Washington Black Earns its Praise

Washington Black

By Esi Edugyan

Knopf, 352 pages

* * * * *

This fascinating novel from Canadian Ghanian writer Esi Edugyan is up for consideration for the Man Booker Prize. Although my vote would go Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, it certainly wouldn’t make me upset were Ms. Edugyan to win.

Washington Black is about searching, dreaming, and the elusiveness of freedom. Its namesake narrator is a slave on a sugar plantation in British Barbados in the 1830s. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself was illegal after August of 1834, though such ‘technicalities’ took a bit longer to go into effect. In 1830, the year this novel opens, young Washington Black has no thoughts of freedom other than those put into his head by Big Kit, a slave who teaches Washington the ins and outs of getting by and plants the idea that if worst comes to worst, they could commit suicide and allow their souls to fly back to Dahomey,

where she claims to be of royal blood. All of this is so much gibberish to Washington, who is uneducated, without known parents, and has never been off  Faith Plantation.

Several things disrupt Washington’s life, the first of which occurs when Faith Plantation’s laissez-faire master dies and his son Erasmus Wilde takes over. Erasmus vows to take a Simon Legree-like iron-fisted approach toward slaves, a regimen built upon equal parts drive system and humiliation. There were few places on earth where it was worse to be a slave than in the Caribbean, where most in bondage died within 7-9 years. That might have been Washington’s fate, had it not been for the arrival of Christopher “Titch” Wilde, Erasmus’ eccentric younger brother.

Titch is equal parts scientist and mad inventor and he chooses Washington as his personal assistant. Edugyan pulls a page or two from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to show the myriad cultural disconnections between black slaves and whites, even those with good intentions. Put simply, they lived in different worlds in both a literal and symbolic sense. One of the many virtues of Edugyan’s work is that she does not sermonize. If anything, Washington is the most distrustful character in the book and he’s not always right in ascribing motives. He proves a not-very-good student when it comes to book learning, but displays an innate talent for drawing precise renderings of the specimens in Titch’s makeshift lab. When Wilde cousin Peter arrives, Washington will also come to learn that Titch’s family dynamics are no more enviable than his own.

But what adventures Washington is destined to have. Let me tantalize you by saying that plots and subplots revolve around an unstable hot air balloon, a ship bound for the Arctic, the capture of an octopus, flight from slave catcher, dwelling among the Inuit people, life Nova Scotia, and then London with side trips to the Midlands, Amsterdam, Paris, and Morocco. Washington will grow up, meet famed marine zoologist Geoffrey Michael Goff, and have an affair with his mixed race daughter Tanna. Can Washington trust any of them? What happened when Titch disappeared in the Arctic? What did Titch mean when he told Washington that he treated him “like family?” Is that a compliment, a delusion, or an insult? Is Titch even sane?

Several things make Washington Black more than another novel about the horrors of slavery. First, it is beautifully written. It’s not just the elegance of the prose; Edugyan also embeds metaphors throughout the book that lend gravitas to her words. Nearly everything in this novel has a double meaning: family, flight, captivity, scars, illustrations…. Second, Edugyan has little time for pat answers. Uppercase Truth is in short supply in Washington Black. Instead there are real deceptions, apparent deceptions, half-truths, gross misunderstandings, deserved skepticism, and flat-out wrongheadedness. This means that Washington Black is ultimately a book that’s about more than how one “sees” the world; on a deeper level it’s about how we “see” and fail to “see” others. To introduce still another of the book’s metaphors, it’s a work about the differences between surface and depth.

As I implied earlier, Washington Black is a flawed hero. His vision is often clouded and don’t assume for a moment that Edugyan intends an Arctic whiteout or a dessert windstorm to mean just snow or sand. Washington’s troubled soul is often the source of chaos. At one point Tanna says to him, “You are like an interruption in a novel, Wash. The agent that sets things off course. Like a hailstorm. Or a wedding.”

This is a smart book that goes beyond simplistic right/wrong scenarios. If you think you’ve read enough about slavery to skip this book, you’re just wrong. Washington Black has something so many other novels lack: nuance.

Rob Weir