The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

   This was a long and arduous read. It’s not that I didn’t like it. It is quite good. The writing is beautifully, truly beautiful. There’s an honesty about the brutality of slavery and all those involved (included abolitionists) that I haven’t seen in many books on the subject. Still, it is about slavery and right now I could do with fewer reminders of Black people being terrorized and murdered.

A few passages that I liked:

Bored whites were barbarian whites. While they played at aristocrats, we were their well-appointed and stoic attendants. But when they tired of dignity, the bottom fell out. New games were anointed and we were but pieces on the board. It was terrifying. (page 27)

The Underground would give me no chance to reconsider, for though we all dreamed of going north, all sorts of fears might overrun a man when the dream descended into the real. There is always a part of us that does not want to win, wants to stay down in the low and familiar. (page 185)

Corrine Quinn was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might to de the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave. (pages 370-371)