Called from the cane field to serve at the master’s table, eleven-year-old Washington Black measures his future in mortal fear. This night will affect that future in ways he can’t begin to imagine as possibilities open before him, but in the 1830’s will the world allow a young slave to dream, let alone strive to achieve it?
Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black is not the novel you might expect, given the first half-dozen chapters. You might start out thinking it’s a book about slavery but while books about slavery are also books about freedom, Washington Black is very much a book about freedom that’s also about slavery. The calculated cruelty and obscene privilege of the plantation owners, the anger and desperation, the futility of the slaves’ situation – it’s all there in those opening chapters, exquisitely rendered in tense descriptive prose. But as things take a turn for Washington, so the story takes flight, extends not beyond the possible but certainly to the outskirts of the probable, and you, dear reader will be glad you’re along for the ride. From the Indies to America to the frozen North to Europe and North Africa, Washington’s journey is a dizzying adventure.
Freedom, and the lack thereof is the prism through which Esi Edugyan shows all the main players – though it might be described as freedom with a small f that features largest as it’s each character’s own sense of liberty which directs. Big Kit is a formidable presence (at times putting me in mind of Caryl Phillips obeah woman, Christiana, in Cambridge), and the relationship she has with Washington is beautifully complicated. There were echoes in that relationship with Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, and also Tucker Caliban and his legendary ancestor from William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer. Kelley’s A Drop Of Patience chimes too, in the nurturing of Washington’s talent and his striving to find a place in the world, which is ultimately a striving to find peace in himself. To that end, the novel’s ending is perfect.
Though in the modern parlance it’s easy to view the white characters’ issues as first world problems, barely a single player enters the stage without some coercing will driving them from where they might otherwise be happy. The men of the Wilde family are flung far from home, while their mother, stoic in her unhappiness, struggles to maintain the family pile. Even the slave catcher, Willard, is driven to extremes by the things he cannot shake off.
Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black is a treasure. Captivating characters, exquisite prose and a story that will have turning page after page after page. Read it, enjoy it, then put in your shelf alongside Ellison, Baldwin, Whitehead, Kelley.
Washington Black was published by Serpent’s Tail in August 2018 ISBN:9781846689598
vanisreading 