Water Finds a Way

Might there be a smaller story running like a hidden stream through the second of our nation's two great, storied waves of migration from the rural South to the industrial Midwest? That is the question animating David Hardin's Water Finds a Way. The first wave, in the earliest decades of the twentieth century, saw millions of Black American citizens flee the Jim Crow South, seeking economic opportunity and racial justice. After World War II, a second wave of Southerners, Black and White, came north on a promise of opportunity, a chance to build better lives for their children. Water Finds a Way is a reflection on the enduring bond between the author and his father, a poor Southern migrant, to Detroit, Michigan, in the middle of the last century. A bond forged in generational suffering, shame, and fear, but annealed in love's timeless persistence. It is the story of two men who long for home, for a sense of belonging, for something lost in the chasm that yawns between them.