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The water dancer by ta nehisi coates7/1/2023 ![]() Howell acknowledges Hiram as his son he takes him out of the fields and makes him a house slave, sometimes letting him entertain dinner guests with memory tricks, and even assigning to him the same teacher as his other son – and heir – the foolish, bumbling Maynard. He is gifted with, among other things, a photographic memory he is also son to Mr Howell Walker, the plantation owner. ![]() The main character and narrator, Hiram, is no ordinary slave. At the very bottom are the Tasked, the enslaved. ![]() After them are the Freed, former slaves who were able to buy their own freedom. Next are the Low – poor whites, mostly uneducated, employed by the Quality to supervise the plantations and keep the enslaved in check. Virginia is a hierarchy at the top are the Quality, white slave owners with the power of life and death over their chief possession, their slaves. ![]() The stars of Lockless and other neighbouring plantations are indeed beginning to fade and fall: the slave owners, through a mixture of ineptitude and greed, have worked their lands to exhaustion and are now reduced to selling off their slaves to maintain their lives of idle luxury. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s eagerly awaited and ambitious debut novel is set in pre-civil war Virginia, on a slave plantation called Lockless in Starfall, Elm County. ![]()
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