The following version of the novel was used to create this study guide: Nkrumah, Nyani. Wade in the Water. Amistad, January 17, 2023. Kindle.

In her historical fiction novel, Wade in the Water, Nyani Nkrumah shines a light on ongoing racism as she describes the backlash from the 1964 Freedom Summer murders. Nearly twenty years after those murders, the people in 11-year-old Ella’s town of Ricksville have not forgotten the way they were treated and continue to be treated by racists. The reality of continued racism is confirmed when a White woman, who is determined to immerse herself in Black society, arrives in town. The novel culminates in a clash between the descendants of the Blacks who fought for the right to vote and the descendants of those who were fighting to stop them.

Ella knew racism existed because she dealt with it in her own home. Ella’s midnight black skin served as a constant reminder to her mother and stepfather, both of whom were light-skinned Blacks, that Ella’s mother had been unfaithful. Ella had never felt loved by her mother. Her stepfather, Leroy, abused her both physically and sexually. At church, Ella’s family had lost its position of respect when Ella was born. Even the children who were Ella’s playmates were aware of her illegitimacy and often treated her differently. There were only two people on whom Ella felt she could rely, Mr. Macabe and Nate. Mr. Macabe was old and blind; Nate was the owner of the diner.

Alongside the story of Ella’s situation is the story of another girl raised thirty years earlier in the neighboring town of Philadelphia, Mississippi. This girl, Kate, was taught by her father to hate Blacks. Kate was aware that her father was meeting with other men in their barn, planning out some way to keep the Blacks from gaining more rights. One night, her father arrived home very drunk and announced to Kate that they had done it. Kate was not sure what he meant by those words. A few days later, she was awakened in the middle of the night as her family fled to Boston. While Kate and her family lived in Boston, she was engaged to a man named Carl. Kate spent nearly three years in a mental institution after her father shot and killed her fiancé.

When Kate was released from the mental institution, she believed she had been cured of the racism and hate her father had taught her. However, she could not really hate him or his beliefs. She re-branded herself as Katherine St. James. At Princeton University, she studied the impact of Black migration and the development of working class Blacks. After Katherine failed to write a paper from the perspective she had been assigned, that of a Black sharecropper, Katherine’s professor suggested to her that she still harbored hatred and prejudice against Blacks. Katherine felt challenged to prove him wrong and decided to go home to Mississippi to conduct her research.

In Mississippi Katherine befriended Ella, hoping to use her as a way to win the friendship of the Blacks in Ricksville. Suggestions that Katherine was racist continued. Katherine argued that White people were impacted by the civil rights movement because White farmers unfairly lost wealth after low-cost labor was no longer accessible. At that point, even Ella was concerned over her new friend's loyalties.

Katherine appeared to have turned the town against her when she went to Nate’s Diner on a busy Friday night and had words with Nate because she thought that he should have taken her order quicker. Ella decided to try to turn the town back in Katherine’s favor by paying her friend, Ty, to fall into the river the day of the church picnic and allow Katherine to save him. Katherine saw the boy struggling in the water, but she did not run to him as quickly as Ella had believed she would. Instead, Katherine hesitated and almost ran away. When she did dive in after the boy, he had already suffered some brain damage.

Ella was angry with Katherine after her hesitation, but the Black people of the town welcomed Katherine as a heroine. They agreed to cooperate with her interviews. Katherine managed to even befriend Ella again. One day when Ella was at Katherine’s house alone, she read a portion of Katherine's journal in which Katherine described how her father shot her fiancé because it had been determined that he had a Black ancestor. Ella believed she was just reading a story that Katherine had written and wondered why somebody would shoot a person just because of the color of his skin.

Later, Ella was at Mr. Macabe’s house when Katherine came to him to finish an interview. She asked him the first question, but he did not answer right away. When he did answer her, he asked her a question. He wanted to know how she felt knowing that her father had been the mastermind behind the killings of the election workers during the Freedom Summer. When Katherine had talked with Mr. Macabe earlier, she had too much to drink and accidentally told him that her father was Jack Summerville. Nate and Mr. Macabe researched Summerville and determined he was the main organizer of the Ku Klux Klan chapter that killed the workers. Mr. Macabe ordered Katherine to leave their town and not to think of using any of the information she had gleaned from them in her thesis.

As Katherine was packing to leave, she thought that Mr. Macabe, Nate, and the others did not know the worst about her. When she was 15 years old, she had asked her father to let her help him kill a Black man. At her father’s orders, she asked a Black man to row her to the middle of the river. Once they were there, Katherine dived off the side of the boat while her father waited to capsize it. The Black man drowned. The memory of that man drowning made Katherine hesitate when she saw Ty in the water. Regardless, Katherine tried to console herself that she had saved a life, something that her father would not have done. She continued to believe she was different from her father. However, Ella recognized that Katherine's research was only an attempt to make Katherine's racist father appear rational.