BOOKS
‘Washington Black’ tells a beautiful tale set in the ugly world of 19th-century slavery, writes
Why Washington Black is worth the hype
’It had happened so gradually, but these months with Titch had schooled me to believe I could leave all misery behind, I could cast off all violence, outrun a vicious death. I had even begun thinking I’d been born for a higher purpose … I had imagined my existence a true and rightful part of the natural order. How wrong-headed it had all been. “I was a black boy, only — I had no future before me, and little grace or mercy behind me. I was nothing, I would die nothing, hunted hastily down and slaughtered.”
George Washington Black (or “Wash”, as he’s called) is a child slave on a sugar plantation in Barbados when, following the death of his first master, he is taken under the wing of the new master’s brother, a strange scientist, explorer and abolitionist named Christopher “Titch” Wilde. After a traumatic event endangers Wash’s life, he and Titch set out on an adventure that cuts through clouds and crosses vast seas.
That’s the basic premise of Esi Edugyan’s rich, layered and vivid Man Booker-shortlisted novel Washington Black. It’s a gripping tale that grabs you from the opening sentence: “I might have been ten, eleven years old — I cannot say for certain — when my first master died.”
The novel is narrated by Wash, who tells his own story as though he is a spectator to it rather than the one living it. But, if you were born into a life of unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity, how would you cope? Surely detachment would be the only way to keep yourself sane?
The book is divided into four parts and spans six years. The first half focuses on Wash and Titch’s peculiar yet tender relationship: from their initial uneasy alliance (Wash is roped in as Titch’s apprentice in an aeronautical experiment) to what eventually becomes a deep bond.
Titch is not only the first white man to show kindness to Wash, but also the first to treat him as a human being. As they travel from the suffocating island heat to the northernmost, coldest parts of the earth, their relationship blossoms, with Wash slowly learning to let his guard down and trust someone of a different hue, a hue — in the 1830s — associated with cruelty, brutality and a bloodthirsty grip on power.
Of course, not everything is smooth sailing and something happens that is figuratively a kick to Wash’s face, a reminder that he is “a black boy, only” who will “die nothing”.
The second half of the book is Wash’s life post-Titch, as he aims for survival and in the end, meaning.
It might be set during the dying days of the slave trade, but Washington Black is not torture porn. Yes, some acts of brutality pepper the pages but the true cruelty Edugyan wants us to see contains no physical violence. Washington Black is also, thankfully, not a white saviour story.
Edugyan writes simply yet artistically. She is brutally honest in her descriptions yet there is a gentleness and delicateness in her style. She writes beautiful sentences and has an astonishing turn of phrase (and uses really dramatic figures of speech, for instance “fragile as a woman’s stocking”).
The paradoxical nature of her writing is perfect for telling this story.
Like being in the middle of the ocean, one moment it’s sunny and calm, the next you’re gasping for air in a storm
One moment you’re smiling warmly, the next you’re crying. Edugyan cuts you deeply and then stitches you up and tenderly kisses your wound before suddenly, without warning, cutting you again.
Edugyan doesn’t just take you into Wash’s world — you are Wash: you feel his anguish, his dread, his joy, his wonder, his uncertainty, his resentment.
Reading this book feels like being caught in the middle of the ocean: one moment it’s sunny and calm, the next you’re gasping for air in a storm.
During a scene when one of the characters stares at the carcass of a mutant sea creature, he says: “I have never seen such beauty in such ugliness.” That sentence could also perfectly describe Washington Black — an achingly beautiful tale set in an unbelievably ugly world.