Coates’ Water Dancer and Peele’s Sunken Place
Trigger/content warnings: slavery; prison; abuse/torture; racial oppression; spoilers for Get Out and The Water Dancer
(Note: All my Medium essays are available for anyone to read online for free. This means I don’t make any money from Medium. So, I wanted to explore this idea on my Medium, rather than on Book Riot or another paying outlet. As with some essays that I wrote in college, I’m writing from a literary criticism perspective, not informed by my personal identity or experience. I Tweeted about this idea on November 20, 2019 and still can’t find anything online about it.)
Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror/satire film Get Out and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2019 genre-bending novel The Water Dancer have completely different plots and settings. However, Coates’ novel uses imagery for racial oppression that consistently evokes Get Out’s concept of the Sunken Place. Chris Washington, the protagonist of Get Out, is a brilliant, young, Black photographer who travels from Brooklyn to upstate New York with his new, white girlfriend, Rose Armitage, to meet her parents. After a bizarre party and a weekend full of microaggressions, Chris learns that the Armitages are founding members of the Coagula. The Coagula is an evil cult of rich, white people who abduct, enslave, and experiment on Black people. Rose frequently chooses, then seduces or grooms, potential victims. Wealthy, white clients buy Black victims, then participate in experimental surgery that allows the white person’s brain to control and inhabit the Black person’s body.
In many ways, the Coagula is the polar opposite of Corrine Quinn, a passionate, rich, white, 19th century abolitionist from The Water Dancer and its fantasy version of the Underground Railroad. However, Corrine’s methods for choosing and initiating Hiram, the protagonist, are disturbingly similar to what Missy Armitage calls the Sunken Place. Missy, Rose’s mom, is a hypnotherapist who uses abusive techniques to break down victims’ defenses or exploit their vulnerabilities. After Rose has groomed them, Missy’s hypnosis is the next step before the operation. The Sunken Place leaves its victims traumatized, petrified with fear, and vulnerable to the Armitages. Although Corrine’s goals are supposedly the antithesis of Missy’s, both inflict racial trauma on their victims in the attempt to make them more malleable. Through Corrine’s abusive techniques, Coates’ novel implicitly questions white activists from any era who remain white supremacists and seek to dominate, humiliate, and lead the people they claim to help.
Hiram Walker, the protagonist and narrator of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2019 novel The Water Dancer, is a brilliant, young Black man enslaved in a fantastical version of the antebellum US. Hiram grows up knowing that his slaveowner, Howell, is also his father. Howell gives Hiram private lessons with the same tutor as Maynard, Howell’s heir (who is also Hiram’s white, half-brother). Hiram is a much better, more diligent student than Maynard. Rather than free Hiram, Howell makes him Maynard’s manservant as an adult.
Maynard is engaged to Corrine Quinn, the sole heir to her wealthy, white, slaveholding family. Hiram consistently describes Corrine as “odd.” Even after Maynard’s death in a carriage accident, Corrine remains involved with the Walkers. She seems manipulative and eager to align herself with another powerful, slaveholding family.
Hiram discovers that he is a powerful Conductor. In the novel, Conduction is the supernatural ability to travel rapidly through time and space, using the power of memory. He approaches Georgie Parks, an elderly, enslaved man on his father’s plantation, seeking advice on escaping slavery. Instead of helping them, Georgie betrays Hiram and his girlfriend, Sophia.
Thus begins a harrowing, nightmare-like trauma for Hiram. The overseer, Ryland, attacks him with his hounds (Coates 120). Hiram feels that he is entering into a deeper form of slavery and as if he is dying, experiencing “our last moments together, our last moments on Earth as we knew it” (121). Hiram and Sophia are arrested together but are quickly separated.
Hiram repeatedly describes his trauma as a fugue or deathlike state: “So I was now under it, down in the coffin of slavery” (127). When he witnesses white men tormenting an enslaved Black woman, Hiram observes: “There was something achingly familiar in this ritual, something that an old forgotten part of me recognized, like a scene from some other unrecalled life” (127). He has the uncanny feeling that his trauma feels both familiar and unfamiliar and taps into collective, unconscious memories. He feels that he may already be dead and is observing himself from afar.
These feelings of dissociating or being trapped in a nightmare intensify as white men inspect and violate, and ultimately sell, Hiram. After being sold, he is blindfolded and thinks: “I suspect that I had been singled out for some especial point of torment” (136). He thinks that the white man who bought him must be especially sadistic, even compared to other slaveowners. Hiram fears that he must be the type of white man who “enact their wildest pleasures” on enslaved people: such as rape, torture, murder, or human experiments (137). The sense of trauma as a waking nightmare increases: “Time lost all meaning . . .The wall between sleep and the waking world dissipated” (138). Hiram’s new owner pushes him, “but instead of hitting the ground . . .I fell farther” (137). He finds that he is literally and figuratively in a pit that seems impossibly deep.
