Book: The Sweetness of Water
Author: Nathan Harris
Publisher: Headline
Price: Rs 899
Somewhere in the middle of Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water, Wade Webler, a Southerner, offers an estimation of the Walker family to Isabelle, the wife and mother in the story: “Your son is a blight... and the Negro is worse. It’s as simple as that. There will be consequences for what your family has wrought. Let that be known here and now.” Contrary to Wade Webler’s promised retribution, the plot unfolds otherwise, towards a tale of hope and freedom amid a history of pain and enslavement. Through the lives of two Black brothers, the unspeaking Landry and the motherly Prentiss, Harris, himself a young Black American writer, empathetically sweeps the newer structures of feelings produced in the wake of the proclamation of the Emancipation. Over 350 pages, the novel dwells on the inner conundrums, conflicts and grief along with the sweetness of freedom.
The primary focus is on the brothers’ story after they are set free from the slave plantation of Ted Morton, and sleepy Old Ox, the fictional town set somewhere in Georgia, explodes with racial tension after Prentiss and Landry are engaged on fair terms by an ageing white landlord, for whom “Nantucket or the plantation, it was all the same.” Uncaring about social niceties, George Walker is a moody idler who lives off his legacy and spends his nights wandering in the dark in the hope of sighting the mythical beast, a creature “that existed on the border of reality and legend.” Thus, for him, the sudden presence of the two men on his lands is providential: it represents a “fitting meeting, bound up in something real”. And, as he pursues the ‘real’ uncompromisingly with the brothers much to the anger of his Southern neighbours, a chain of events unfolds once his supposedly dead son returns from the war.
Harris weaves in other plots to illumine the darker and hopeful questions surrounding freedom. War, for instance, leaves behind the unpleasant consequences of poverty and desperation and the Southern town fills up with war veterans and overflows with makeshift camps of recently freed, homeless people. For Caleb Walker, a war-returnee, it is a long walk home. A Confederate soldier-turned-deserter, Caleb is captured by the Union soldiers and his disfigured face bears testimony to his disgrace. The townsfolk slight him and the elders, especially Wade Webler, mock him for lacking a Southern bone in his body. And his uptight gay lover, who feigns injury to escape the war, falsely assures him that things won’t change. This personal promise is blighted as Caleb watches the ease with which August Webler agrees to a pragmatic marriage based on social class and respectability.
The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris, Headline, Rs 899 Amazon
Struggling against degradations, Caleb enters into an uneasy truce with his father and joins the commune farm with the brothers. However, after his personal dignity is savaged by his lover and he is a forced witness to a most brutal murder, Caleb decides to nail the nonchalant lie that the patroller-turned-Sheriff doles out, that “no one cared about a dead Negro”. While the town had been hissing and spitting at the Walkers for employing the Black freemen on fair wages, its racial anger overflows after Prentiss aims a ball of phlegm at Wade Webler’s face. Old Ox literally burns whilst Caleb and Prentiss flee to seek freedom in the North under the watchful care of George astride his faithful donkey, Ridley.
Harris expands his narrative actions with a host of characters besides Landry, Wade Webler and his son, August. However, without giving away the plot which has a satisfying moral impulse, it is interesting to note how Harris knits a common ground of race reconciliation through shared silences, knitting and the stillness of water between two unlikely individuals across race, age and gender. Harris’s narrative focus empowers Isabelle Walker, not so much as a wife and mother but as an empathetic character who overcomes her aloofness and stubbornness with her forthrightness and fortitude. Her vision of alternative families enables her to realize her husband’s dream of a commune, a dream which can also accommodate her middle-aged, white, widowed friend in a common story of fellowship and friendship.
There are wispy characters who deserve better telling, especially Taffy and Clementine, who are mainly functional within the telos of the tale. And just as one would wish for some more of Prentiss’s dreams or thoughts, one wonders how Caleb can grow so contrary to his customary lethargic or oppressed self. Barring these omissions, Harris’s debut novel is an immensely well-told tale in which imaginative possibilities meld and merge with historical truths. Not surprisingly, given the richness and the range of social affect, The Sweetness of Water has been listed in Oprah Book Club selection, included in Barack Obama’s reading list, and was longlisted for the 2021 Booker. In our present era of Black Lives Matter, this book is a great addition.
