The Water Dancer

Hiram realizes that what he just experienced was Conduction. Yet he doesn’t want to try it again, because every time he conducts it leaves him exhausted. Back at the house, he finds Otha and Raymond, who summon him to accompany them. Walking through the city streets, Raymond says that the law in Pennsylvania means that any enslaved person there must automatically be granted their freedom. Yet many who come do not know this, because their enslavers keep the law secret or lie to them about what will happen if they try to get free. 

It is Saturday, and very hot. In the two days Hiram has been in the city, he has seen a few enslaved people. Although they tend to be dressed well, he can tell their status by their manner. They see a well-dressed black woman, held on one arm by a tall white man and on the other by a young boy. Raymond approaches her, addressing her as Mary Bronson and saying that he knows she’s “made a request” regarding her freedom. The white man angrily pulls Mary away, saying, “I mean to return with my property to my home country.” By now a small crowd has gathered, and Mary defiantly takes her child and stands behind Raymond, ignoring the white man’s demands that she follow him.

The white man tells Raymond that if he was home he would “break [him] good.” Triumphantly, Raymond reminds him that he is not home. After, Hiram and the brothers take Mary and her son back to the house, where they serve Mary coffee and give her son wooden toys to play with. Hiram goes back to Mars’s bakery and apologizes for being rude the day before; he meets Mars’s wife, Hannah, and is given two free loaves of bread. Back at the house, Hiram serves the bread with cheese and spreads. Mary says her son is called Octavius, a name chosen by her former enslaver. While she tells them about her life, Hiram writes down her answers.

Mary has a husband and another son in addition to Octavius. She was a cook. Her first master treated her with some appreciation because he liked her food, allowing her to work part-time for wages, but after he died a low white enslaver (the tall man) took over and started beating her. He eventually sold her husband and other son. She has been North before and thought about fleeing but has never actually done it until now. Mary starts crying and Otha embraces her, comforting her. He promises to find somewhere for her and Octavius to live within a few days. However, Mary says she doesn’t want any help, unless it is finding her husband and other son. She says she owes it to Octavius.

On Monday Hiram takes a job in a woodworking shop, spending three days a week at work there and another three working for the Underground. He likes walking around the city but feels lonely. He identifies with Mary’s sentiment that freedom means nothing if a person is cut off from their loved ones. One day, Otha invites Hiram to have dinner at his mother’s house. Hiram travels by ferry across the Delaware River to get there. Just as he is arriving at the house, he experiences a vivid memory of Rose, and when he returns back to the present, Raymond and Otha’s mother, Viola, tells him he looks like he’s “seen the devil himself.”

The house is full of family members, including Mars and Hannah. Happy to be in this company, Hiram feels the emotional barriers within him begin to fall. he notices that the love here is different to the love that existed on the Street, which was always colored by the cruelty and degradation surrounding it. After dinner, one of the girls plays the piano, and her whole family watches her with intense pride. Hiram thinks about all the enslaved children whose talents are never encouraged this way, but instead stolen from them. Hiram keeps hearing the names Lambert and Lydia, and later, Otha tells him that Lambert was his brother and Lydia his wife. Lambert is dead, and Lydia still enslaved.

Otha and Lydia have three children. Otha was born into slavery, but both his parents managed to escape separately and then reunite in the North. In addition to Raymond and Lambert, he has one sister, Patsy. The first time Viola escaped, she, Otha, and Lambert were caught and brought back. However, she managed to escape punishment by blaming the whole thing on her husband (who remained free), and eventually fled again, this time leaving Lambert and Otha behind. They were both sold South, which is where Lambert died and where Otha met Lydia. For a long time, Otha resented and even hated Violet.

Otha himself managed to flee and came to Philadelphia in search of his family. When he was reunited with Raymond, they didn’t even recognize each other. It took time for them to discover that they were brothers. Now, he thinks back on why Viola only took the younger children when she fled for the second time, leaving behind her older boys. She’d told them, “I can only carry so many, and them only so far.”