He's always lived apart from Old Ox, in geography and attitudes. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement, a requirement on both sides: Landry and Prentiss won't accept a new master-slave type arrangement of the kind that's proliferating in the area, and that's fine, because George has no desire to be a master.
So though he's always avoided industry, with Landry and Prentiss's help, he decides to start farming his land.
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Bereft himself, George doesn't know how to help his grieving wife, but he needs to do something. In the days that follow, a connection takes root. Harris spins an increasingly complex tale about the postwar South, and he tells it in a humane and intimate way, by exploring the interpersonal relationships of all kinds in and around this rural Georgia town. Plus, there's more to Geoge's wandering that day he'd just gotten the (erroneous) news that his son, Caleb, a Confederate soldier, was killed in action and dreaded sharing that with his wife. It doesn't sound like much - but in that context, cooperation is an act of kindness and trust. Slightly disoriented and in pain, George asks for help getting back to his cabin and his wife, and he offers the two brothers food and shelter in the barn. An unlikely connection takes rootĭespite mutual trepidation, the three decide to treat each other with care. They only know they'd rather be anywhere than back at their old plantation, where the owner is in complete denial about Emancipation and still considers both men his rightful property. George Walker, an aging white landowner, has spent too long out there hunting an elusive prey when he comes across Landry and Prentiss, two young Black freedmen who've been secretly living in the forest on George's property because they have nowhere else to go, and lack the resources to move on. It takes flight when three men meet by chance in the woods - two Black, one white. That hope is the driving force in The Sweetness of Water. There are several reasons for that.Īnd third, right now, we desperately need to believe in our better angels, that we too can come together and rise above, like Harris's protagonists (and as President Obama famously urged). 'The Sweetness of Water' is having a moment that goes beyond topicality. Nathan Harris makes those extraordinary, still contested times comprehensible through an immersive, incredibly humane storytelling about the lives of ordinary people. In struggles over flags, monuments, textbooks, and university tenure, we're still fighting over how to frame this event in public memory, so those old wounds feel particularly fresh. Like a fictional companion to Clint's Smith's history How the Word is Passed, The Sweetness of Water joins the national conversation on race and reckoning with history already in progress. Second, the peacemaking project attempted on these pages is still clearly unfinished. Between the January insurrection, the threat of Texas secession, and the daily rhetoric of combat and revolution, the battles are ongoing, not just along party but also regional lines. There are several reasons for that: First, its question feels urgent and familiar, because politics now feels like war. But posing the question and following through the work undertaken felt incredibly worthwhile nonetheless.īetween Oprah's Book Club, President Obama's summer reading list and the Booker Prize long list, The Sweetness of Water is having a moment that goes beyond topicality.
Lee's surrender at Appomattox and the enforcement of emancipation in the South through the presence of Union troops, Harris asks a question Americans have yet to figure out: How does a community make peace in the wake of civil war? I'm not sure the novel comes close to finding an answer. Focusing on the period just after Robert E. Old Ox, Georgia, is a community attempting to right itself after tectonic upheaval. Evocative and accessible, Nathan Harris's debut novel The S weetness of Water is a historical page-turner about social friction so powerful it ignites a whole town.
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