Mind Picker: The Sweetness of Water

It dawned on him that there was less to fear than he’d once imagined, which was maybe a truth he’d long wished to believe — that all danger carried the faint trace of comfort, all wrongs the hint of what may be right. How else to explain a world of cruelty that had also carried in it the great joy of watching his mother at the mercy of Little James’s fiddle on a Sunday afternoon, the miracle of a fresh tick mattress, the sweetness of water after a day spent picking in the fields?

Set after the Emancipation Proclamation and before the actual end of the American Civil War, The Sweetness of Water examines a time of incredible stress and flux: The Union Army has gone plantation to plantation in the fictional town of Old Ox, Georgia, telling the slaves that they are free to walk away, but where can they go? No money, no education, no social programs, some of the freedmen set up tents in the woods and beg for change in town, some stay on with their former owners — working for little better than slave wages — and some just start walking. In this fraught setting, author Nathan Harris shifts an omniscient third person POV between a large cast of characters — from well-spoken and dignified African Americans to white people who range from ambivalently decent to fools to the depraved — and while at first I was totally pulled into the story, it eventually went on too long and fizzled out for me. Harris definitely got his money’s worth with his MFA — this reads exactly like it was written by someone with an MFA — and while I certainly did admire his sentences, and appreciated what he showed me of this time period, this novel was missing the it factor for me.

Ted Morton was a dimwit, a man who, if offered a fiddle, would be as liable to smash it against his own head to hear the noise as put a bow to its strings. His parcel of land bordered George’s, and when an issue arose — a runaway most often — the ensuing spectacle, rife with armed overseers and large-snouted dogs, lanterns of such illumination that they kept the entire household awake, was so unpleasant that George often deferred all communications with the family to Isabelle just to avoid the ordeal. But to find Morton’s former property on his land now carried with it a welcome irony: Emancipation had made the buffoon helpless to their wanderings, and for all his great shows of might, these two men were now free to be as lost as George was in this very instance.

After receiving word that his only son had died in battle, landowner George Walker takes a long walk in the woods and discovers two recently freed men — brothers Prentiss and Landry — and conceives of a plan: George, who has never farmed his land (or owned slaves) decides to set up a peanut plantation, using the brothers as well-paid labourers. This serves to ostracise George and his wife Isabelle from their former friends and neighbours, and when a horrible crime occurs, they will realise how deep-rooted the community’s hatred is for the Black folk who now roam free among them. Harris is an empathetic observer of these four characters (overall, he spends the most time from George and Isabelle’s perspectives, and they are complicated characters who end up doing the right things for complicated reasons), and I was very interested to know how Harris would deal with the aftermath of this crime: What would “justice” believably have looked like in that time? And while I was more or less satisfied with how that worked out, I didn’t love that the novel went on for another third of its length, tying up all the loose ends and going to places that were less believable to me.

I was intrigued by a forbidden love between two Confederate soldiers (but think that Harris could have done a lot more with that storyline), and while I appreciated that the Black characters were written with dignity and agency, I don’t know if I really bought how articulate they were for recently freed slaves (or, for that matter, how like a therapist savant was the mixed race prostitute with a heart of gold.) As for the white people: It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to have those Union soldiers come along and free the slaves that were essential to the running of a plantation, at a time when one’s own son could still be off fighting the Civil War, and with the level of systemic racism and ugly superiority that would have made them believe that they were justified in owning people in the first place, it would be impossible for Harris to portray them as anything but angry and aggressive as their systems fell apart. As a result, there are some very unappealing white people in this book — offset by the decency of George and Isabelle and a couple others — and while most of them are violent bigots, some of them are played for laughs:

For no other reason than boredom, Prentiss had begun to tabulate the many symptoms that Hackstedde’s girth inspired. The man’s mouth closed only when he needed to swallow; he was unsteady in his chair, prone to falling over but never quite doing Prentiss the favor; his skin was blotchy; and when he breathed, especially after one of his monologues, it sounded like the airy whine of a child nearing the end of a tantrum, so labored that the flame of the candle atop his desk would often flicker. His daughter, a young woman, had brought him lunch wrapped in paper — from the tavern next door, Prentiss guessed. It had been too hot to eat, but after a few minutes Hackstedde stuck his finger in the mashed potatoes, judged the temperature, and commenced. In contrast to what one might expect, given his slovenly appearance, he ate daintily, quietly, and with a solemn devotion to the task, as if it were an act of prayer.

The Sweetness of Water employs high-level, well-trained writing, without becoming dense or tedious, and throughout, I was struck by many nice passages:

Such comments had once harmed her grievously, yet she’d developed a resistance to such attacks; from the stares in town and the words uttered behind her back. A hollow pit, somewhere within her, where she stored such viciousness away, let it die, then released it to the air to float off forever. She sensed it, somewhere beside her heart, a compartment at her core — her hand felt the spot, let it rest for a moment, before her anger settled and she closed the door to the cruelty of his words.

I hadn’t known that the Emancipation Proclamation came a full two years before the end of the American Civil War — or that the Union Army was enforcing it in the South as the war dragged on — so this, to me, was a very interesting time and place for Harris to have explored with his first novel. I don’t know if it deserved to be longlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Prize, but I would be interested to see what Harris writes next.