By Paul Carrier
The eponymous narrator of Washington Black, Esi Edugyan’s insightful, riveting novel about the insidious effects of slavery, begins his tale in 1830, as a young field slave on a plantation in Barbados. Although Wash, as the boy is known, witnesses horrendous cruelty and abuse, he eventually escapes the island in a flying machine invented by abolitionist Christopher “Titch” Wilde, the plantation manager’s brother.
Thus begins an adventure-filled journey that will take the reflective and articulate Wash to far-flung corners of the globe as he grapples with his origins as a slave and the fact that even Titch, who may well have saved Wash’s life by spiriting him away from Barbados, does not view Wash as an equal. Despite Titch’s benevolence, he clearly has the upper hand — the power — in his relationship with Wash. Titch, after all, is white. And Wash, after all, is not.
“I didn’t want these abolitionists to be viewed as the great white saviors,” Edugyan said in an interview with bookpage.com. Despite appearances to the contrary, Titch and Wash are not true friends. “The power imbalance is just so staggering,” Edugyan explained.
Seeking his rightful place in the wider world, Wash learns that his “master” in Barbados has hired a finder who is offering a hefty reward for Wash’s capture, dead or alive. Having been the sole witness, back in Barbados, to the suicide of Titch’s cousin, Wash now stands falsely accused of murder.
For Wash, then, life is both a remembrance of how he and other slaves were treated in the past and a nagging apprehension of what may befall him in the future, if he loses the tenuous and ill-defined independence he has acquired. True freedom may seem to be within Wash’s grasp, but as Titch tells him, freedom is a word “with different meanings to different people.”
Titch’s remark refers to Wash’s fate, but it proves to be applicable to Titch’s life as well. As time goes on, Titch learns a life-altering secret about his own father, one that forces him to adopt a new, and fateful, conception of freedom for himself. It is Wash, though, who remains at the center of the novel, as he juggles his painful past and his quest for a full measure of independence and equality.
“I was everywhere uneasy in my skin,” he says while living in Nova Scotia as a self-sufficient but confused teenager, “and this made me irritable and nervous and desperately melancholy.” Wash later describes himself as “a boy without identity, a walking shadow, and with each new month I fell deeper into strangeness.”
As such observations suggest, Edugyan’s writing is evocative, thanks to the eloquence with which she has blessed Wash. He notes that the cold in the Arctic, where he lives for a time, is “the devouring of heat, a complete sucking of warmth from the blood,” and the wind there “would scythe through the skin as if we were the cane and the wind were our terrible reaping.”
Although Wash is semiliterate early on, he proves to be highly intelligent and thoughtful, a skilled illustrator with a keen interest in natural history, and a scientific frame of mind. Yet, thanks to his background as a slave, his skin color, and the disfigurement he suffered as a boy when he was burned in an accident, Wash finds it hard to earn respect and acceptance, even from those who like him.
The savagery of his past life “left me a ruined being,” in the eyes of one otherwise friendly and admiring man, “like some wretched thing pulled smoking from a fire. It did not matter that he accepted me as a thinking man, that he respected my mind . . . . I was black-skinned and burnt, as disfigured inside as without . . . .”
Wash’s stature grows over time, and with it his self-esteem. Yet his past continues to haunt him even as he matures, and he still struggles to attain the recognition he deserves for his accomplishments. In elegant and memorable prose, Washington Black provides a window into the harrowing psychology of slavery as it affected those ensnared by it and those who, even when free, fought to escape bomdage's lingering hold on the mind.
Thus begins an adventure-filled journey that will take the reflective and articulate Wash to far-flung corners of the globe as he grapples with his origins as a slave and the fact that even Titch, who may well have saved Wash’s life by spiriting him away from Barbados, does not view Wash as an equal. Despite Titch’s benevolence, he clearly has the upper hand — the power — in his relationship with Wash. Titch, after all, is white. And Wash, after all, is not.
“I didn’t want these abolitionists to be viewed as the great white saviors,” Edugyan said in an interview with bookpage.com. Despite appearances to the contrary, Titch and Wash are not true friends. “The power imbalance is just so staggering,” Edugyan explained.
Seeking his rightful place in the wider world, Wash learns that his “master” in Barbados has hired a finder who is offering a hefty reward for Wash’s capture, dead or alive. Having been the sole witness, back in Barbados, to the suicide of Titch’s cousin, Wash now stands falsely accused of murder.
For Wash, then, life is both a remembrance of how he and other slaves were treated in the past and a nagging apprehension of what may befall him in the future, if he loses the tenuous and ill-defined independence he has acquired. True freedom may seem to be within Wash’s grasp, but as Titch tells him, freedom is a word “with different meanings to different people.”
Titch’s remark refers to Wash’s fate, but it proves to be applicable to Titch’s life as well. As time goes on, Titch learns a life-altering secret about his own father, one that forces him to adopt a new, and fateful, conception of freedom for himself. It is Wash, though, who remains at the center of the novel, as he juggles his painful past and his quest for a full measure of independence and equality.
“I was everywhere uneasy in my skin,” he says while living in Nova Scotia as a self-sufficient but confused teenager, “and this made me irritable and nervous and desperately melancholy.” Wash later describes himself as “a boy without identity, a walking shadow, and with each new month I fell deeper into strangeness.”
As such observations suggest, Edugyan’s writing is evocative, thanks to the eloquence with which she has blessed Wash. He notes that the cold in the Arctic, where he lives for a time, is “the devouring of heat, a complete sucking of warmth from the blood,” and the wind there “would scythe through the skin as if we were the cane and the wind were our terrible reaping.”
Although Wash is semiliterate early on, he proves to be highly intelligent and thoughtful, a skilled illustrator with a keen interest in natural history, and a scientific frame of mind. Yet, thanks to his background as a slave, his skin color, and the disfigurement he suffered as a boy when he was burned in an accident, Wash finds it hard to earn respect and acceptance, even from those who like him.
The savagery of his past life “left me a ruined being,” in the eyes of one otherwise friendly and admiring man, “like some wretched thing pulled smoking from a fire. It did not matter that he accepted me as a thinking man, that he respected my mind . . . . I was black-skinned and burnt, as disfigured inside as without . . . .”
Wash’s stature grows over time, and with it his self-esteem. Yet his past continues to haunt him even as he matures, and he still struggles to attain the recognition he deserves for his accomplishments. In elegant and memorable prose, Washington Black provides a window into the harrowing psychology of slavery as it affected those ensnared by it and those who, even when free, fought to escape bomdage's lingering hold on the mind.
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