It is a pessimistic message
he has, Ta-Nehisi Coates: whoever wants to impose on African-Americans the American dream that everyone can rise up in society as long as they add the man, is a traitor, if his name is Obama.
African-Americans do not bear the blame for their own vulnerability, the whites must take it upon themselves, subordination is built into the system.
Coate's first novel, The Water Dancer, takes place in Virginia just before the Civil War.
The world is divided into white "nobless", poor whites and "recruits" - Coates does not want to use the oppressors' term "slave" - who wear out soils that tobacco has sucked out and where the nobility is getting poorer and crueler.
Hiram is the son of a white plantation owner.
He is gifted with photographic memory but still does not remember his mother, who was sold when he was little.
He also has a supernatural ability, "conduction", he can move and others over great distances.
His talent comes in handy
on the underground railway, a network of stations, hiding places and agents who helped slaves from the southern states to freedom in the north.
Hiram becomes free, but returns to Virginia to save those he loves and to find himself and his repressed memory.
Hiram is a mix of cartoon character and science fiction hero, a black superman, but he is drawn to real characters: Frederick Douglass, author of the autobiographical An American Slave's Life (1845), and above all Harriet Tubman, who also appears in his own character in the book.
Coates consciously relates to older autobiographical stories about blacks' liberation from slavery, his prose is simple, eloquent, but turns into luminous dreams and sheer poetry when Hiram experiences' conductions'.
It is a poetry that, however, never becomes an anthem: Coate's father was a member of the Black Panther movement, his own attitude is non-religious and the blacks in his story lack all submissiveness under any higher will, be it the slave owner or God.
So is the narrator's gaze of his
fellow brother, full of tenderness.
The violence to which blacks are exposed is never directly portrayed, flogging, a standing feature in films and novels about slavery, can only be seen as faded scars on a back, that women are raped is a knowledge that is not physically demonstrated.
Where others want to create empathy by reproducing the violence into the body, Coates keeps a respectful distance.
This narrative attitude, which safeguards the dignity of both women and men, makes the depiction an unusual and gripping story of an ongoing crime.