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
