Fifty Books Project 2023

 Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

I stepped out onto the threshold, the sand stinging me, blinging my eyes.  Behind me I thought I heard Tanna call my name, but I did not turn, could not take my gaze from the orange blur of the horizon.  I gripped my arms about myself, went a few steps forward.  The wind across my forehead was like a living thing.

Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize and listed by Obama as one of his favorite books of that year, I picked up Washington Black with great anticipation.  It is the story of a young man born into slavery in Barbados who, through a combination of extraordinary circumstances and extraordinary intelligence, lives a remarkable life in Barbados, Virginia, the Arctic, Nova Scotia, England, Amsterdam and Morocco.  In building the main character’s life, Edugyan creates an opportunity to explore human relations in a wide variety of situations, with race being of central but not overwhelming importance.  The book is a page turner – the plot is far reaching and inventive – but also quite thought-provoking.

George Washington Black (known colloquially as Wash) is an enslaved boy on a Barbados sugar plantation in 1832.  As the novel opens, the relatively humane owner who named his slaves after heroes has died and, under his new owner, Erasmus Wilde, Wash is suddenly subject to much more brutal treatment and inhumane labor.  His only protector is the fierce but also enslaved Big Kit, whose idea of protection is centered around the belief that when they die, enslaved people return to Dahomey, Africa.  She plans on killing Wash and herself to enjoy the fruits of that legend. 

That plan is interrupted by the arrival of Christopher Wilde, known at Titch, Erasmus’ younger brother.  The Wilde family is divided into intellectual explorers who love rational science and brutal businessmen who make the money that finance the explorations of Titch and his father.  Erasmus grants Christopher the use of Wash as an assistant because he is the right size for Titch’s proposed experiment with ballooning.  Suddenly, Wash is well-clothed, well fed and given an opportunity for education.  When he turns out to be a talented sketch artist and water colorist, Titch decides to make his position as assistant permanent. Big Kit is left behind.

A series of events on the plantation cause Erasmus to want to take Wash back and Titch – whom we slowly realize is something of an abolitionist, though a very inactive one – decides to run away with Wash.  Much has been made of the hot air balloon science and history in the novel, but in fact the balloon scene is short and – while highly dramatic – largely unbelievable.  Suffice it to say that it launches Wash on his career as a scientist and a runaway.

A long series of adventures follow:  Wash and Titch travel to Norfolk, Virginia, but are followed by Willard, the man Erasmus has hired to bring Wash back.   They proceed to Upper Canada, seeking Titch’s father in his arctic outpost – the Senior Titch is a renowned marine biologist and member of the Royal Society.  By this time, 1836, slavery has been outlawed in British colonies so Wash and Titch’s continued hiding from Willard seems extraneous.  When Titch decides to return to the south, he decides he must return alone.   He refuses to let Wash go with him and disappears into a blinding snowstorm.  Wash has been abandoned as randomly as he was chosen.  

Wash returns to Nova Scotia and to the life of an ordinary freedman.  While he is extraordinarily talented and well-educated, the economics and prejudice of Canada prevent him from being more than a manual laborer and delivery boy.  However, in short order he meets a beautiful woman transplanted from the Solomon Islands.   Her father is a famous marine biologist (the British colonies were crawling with them apparently).  He once again has entrance into the world of science and education.  And once again, he is chased and attacked by Willard – now clearly an obsessive as we have learned that Erasmus is dead.

He conceives of the idea that he must track down Titch.  The man’s abandonment of him hurts, not least because it reminds him of his own abandonment of Big Kit.  Tanna, now his lover, disapproves of this quest.  She points out that Titch may have been against slavery in the abstract, but treated Wash like an object and a possession just the same.  In addition to searching for Titch, Wash has devised a way to display ocean creatures live, in tanks – the world’s first aquarium and is engaged in a quiet battle with Tanna’s father to get credit for his role in this invention.  So Mr. Goff’s ability to treat this black man as an equal is also suspect.  Only Tanna seems to see his full humanity.  Despite her perfectly rational objections and his repeated failure to find Titch, Wash takes Tanna to England, Amsterdam and Morocco before finding his former teacher.

The novel is full of people who fail to see each other’s humanity, who are cruel to each other – often unspeakably, brutally cruel, but just as often subtly, unthinkingly cruel.  The scientists are no better than the artists, and both seem obsessed with cataloguing the world around them, with measuring and labeling its creatures as objects.   When Wash finally finds Titch, he has a new assistant, a small Moroccan boy, and has become involved in experiments in early photography:  not content with measuring and displaying nature, he now seeks a way to record it.

Washington Black has some of the kinds of faults one expects in big, ambitious novels – coincidences that are hard to believe (ships appear when needed, men are traced across continents successfully, Wash’s favorite book was written by the man he just delivered groceries to). Many of these are entertaining in themselves, but the collection begins to grate after a while.  While I believe much of the science history is accurate (I did not check), it seemed less important than Edugyan wanted it to be – another series of coincidences if you will, that the age of enlightenment and the age of colonialism and slavery overlap this way.  That is unfairly reductive, but I found it difficult to think my way deeper than that here.  The love story between Wash and Tanna is a stretch – the beautiful, brilliant, wealthy Tanna falls for the lowly (and horribly scarred, a plot detail I left out) errand boy and follows him anywhere.  Had it been written by a man it would have been offensive, written by a woman it is merely puzzling – not least because Edyugan has gone out of her way to make Tanna brown woman so light she generally passes for white.  Titch’s evolution from pilot to photographer should carry more weight than it does.  As for Wash’s obsession with the man, I am with Tanna – not convinced he was worth it.

However, I read the novel hungrily, finding myself thinking out details like the focus on marine life and view of British slavery and Canadian racism, while also anxious to see where Wash would go next, fearful that Willard would overtake him, worried that fate would not bring him together with Tanna.  I would happily recommend this novel to another reader:  you would enjoy reading it and we might enjoy complaining about its imperfections later.