He tells them that with freedom comes the right to choose the small things-when to dine, when to begin and end work-as well as the big things, such as whom and how to love. Their relationships begin to fray when a visiting minister with a mysterious past starts to fill their heads with ideas about independence. There is also Pandora, with thick braids and long limbs, whose beauty calls to him. He now finds solace in his hearty band of friends, including William, who is like a brother Margaret Little Zander and Milton, a gifted artist. And it hurts Cato, whose first love, Iris, was sold off with no forewarning. It hurts the reserved and stubborn William, who finds himself falling for Margaret, a small but mighty woman with self-possession beyond her years. It’s that cruel practice-the wanton destruction of love, the belief that Black people aren’t even capable of loving-that hurts the most. Subject to the whims of their tyrannical and eccentric captor, Cannonball Greene, they never know what harm may befall them: inhumane physical toil in the plantation’s quarry by day, a beating by night, or the sale of a loved one at any moment. Jabari Asim’s debut novel returns readers to Gateway City, the fictional Midwestern city first explored in his acclaimed short story collection, Taste of Honey. In a world that would be allegorical if it weren’t saturated in harsh truths, Cato and William meet at Placid Hall, a plantation in an unspecified part of the American South. They are taught their captors’ tongues and their beliefs, but they have a language and rituals all their own. The Water Dancer meets The Prophets in this spare, gripping, and beautifully rendered novel exploring love and friendship among a group of enslaved Black strivers in the mid-nineteenth century.
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