“It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit,” J.R.R. Tolkien once said. In the novel The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Coates explores emotions and the emotional connection of family and what it can do to a person. Although emotional connection is important, it influences Hiram’s emotions into different thoughts which can strengthen his power of Conduction. Hiram has a lot of dreams at the beginning of the novel, which ultimately can affect the way he thinks about Lockless, his family, Conduction, or even himself. Hiram isn’t very much emotionally connected to Maynard, but he can still affect how Hiram thinks. “That night I dreamed that I was out in the tobacco fields again, out there with the Tasked, and we were, all of us, chained together and this…show more content… I could not live knowing what I had done, what I had brought to Sophia” (121). Hiram’s guilt is pushed onto him so fast that he can’t express it and bottles it up inside, which eventually Hiram learns how to harness for later use of his Conduction. As the novel progresses, Hiram learns more about his power and the Underground, but not before getting caught by Ryland’s Hounds again. Hiram feels so much that he eventually loses control of his emotions and says, “It was as if I had been lifted out of myself to behold the scene.In that moment all the rage of everything from my mother to Maynard to Sophia to Thena to Corrine–all of it came up there and vented itself on a dead man” (215). Hiram is angry about everything that happened in his life, and all of the emotions that he bottled up come spilling out because he never got a chance to express himself when he was enslaved in Lockless, which in the end, can charge up his memories to help strengthen his Conduction. Hiram is also emotionally connected to Micajah Bland. After his death, Hiram didn’t know what to think, just letting himself accept the loss and gain more grief and guilt for
