Wait. What am I watching? Why is this black and white? And when is this in time because Vision in Infinity War…am I remembering this right?

This felt…oddly familiar. I went through my mental Nick at Nite rolodex to the shows I only encountered in reruns. Dick Van Dyke. Mary Tyler Moore. I Love Lucy. Is this referencing Leave It to Beaver? It’s giving The Donna Reed Show.  I was in this weird place of nostalgia for something that didn’t belong to me but did.

That feeling is the show. The black and white, the laugh track, the borrowed sitcom grammar. The form is carrying the grief before anyone names it. By the time we see the literal cracks of the Hex when Wanda has to look at what she’s been building the form has already been holding the meaning. 

We all felt it before the show said it out loud.

I want everyone to read this.

I closed the book and just sat there, turning over the plot, the message, and the feeling I was left with after finishing The Water Dancer.

When I initially picked up the book I wasn’t expecting what is essentially a cross between a fictional slave narrative and a sci-fi novel to leave me with such a feeling of wholeness and hope. But there I was at the end of my journey with Hiram Walker.

In all my years, this is the only book I was able to push through all the red tape of approval, procurement, and whole team adoption.

Years later, when I was building Rooted Meaning, the etymology helped me better express what I had felt was the book’s argument. The argument was being carried at the level of language. Coates, while writing a novel about memory and inheritance, built the novel out of words whose roots are still carrying those questions.

While working on Rooted Meaning there have been a couple times that the etymology paired with a text just left me floored.

It feels weird to say that the etymology of a word gave me an emotional experience,  but for The Water Dancer, the word that broke it open for me was record. Hiram is writing about his own life — at first about his studies, then about his thoughts, then about his impressions — and he pauses to notice what he is doing:

At first it was merely a record of my studies. But soon this record expanded to my thoughts, and then from my thoughts to my impressions, so that I now possessed, not merely a record of my head, but of my heart.

Record comes from re- (back, again) plus cor, cordis (heart), with the older idea of the heart as seat of memory and thought. To record is, at the root, to call back to heart and mind. The same Latin root gives us courage, encourage, accord, cordial, discord — a whole vocabulary of action that takes place at the level of the heart, as if the heart had its own kind of agency alongside its work as muscle.

Hiram uses this word, rich with etymological implication, in the middle of writing his own life. The entire book — the book I closed and sat with, the book my team adopted, the book a teacher would put in students’ hands — is Hiram’s act of re-cording and calling back to heart. 

And man. Once I saw the move at record, I found memory and memorial both trace back to memor — mindful, remembering. To have memory is to be mindful of what happened; a memorial is a structure built to keep us mindful of who was lost. Hiram says the bridge at Lockless is “stained with the remembrance” of family sold Natchez-way; the same root that makes his interior life makes the structure of the place that took them. Conduction comes from con- (with, together) plus ducere (to lead) — to lead together, across. Harriet Tubman teaches Hiram that to conduct, you have to remember. The Underground Railroad’s borrowed metaphor scales into something older that the layer of etymology compounds.

This is where morphology instruction becomes easy to underestimate. Morphology researchers have been making the case for these roots for years. Marcia Henry’s systematic case for Latin and Greek roots in academic vocabulary. Donald Bear and Shane Templeton’s developmental framing of word study, with the spelling-meaning principle at the center. Joanne Carlisle’s rigorous evidence that morphological awareness is a distinct predictor of reading comprehension, especially as readers move into complex texts. The instructional case is established.

But the research case is usually framed around comprehension, decoding, spelling, academic vocabulary, and vocabulary growth. Morphology helps students decode unfamiliar words. Morphology helps vocabulary expand. All true. All important. Still not quite what I just described with The Water Dancer.

Morphology as recovery

Morphology, taught alongside a serious literary text, can be more than a comprehension tool. The everyday use of a word like record has flattened the word into a piece of utility when we use it to document, to file, and to capture. But the etymology of the root invites a deeper association. 

The form carries the meaning.

The word carries the history.

The root gives students a way to recover (and discuss) what the text has been holding all along.

This potential is a different kind of analytical access than the research describes. Not “students need to know record means heart-memory to comprehend the passage,” but something stronger. The etymology is part of how the book is thinking, and when students sit with a word’s history, they get a more precise way to articulate what the novel is doing.

Check out The Water Dancer unit (free)

The dealing-with is the literary analysis. And in the novel’s own argument, dealing with history is what makes a way through possible.

This is part of why The Water Dancer is hopeful in a way that surprises readers who expect a slavery narrative to feel different. The hope is not from erasing or overcoming the pain. It is from integrating it. Conduction is memory reckoned with and made into power. The holes in Hiram’s memory don’t erase the inheritance; they are where the inheritance lives. 

What is grief, if not love persevering?

WandaVision is doing the same move at a different scale. The grief Wanda is dealing with is never introduced by the glitches — it was always there, underneath the form she built. 

Near the end of the series, after Vision is gone for the second time, after Wanda has finally let the constructed world dissolve, Vision asks her what they are. She says she doesn’t know. He answers:

What is grief, if not love persevering?

The line is famous because it names what the form has been doing the whole time. The grief was love, and the nostalgia of the sitcom form was carrying it. The dealing-with is what allows the love to continue. Understanding the function of the form deepens the meaning. 

What this is

What I’ve described here is part of a methodology I built called Rooted Meaning. The Water Dancer is one example of the kind of work it is designed to make possible: moving from root study into literary analysis, from word history into textual meaning, from vocabulary into interpretation.

Rooted Meaning is one branch of the Teaching for Today membership, alongside research dives, curriculum design resources, and workshops that help teachers think more deeply about the texts and systems already in their classrooms. Inside that branch, I’m building resources that help teachers bring this kind of etymology-informed analysis into the books they actually teach.

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