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A Black woman sitting at a table smiling

Nkrumah’s novel calls on us to reflect on how racism is inculcated and to consider whether a person is the total sum of their angles.

Wade in the Water, by Nyani Nkrumah ’92, is a novel in short chapters that sail by before you know it (I managed to read it in about six hours). But it isn’t what I’d call an easy read. The novel is haunting and difficult to write about, especially as an African. In this debut, Nkrumah reflects on the horrors visited on African Americans by the Ku Klux Klan. She reminds us that those who endured these 
inhumanities and those who perpetrated them are still very much with us, or their children are.

Ella, a 12-year-old Black girl living in the fictional small town of Ricksville, Miss., in the early 1980s, is the third child of four and the too-dark-skinned product of her mother’s affair with an unknown man. Although well-loved in her community, Ella is often made to feel unwanted and unsafe at home, especially when her stepfather, Leroy, returns from his months-long disappearances. This begins to change when Kathleen St. James, a white woman, rents a house in the Black-only part of Ricksville and stirs discontent in the deeply segregated community. Kathleen is a graduate student at Princeton undertaking research for a thesis about the Civil Rights Movement. She quickly notices the precocious, determined girl and decides to take Ella under her wing.

If you have read Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Ella and Kathleen’s friendship will trigger nostalgic childhood memories. Here is a highly educated woman who defies racial expectations in search of a deeper understanding of Black lives in the South, and here is an unmothered Black girl with evident talent who could benefit from adult guidance. Ella feels that she has found someone who truly understands and cares for her, and so she goes to great and dangerous lengths to help 
Kathleen gain acceptance in Ricksville. But Kathleen is hardly Matilda’s good Miss Honey. She was born Kate 
Summerville, the daughter of a Ku Klux Klan member responsible for organizing the killings of three young men involved in mobilizing the Black vote in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964. She brings to Ricksville her struggle with the trauma of her father’s actions and guilt over her own complicity.

Told from several points of view, the novel moves effortlessly between Ella’s and Kathleen’s stories, calling us to reflect on how racism is inculcated and the real harm it has caused Black people over several hundred years. Nkrumah examines how each generation across the Black-white racial divide tries to rationalize and come to terms with this past. History is the tar, the dark matter, filling the unseen spaces of American lives.

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A book titled Wade in the Water

Wade in the Water
By Nyani Nkrumah ’92
HarperCollins

Wade in the Water is an uncomfortable, tense read that makes overt what is often thought but seldom said. Here are Ella and Kathleen discussing Kathleen’s thesis topic:

“It’s easy to see why they didn’t want civil rights, they were racist! It was racists that killed those election workers, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.”

Miss St. James pursed her lips again and sighed.

“It’s not that simple. The real question is why were they racist? Who were the winners and losers when the migrations and civil rights laws happened? I am looking at those events and their impact from all different angles.”

Nkrumah invites us to consider whether a person is the total sum of their angles. Is Kathleen’s father 
redeemable because we know the reasons he gave 
himself for doing what he did? Was Kathleen just a brainwashed child?
I applaud Nkrumah especially for her convincing portrayal of Ella as a child narrator. When she finds the widow Mrs. Robertson gatekeeping at blind Mr. 
Macabe’s house, evidently for the purpose of trying to make him see her as a possible wife, Ella’s cleverness with words is evident:

“Mr. Macabe can’t see,” I said slowly…. “He can’t see any note I write him.” Then I added for good measure, “Pity he can’t see your purple outfit either.”

Nkrumah masterfully serves up a spunky character with much to say about the joy, love, ambition and 
everyday determination of her community, as well as its problems: colorism, classism, hypocrisy, male chauvinism, child sexual abuse and isolationism.

Overall, reading Wade in the Water was like walking home in relentless rain: sharp, cold, thoroughly drenching. The sun did come out eventually, but I left the book weary of heart. There are those who believe that we have talked enough about the wrongs of the past. This book says, no, we have not even begun, and I agree: Anti-Black racism is still very much with us.


Onjerika won the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing; published a dozen more short stories, including one on Granta.com; then decided a career in qualitative market research wasn’t such a bad thing, for now.

Photograph by David Maja