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Washington Black
by Esi Edugyan
c.2018, Knopf
$26.95 / higher in Canada
352 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
You need to get out of here.
You don’t know where. You just have to go to another room,
maybe, or another building, another town, across the world.
You need to get out of here but, as in the new novel
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, be careful, and
mindful that you don’t run away from yourself.
Big Kit was going to kill him.
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That, as George Washington Black understood, was her way of
protecting him forever: she’d kill him and herself, sending
them to a sort of heaven for slaves. Wash was just a boy,
maybe 10 or 11 years old, when she explained that
no-more-options plan but she never followed through, perhaps
because she was promised by a white man that mutilated
corpses had no afterlife.
It was 1829 and from then forward, Wash avoided all white
men at Faith Plantation, especially Erasmus Wilde, the new
master whose cruelty knew no limits. Wilde was a man to
steer clear of, but Wash couldn’t escape when he and Big Kit
were summoned to the Plantation house one warm Barbadian
evening.
Nothing good could come from it – but there did: that was
the night when Christopher “Titch” Wilde, Erasmus’s brother,
declared that Wash would be the right-sized assistant for
his flying machine, which Titch was building at the edge of
the plantation. He insisted that Wash come to live with him
in the garden cottage and, without telling Erasmus, he
insisted that Wash learn to read. He gave Wash drawing
materials, and encouraged his talents.
So, though he was yards away from the Plantation house and
could never entirely relax, Wash settled into a new life. He
learned and watched, absorbing science and nature. He worked
on Titch’s flying machine and felt a strong friendship with
the abolitionist scientist. He listened to Titch’s stories
and began to dream of impossible things. And when Wash was
the unwilling witness to something horrible, he trusted his
odd friend, and flew…
You may be scratching your head now about pre-Civil War
years and flying machines. Yes, and it works. In
Washington Black, it works phenomenally well.
That’s the biggest surprise: the H.G. Wells hint that’s
here, and how much it doesn’t make this book into
science fiction. Instead, Washington Black becomes an
early Victorian adventure-drama told with the quiet, proper
voice of the title character explaining how he got from a
slave plantation in Barbados to Virginia to the Arctic and
around the world.
That sounds far-fetched, doesn’t it?
Until you read this book, it may seem so but Edugyan leaves
enough room in this story to delight his readers, move them,
and make everything fit just as they’d want it. There’s
violence in here, yes, but there’s also a cliffhanger
within, an enchanting romance, and a coming-of-age
maturation you’ll be glad you’ve witnessed.
Don’t miss this wide novel. Don’t, but do be prepared
for a book hangover, since Washington Black will
stick with you awhile. If that’s the kind of tale you
cherish, here’s the one to get.
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