Throughout, Get Out and The Water Dancer use similar imagery for racial trauma and oppression, but the parallels to Peele’s Sunken Place become more obvious here. Hiram is now both literally in a pit and arguably, figuratively, in the Sunken Place. After hypnotizing Chris, preying on his childhood memories of his mother’s death, Missy commands him: “Sink into the floor.” Then she tells him: “Now you’re in the Sunken Place.” Chris has an out-of-body experience. He feels himself falling through the floor and sees Missy through her window, as if she’s at the other end of a tunnel. Physically, though, he’s still in the Armitage living room, unable to move or speak from fear. Missy manually closes his eyes, as if he’s dead.
Chris re-enters the Sunken Place near the climax of the film, when he realizes that Rose is collaborating with her parents and won’t help him. The psychological violence of the Sunken Place enables the Armitages to bring Chris to the basement without physical violence or struggle. Missy warns her family not to damage his head, as he’s a valuable commodity to them and their clients. Near the end of his own ordeal, chased by white men and their dogs, Hiram thinks: “There were no chains, who would need them?. . . Now came the hunt” (141). In both cases, psychological terror and control render physical violence unnecessary.
Hiram wakes up and initially thinks that he has died and is in heaven. He discovers that he somehow is in bed in a mansion, clean and wearing new clothes (150). He sees two people beaming down at him: Hawkins (his former tutor) and Corrine Quinn (150–151). She asks him: “Do you know where you are?” and “Do you know who I am?” (151) At this point, I initially feared that Corrine was a sexual predator. She’s not, but her possessiveness towards Hiram — this single-minded focus on him — is still unsettling and seems like fetishization or objectification.
Hiram and readers learn that Corrine’s supposed support of slavery was actually a cover for equally passionate support for abolition. She and Hawkins are both agents in the novel’s fantasy reimagining of the Underground Railroad. When Hiram asks angrily if they know what happened to him, Hawkins replies: “Know? We caused it to happen to you” (155).
Corrine has intentionally engineered Hiram’s recent traumatic ordeals as a nonconsensual way of training him to be the next agent. She asks Hiram eagerly: “You are wondering how I did it, aren’t you?” (153) She seems proud of herself for her ingenuity. She wants Hiram to be grateful to her, or at least impressed. Of course, he’s horrified and furious instead. Corrine says that she’s given up her power and privilege over Black people to help them. The novel implies that she merely has found another way to oppress them instead. She can’t truly be an ally to Black people or an abolitionist while still controlling or terrorizing them.
When Chris is imprisoned in the Armitages’ basement, they show him a video, explaining the Coagula and the procedure that they plan to perform on him. They also seem proud of their inventions and expect Chris to be more impressed than angry. They tell him that the operation will go less smoothly if he struggles. At the end of the video, Jim (the blind, white, art dealer who has purchased Chris) appears in a video call. He praises Chris for his intelligence and tells him: “I want your eye.” This has several meanings: he covets Chris’ eyesight, his talent as a photographer, and his subjectivity — in other words, his person and soul.
Corrine admits to Hiram: “This was not done for your benefit, but because we have long seen something in you of incredible value” (155). She admires Hiram’s intelligence but disrespects his humanity and autonomy. Instead of caring for his physical and emotional well-being, she sees him as an invaluable means to an end. Corrine believes fervently that the ends justify the means. The novel itself is far more nuanced than Corrine’s views, and she remains a distant, frightening, morally ambiguous character. We can simultaneously be relieved that Corrine is an abolitionist and horrified by her methods.
As the writers at LitCharts explain: “Corrine can be rather ruthless and controlling. Indeed, her desire for total control over her operation and the minds of her agents can be reminiscent of an enslaver, something that Hiram points out to her at the end of the novel. Although Corrine is a flawed person who is motivated by egotism, her contribution to the abolitionist cause is nonetheless significant.” This quote encapsulates the paradox and even hypocrisy of her character. Perhaps Corrine has tried to sublimate her urge to dominate Black people into a good cause, but the novel shows that these brutal tactics are both unethical and unnecessary.
Missy from Get Out and Coates’ Corrine Quinn both use insidious mind control techniques to infiltrate their targets’ psyches. They also weaponize stereotypes of white women as unthreatening or trustworthy, as well as their relative power over Black men. Although they have opposite ideologies and goals, their methods are disturbingly similar. Corrine believes that her cause justifies these methods. Coates’ novel The Water Dancer questions whether the ends ever justify the means, especially when doing so recreates or perpetuates racial oppression.
Works cited:
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Water Dancer. New York: Random House, 2019.
Peele, Jordan (dir.) Get Out. Los Angeles: Blumhouse Productions, 2017.
