An epic journey from slavery to freedom
Esi Edugyan’s followup to the Giller-winning Half-Blood Blues explores uest for agency during the 19th century
From Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” to Lawrence Hill’s “The Book of Negroes,” the slave narrative has produced many powerful novels. Esi Edugyan offers an inventive spin on the genre in “Washington Black,” the Victoria author’s followup to her 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning “HalfBlood Blues.” A cinematic epic of slavery and freedom, it’s also a tale of high adventure and scientific endeavour.
When the story opens, the title character (and narrator) is an 11-year-old slave at a Barbados sugarcane plantation in 1830. The plantation’s master has died and Washington (known as Wash) fearfully observes the arrival of his successor, Erasmus Wilde and his brother, Christopher.
Wash is right to fear Erasmus, who’s a brutal master. But Christopher (nicknamed Titch), a naturalist and inventor, enlists Wash as his manservant to assist in building a “Cloud-cutter,” Titch’s version of a hot-air balloon. It’s the first of many turns his life takes.
Titch comes to value Wash’s qualities (he has a special talent for drawing), but is often oblivious to what Wash really thinks and feels.
In one revealing scene, they climb a small mountain to scout it as a site for the balloon launch. Wash is awestruck by the view of the ocean, “its pricks of light … like thousands of cane-knives,” while Titch cares only about measuring the summit’s surface area. (That glimpse of the sea is auspicious, for Wash’s fascination with the ocean and its creatures leads to a vocation.)
Titch is also indirectly responsible for an accident that leaves Wash’s face horribly burned.
He’s literally a marked man: so when he’s forced by circumstances to flee the plantation and a bounty is put on his head, Wash is keenly aware of how easily he can be identified.
The disfigurement is also powerfully symbolic.
Wash is haunted by his memory of being a slave, no matter how far he travels — from the high Arctic to the shores of Nova Scotia and beyond — and how much he accomplishes. At one point, he sees himself as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind and a talent on canvas, running, always running, from the dimmest of shadows.”
In keeping with the novels of its time period, “Washington Black” features love and loss, vivid characterization and plenty of plot twists. Edugyan’s prose is somewhat formal in diction, but also sensuously evocative, as in this passage describing one seedy port town: “Its docks stank of tobacco, of lead, of crushed reeds and especially of cotton, white bolls of it glowing like plucked eyes on their boughs.”
At the heart of this capacious saga is the basic human need for agency and the struggle to make one’s life meaningful.
As such, “Washington Black” is both engaging and deeply affecting.
Barbara Carey is the Star’s poetry columnist, and a Toronto writer.