In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new novel The Water Dancer, Hiram Walker is an enslaved man living in southern Virginia. Hiram learns instinctively from an early age that things are not as they should be in the antebellum South. He is perceptive enough to see right through the disturbing paradoxes and hypocrisy of a society ruled by slavery, where cotton is king and freedom is elusive and arbitrary.
Hiram is both the son and slave of his owner. He’s the walking paradox of slavery. Hiram is one of the Tasked; his father is one of the Quality. Hiram also happens to have a prodigious memory, and because of that gift, he is secretly recruited to serve in the Underground Railroad.
But Hiram has another gift, and here, the novel veers into the world of fantasy. Hiram is able to summon up special powers of conduction. The word “conduction” was used to describe the surreptitious ferrying of slaves from the South to the North via the Underground Railroad. But in Coates’s novel, conduction takes on an otherworldly dimension. It’s a magical journey in which slaves are transported to freedom over vast distances in the blink of an eye.
And conduction can only be mastered by a special person with the gift of stirring up powerful memories, memories weighed down by the evils of slavery and haunted by its accompanying cruelties. But conduction also draws on memories of what it’s like to be free. In order to magically usher slaves to freedom, the conductor feeds on these memories as food for the journey. And the memories are both personal and deeply tied to a larger community of enslaved individuals.
Memory is the impetus behind conduction.
When Hiram himself experiences the power of conduction, he wades into a river while simultaneously relating the stories of oppressive life under the grip of slavery. Giving voice to the memories of captivity is what fuels the journey towards liberation. And with hints of the Exodus story, the persons being conducted miraculously float or dance on the water into a land of freedom.
In his liberation from out of the “coffin of slavery” into freedom in the North, Hiram encounters Harriet Tubman, known as “Moses.” She, too, possesses the power of conduction. It just so happens that when Hiram is conducted to Philadelphia, he finds himself at a station on the Underground Railroad located at 9th and Bainbridge Streets, just a block from the Church of the Crucifixion, where our RISE ministry gathers.
It is Harriet Tubman who highlights for Hiram the importance of memory in the journey towards freedom. She tells him that “[t]o forget is to truly slave. To forget is to die.” She continues, “memory is the chariot, and memory is the way and memory is bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom.”[1] Hiram’s own conduction to the North is his initial taste of true liberty. And so, Hiram’s ensuing adventures in the Underground are powered by his own memory of the horrors of slavery, as well as the joys of freedom. Once he has experienced a taste of that freedom, he cannot be the same ever again.
Memory is the bridge between captivity and release.
It seems hard not to think of baptism and parted bodies of water and figures like Moses on this feast of Christ the King. For today we rejoice in our citizenship in a kingdom whose ruler is Love itself and whose very life liberated creation from its bondage to maleficent forces. To celebrate Christ as King is itself paradoxical, for we do not attribute our freedom from Sin and Death to the victory of a heavy-handed autocratic. No, to celebrate Christ as King is to rejoice in the fact that there is a power greater than all the powers of darkness, as threatening as they may seem. And that wondrous power of God, infinite though it may be, does not claim its authority through manipulation or rigid control. In Christ, we have been conducted into a kingdom where we are truly free.
But unlike the conduction of a fantasy novel, our transference from a kingdom of Sin and Death into a kingdom governed by forgiveness and redemption is not magic. It might appear to be magic in a world that has little time for mystery and no concept of invisible powers. But far from being magic, our conduction into freedom is nothing other than the working of God’s almighty power.
Our conduction by Christ happened in a real time and place, and in that conduction, real blood was shed. It had a cost. The Red Sea waters parted there on that holy hill of Calvary, where all created things danced across the water and were reconciled back to God. The ultimate sacrifice was paid. And so we can sing, “the strife is o’er; the battle done.”
And we must never forget where our true freedom came from, for as Harriet Tubman cautioned Hiram Walker, “to forget is to die.”
But if the battle has been won, what are we to say of the ubiquitous presence of sin and evil? If sin continues to rear its ugly head, what are we to say of the efficacy of being washed in the waters of baptism, where we are cleansed from sin and where we have risen to new life? What has that baptism achieved when we find ourselves still ensnared in doing the things we know we shouldn’t do and precisely the things we do not want to do? If we truly inhabit a kingdom marked by freedom from the powers of darkness, then why has the world seemed to go off the rails? If we have been reconciled to Christ and one another and have been brought together under his most gracious rule, then why are we literally and figuratively at war with one another?
And is it too much to ask, even nearly two hundred years later, whether King Cotton himself has lost his power? In a country that is supposedly founded on principles of “liberty and justice for all,” is it not a paradox that so many people are still struggling to rise from the coffin of bondage, wherever it may be and whatever it may look like?
