Slavery, marine biology, and raw artistic instinct collide in Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2018 Giller Prize.
George Washington Black’s very name is a mockery of his torment. An eleven-year-old slave on a sugar plantation in Barbados, Wash has not been brought up, but beaten into late childhood. Routinely exposed to the kind of grotesque cruelty that one would expect from animals rather than human beings, Wash lives in a permanent state of paralysing terror and trauma that is temporarily assuaged by his protector Big Kit, a slave woman who holds to the belief that if she kills both herself and him, they will return to Kit’s ancestral home in Africa and so escape the horror of their lives. A number of slaves commit suicide before the plantation’s new master, Erasmus Wilde, begins mutilating the corpses of the dead in front of the slaves so that they will walk, disfigured, in the afterlife. Respite arrives in the form of Erasmus’ brother Titch, an abolitionist and inventor who asks for Wash to assist him in the testing out of an airship, or Cloud Cutter, on the plantation. Under Titch’s tutelage, Wash learns the rudiments of reading, writing and mathematics, but also discovers a talent in himself for drawing which will direct the rest of his life. But despite the bond between the two, Titch never sees Wash as more than a servant, a means of assuaging both white guilt and loneliness, and when the two have to beat a hasty retreat from Barbados that will take them as far north as the Arctic, Titch abandons Wash and leaves him to fend for himself, an educated black boy in a world that wants him dead. Washington’s fight for his right to have something of his own, even if it is his own soul, will take him to Nova Scotia, London, Amsterdam, and Morocco.
Washington Black is beautifully written. Edugyan has a Victorian knack for conjuring up vivid landscapes that do not only show us where the characters are, but what they are and what they are searching for. Excluded from the lives of black people, who think he’s a traitor, and from white people, who think he’s a savage, Wash is a profoundly lonely soul who tentatively accepts friendship on the rare occasions that he can find it, but who chiefly finds solace in the beauty and sophistication of the ocean that he tries, each day, to render on the page. The vast majority of the whites around him, however, will not even allow him the dignity of being left alone to mind his own business. Conflict is always initiated by people that Wash barely knows, or more commonly, by people that he does not know at all, from foul-mouthed sailors in dive bars to crotchety old ladies on ships. There is nothing that will not be taken from him. Even peace and quiet have their own high price.
Washington’s voice, still and soft though it may be, imbues the novel with a perspective on slavery that is very different from that provided in slave novels written by white people: “you were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men”. The cruelty of Washington’s childhood, and his knowledge of what happens to escaped slaves who are recaptured, affects every aspect of his life and relationships, and leads this educated, soft-spoken man to engage in behaviour that is reprehensible to him, such as watching a public execution to make sure that a certain dead man is really dead. There is no part of Wash’s life that slavery does not poison, from his relationship with his lover to his meticulous drawings of marine life.
Despite its many beauties, Washington Black is not perfect. The biggest problem is the novel’s settings. While the portrayal of Barbados, the Arctic and Nova Scotia are all meticulous, Edugyan decides, in the novel’s third act, to send Washington on a quest. This leads him to drop in on various places, including London, Amsterdam and Morocco, and to undertake such journeys as casually as a modern jetsetter hopping on and off a plane. Victorian travel was thoroughly nasty, lengthy, uncomfortable and inconvenient, and doubly so for a person of colour. Thus, while each individual city and country is described in striking detail, the novel’s third act is filled with too much casual globe trotting and one-in-a-million chances for the denouement to be entirely credible.
Washington Black is the work of an exquisite writer. Edugyan who has created a jewel box of deep introspection and love of beauty, and the hard, metallic action that will always return to yank one out of it.
LADYGILRAEN 