Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is Coates first novel and while it is not him at his very best as a story teller, it contains all the elements of his writing that make him memorable.  This is a book with slavery at its center,  then anchored by the true stories of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to develop a narrative that is both new and familiar.
Hiram, the narrator, tells this story from a distance of many years, but he describes everything with bracing immediacy.  It begins with a horse-drawn carriage crashing off a bridge into an icy river. The driver is Hiram, a slave, miraculously survives. But the passenger, Hiram’s white half brother and the heir apparent of the Lockless plantation, drowns. For their father, this is just the latest disaster. Poorly managed tobacco farming has destroyed the soil on the plantation (the wordplay between Lockless and luckless is undeniable). Every year, more slaves must be sold down South to service rising debts. To the master, this is a troubling inconvenience. To the enslaved families ripped apart, it’s a death sentence.
After the drowning death of his half brother, Hiram jumps back to describe the traumatic loss of his black mother and his existence as the favored slave of his proud father/master. That precarious position introduces Hiram to the social and psychological contortions of America’s “peculiar institution,” and he becomes an insightful critic of the layers of white deception.  There is a search for freedom, the interplay with the Underground Railroad and historically accurate conductors, and the human tragedy of the legacy of slavery.