Free The Water Dancer: A Novel by Ta-nehisi Coates Page B

and the cakes and fried pork on each of them and handed one to me and then one to Georgie, and I sat there eating wordlessly. Amber went back in and then returned with her cooing boy cradled in her arms. It was now late in the afternoon.
    “Ain’t had nothing today, huh?” asked Georgie, smiling large, his reddish-brown hair seeming to flame against the dying light of that late autumn afternoon.
    “Naw, guess I haven’t,” I said. “Somehow it just slipped me.”
    “Something else on your mind, mayhaps?”
    I looked up at Georgie and started to speak. But then, fearing what I knew I wanted to say, I stopped. I set the plate down next to the log. Amber had gone back inside. I waited for a moment and heard muffled laughter and the baby squealing, and I reasoned that Amber was now out front enjoying the company of some other visitors.
    “Georgie, how’d you feel when you walked off Master Howell’s place for the first time?”
    He swallowed half a mouthful and took a moment before answering. “Like a man,” he said, and then chewed and swallowed the rest. “Which is not to say I wasn’t one before, but I had never truly felt it. My whole life depended on me not feeling it, you know?”
    “I do know,” I said.
    “I don’t need to tell you this, or maybe I do, because they have always favored you in a particular way, but I’ll say it anyhow and you may make what you feel of it. I now rise when I want and I sleep when it is my will. My name is Parks because I said so. I pulled the name from nothing—conjured it as a gift to my son. It got no meaning except this—I chose it. Its meaning is in the doing. Do you get me, Hiram?”
    I nodded and let him continue on.
    “I don’t know if I ever told you, Hiram, but we was all crazy in love with your Rosie.”
    I laughed.
    “She was a beautiful girl, and there were so many beautiful girls down there in the Street. Wasn’t just Rose, you know, was her sister—your aunt Emma too. Such beautiful girls.” Emma another name like my mother’s, lost in the smoke; I knew she was my aunt, that she’d once worked in the kitchen, that she was a beautiful dancer, but she had otherwise disappeared into the flat words of others and the fog of my mind. But Georgie had it all. The past unfolded itself in front of him like a map, and I saw his eyes glow as he recounted his travels through every mountain pass and gully and gulch.
    He said, “Man, I think back to them days, and how we used to stomp the floor. Good golly. Your momma and Emma was as opposite as could be—Rose quiet as Emma was loud, but when they got down to Deep Meeting you knew the same blood was between them. I am telling you I was there, all those Saturday nights. I was there with Jim the Phenomenal and his boy Young P. We had the banjo, jaw-harp, fiddle all going, pots and pans ringing out, and sheep bones clacking, and when it got hot, Emma and Rose would get to it. And it was something, I tell you, with the jars of water on their heads, going back and forth until a splash of water fell from one of their pots. Then they’d smile and curtsy, and whichever one of them had come out on top would look out for any other who should like to step in the ring.”
    “But no one did.” Georgie laughed loudly and asked, “You ever water dance, Hi?”
    “Naw,” I said. “Wasn’t my thing.”
    “Shame, shame,” Georgie said. “Shame to have all that beauty and not pass it on. And it was so much beauty back there. Beautiful girls. Beautiful boys.”
    Georgie was finished eating by now. He set down his plate and blew out a long stream of air.
    “And I think of all that beauty sometimes, how it withered in them chains….Man, I tell you, when I took up with Amber, I vowed I would get her out. Whatever it took, I did not care. I think I might well have killed a man to get her out, Hiram. Anything to not watch her…”
    And Georgie pulled up there because I think he then realized the import of what he was saying,