The Underground Railroad refers to a series of safe houses and routes running from the slave-owning south to the free north, used by slaves trying to escape their bondage. It will take Hiram a while to master and control it, but because of his potential, he is recruited by the local Underground Railroad cell, run by the outwardly prim and proper southern belle Corinne, Maynard’s fiancee, who is herself a rich plantation owner. Conduction, we discover, is the ability to magically transport oneself, and others if necessary, from one place to another. The revelation of Hiram’s gift of Conduction is one of the most important outcomes of the accident. Photograph: The Washington Post via Getty Images This open recognition by his father encourages Hiram to believe in a special destiny for himself, and “in my quiet moments, to imagine myself in their ranks” – this despite constant warnings from Thena, an older slave and Hiram’s adoptive mother, that to the Quality he will always remain a slave. Howell acknowledges Hiram as his son he takes him out of the fields and makes him a house slave, sometimes letting him entertain dinner guests with memory tricks, and even assigning to him the same teacher as his other son – and heir – the foolish, bumbling Maynard. He is gifted with, among other things, a photographic memory he is also son to Mr Howell Walker, the plantation owner. The main character and narrator, Hiram, is no ordinary slave. At the very bottom are the Tasked, the enslaved.

After them are the Freed, former slaves who were able to buy their own freedom.

Next are the Low – poor whites, mostly uneducated, employed by the Quality to supervise the plantations and keep the enslaved in check. Virginia is a hierarchy at the top are the Quality, white slave owners with the power of life and death over their chief possession, their slaves. The stars of Lockless and other neighbouring plantations are indeed beginning to fade and fall: the slave owners, through a mixture of ineptitude and greed, have worked their lands to exhaustion and are now reduced to selling off their slaves to maintain their lives of idle luxury. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s eagerly awaited and ambitious debut novel is set in pre-civil war Virginia, on a slave plantation called Lockless in Starfall, Elm County.

Ta nehisi the water dancer