Or perhaps we simply have a collective amnesia, even a deliberate amnesia. And if the fictitious words of Harriet Tubman from a novel are correct, are we still in captivity because we have forgotten? Is it fair to say that we have lost our hold on memory? Have we failed to remember how dangerous those waters of baptism are? On the other side of the river over which we have danced, things seem so safe, and the memory of the inherent risk of salvation seems like the wisp of a dream. The muddy waters of the Jordan are no longer imperiled by swirling eddies and rip tides, and the waters of baptism seem no more dangerous than a baby pool.
But if memory is the chariot from out of the coffin of slavery, where cotton is king, into the land of freedom where Christ is King, then maybe we need to summon anew the memory of our own conduction from darkness to light. For Hiram Walker, in The Water Dancer, the taste of freedom in the North juxtaposed with the evil of being Tasked was the key to unlock the door to freedom for others who were enslaved.
And memory is the chariot from one kingdom to another.
Surely, our memory cannot be so faint that we are unable to recall what true freedom looks, sounds, smells, and feels like.
For memory is the chariot, and to forget is to die.
We who have journeyed through the waters of baptism have risen to new life, and we are marked as Christ’s own forever. We must live; we are, in fact, alive in Christ.
So, can you taste and savor those memories of what true freedom looks like?
Imagine that moment when you vividly recalled your sins and asked God for forgiveness, rather than glossing over the error of your own ways. Maybe it was in sacramental confession. Or maybe it was on your knees in prayer at the foot of your bed, behind a closed door, where you pleaded for God’s mercy to wash away your sins. Can you remember the sheer joy of freedom when you knew with all your heart that God had already forgiven you and the slate had been wiped clean? That’s conduction.
Can you think back—and it’s so hard these days—to a time when diverse groups of people could actually speak to one another rather than scream in hate? If you stretch far enough back into the recesses of your memory, you might taste that sweet elixir of unity and harmony. That’s conduction to the other side of the river where we have some hints of freedom from division and disunity.
And can you summon a sensation of those days when every step out into the public sphere wasn’t fraught with worries about physical safety in an increasingly violent society?
Or what about those days, if it was ever so, when we were not quite as chained to capitalistic greed and technology in the ways in which we currently are?
Can you even recall those times in your life when you were not held fast in the grip of fear and anxiety—whether about work, school, or your reputation?
Those were the days of conduction, where we could sense at least one foot firmly planted in the kingdom of freedom. We could feel ourselves liberated by One so much larger than ourselves and conducted into something so much greater than our own narrow mindset.
Here’s the real paradox: our King, Christ, does not rule as an autocrat. While he has already conducted us into his kingdom of light through the waters of baptism, he does not tie us down there. The journey of life and the journey of baptism, harrowing as they are, find us at various times with one foot on the other side of the Jordan, and one on the shore of the land we have left. And if in Christ all things hold together, and in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, then the good and the bad memories must all be placed under the dominion of Christ. For Christ will free it all.
Yes, as the Letter to the Colossians tells us, we have been rescued by Jesus Christ. But if we let our memories lapse while dancing on the water to freedom, the tide may pull us over to the land of captivity more often than we would like. Our task, where memory is the chariot, is to relive, over and over, our memories of freedom, in which Christ won for us the victory. Each day of our lives is a gift, a chance to savor the milk and honey of the land of promise, so that we never lose our hope.
Hiram Walker ultimately realizes that to remember is to acknowledge that his own freedom is not to be won by himself. He has to shed the illusions ingrained in a society where cotton is king. This is a society that deludes him into thinking that he can trust his slave-owning father to free him. It deludes him into thinking that he can count on his own wit to escape to freedom. It deludes him into thinking that he himself can serve as the savior of his fellow enslaved brothers and sisters. But really, he can only experience liberation by remembering his struggle for freedom as part of a wider community of oppressed people grasping for their own deliverance. And this deliverance happens through a power beyond himself.
For us, in a world that is very real and not fictitious, the power beyond ourselves that has freed us and continues to liberate us from the chains of death is not magic. It is God. It is God alone who has redeemed us and has saved us from the powers of darkness. It is God alone who continues, each and every day, to pull us back out of bondage and draw us deeper into the Promised Land of light.
And if memory is the chariot, then this is the thing we should never forget. We have been saved, and yet we still need to be saved, each and every day of our lives. May we never lose our memory of that delectable taste of the kingdom of freedom. For in that memory is our hope.
[1] Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer (New York: One World, 2019), p. 335, Kindle version.
Preached by Father Kyle Babin
24 November 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia