Proper Nouns

There are special nouns in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ mid 19th-century historical novel “The Water Dancer” (2019) that are jarring in what they convey. If nothing else, the book exemplifies how single words repeated in literature, and well used, can carry so much meaning, so much tension, so much emotion. For this reader, the novel seems to flow around just three of his words.

The first, proper-noun Quality, represents the privileged white plantation people of a tobacco-growing estate called Lockless that is fast exiting its one-time prime. Enough of lesser prosperity that the threat and actuality of selling slaves off to more prosperous Natchez buyers strike fear in and cruelly split black families. Storyteller and protagonist Hiram has lost his mother that way, at two. He has limited memory of her.

Hiram is the bright and otherwise memory-gifted, mixed-race son of the white plantation master. It is his less able, white brother Maynard who is positioned for inheritance, with the master’s expectation that Hiram will serve to steer Maynard a straight course to that. This is the Walker family, but only master and Maynard and their white folk are Quality.

“We were better than them – we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.”

The Tasks worked the land and served the Quality as slaves to the Quality. Hiram is a Task; this is the second word of three. He is favored somewhat among slaves, for a moment, by his master father for his supposed benefit to Maynard. Yet, “I saw all that had been taken from me, and all that was so regularly taken from the millions of colored children bred to the Task.”

The Tasks have family, family being the third theme-binding word, though not proper noun, and Task family has all the traditional meaning of the world. But this family has absolutely no non-commercial importance to the Quality. Colored family members are chips turned in for cash. The Quality family sees this word “family” as meaningful to them alone.

You know this story well. It is at the core of the American story, its Civil War, its 13th-15th Amendments to the Constitution, its Reconstruction haltingly, its celebration of Martin Luther King, and its aspiration that the so vital words of the Constitution of the United States mean what they say for every American, even if not conceived that way originally.

There is an Underground in Coates “The Water Dancer,” as there is in Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Underground Railroad.” Coates’ Underground, however, has supernatural magic in it. Both authors, each in his own way, shed tears from the printed page for what is their cold heritage, our heritage. Words are tears.

Each night as I read on, the closed book rested fitfully on my night table, retiring with me for the night. Yet, I knew, I know jarringly, resurgence of other proper noun usages on which to reflect - Jim Crow and Great American Shame. They are hard proper nouns to retire.