Origin Story

TA-NEHISI COATES’s remarkable debut novel, The Water Dancer, is the odyssey of an enslaved man’s journey out of bondage, aided by a superpower he didn’t know he had. The impulse to create this character, and to interweave history, fantasy, and symbolism, goes all the way back to the author’s childhood, he reveals to O books editor Leigh Haber.

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A RECIPIENT OF the National Book Award and a MacArthur “genius” grant, Ta-Nehisi Coates, 44, has explored the importance of archetypes, especially as they relate to the African American story, in his previous books, The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, and We Were Eight Years in Power. But he’s been thinking about how myths mold our perspective pretty much his whole life. At 5, he says, “I was in the back seat of my parents’ red station wagon, talking about my favorite television show, The Tarzan/Lone Ranger/Zorro Adventure Hour, and I told my dad how much I loved Tarzan.” His father, Paul (dubbed Conscious Man by his son in The Beautiful Struggle), was skeptical. As a member of the Black Panther Party and devotee of obscure works about African and African American history, Paul never missed a chance to school his son about his heritage. In this case, he wanted Ta-Nehisi to understand the subtext of the Tarzan legend, and to know that his dad objected to this white man in “the jungles of Africa” acting like a hero among “savages.”

Paul told Ta-Nehisi he wouldn’t be allowed to watch Tarzan until he could see for himself the racist undertones—that there was more to it than the adventures of a guy in a loincloth swinging from vine to vine. In fact, his son would be barred from watching any TV for a week while he worked out why the story shouldn’t be taken at face value.