Washington Black

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

On a tense and perhaps ill-fated evening in Barbados in 1830, young Washington Black departs the only ground he has ever known with Titch, his uncertain friend, in a prototypical hot air balloon of Titch’s design. But though the balloon crashes moments later into a ship sailing the Caribbean seas, and though Titch’s older brother, Erasmus, ostensibly owns Wash as a slave, it is Wash who has “a ring of luck at [his] neck. Luck is its own kind of manacle, perhaps." Indeed, a combination of luck and free will move Wash through his eponymous novel, from Faith Plantation in Barbados, to the Arctic, from Nova Scotia to London, to Amsterdam and Marrakesh, luck an uncomfortable weight haunting Wash’s choices, as inescapable as the memory of Titch once the two are no longer together and equally threaded with troubling uncertainty: did Titch bring Wash along due to Wash’s own merits? Or to satisfy Titch’s nascent abolitionism? Or was it because Wash weighed enough to make the perfect ballast? Or did Wash perhaps choose his flight himself? Or was he pulled along by his fortune alone, free will having little to do with it. An adventure novel both moody and rollicking, Washington Black is also consequential as a bildungsroman, elevating and modernizing a historically Eurocentric form by expanding the range of subjects found within the novel’s pages. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): slavery, suicide, death, abandonment, racism and racialized violence.