or to surrender myself,” he says. In one early scene, Hiram encounters a group of white men charged with capturing runaways. The Water Dancer follows a young man named Hiram Walker, whose journey North is an urgent, perilous odyssey. Deep in the morass of antebellum Virginia, the enslaved protagonist of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel lurches toward freedom.
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