Some novels carry you across continents; others leave you suspended between questions. Washington Black attempts both, and in doing so, becomes as much a meditation on freedom and belonging as it is a tale of escape.
A review of Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
Vintage (Penguin Random House), 384 pages
I finished Washington Black this morning, and I’ve been thinking about what it left me with. Or, perhaps, what it left suspended.
The novel begins on a Barbados sugar plantation in the early 1830s, and these opening chapters were, for me, the most compelling. Esi Edugyan writes with a sensory precision, and through the eyes of her young protagonist, Wash, she evokes the brutal and intimate world of plantation life. One detail stood out especially: Wash’s constant use of smell to interpret the world, particularly how he associates white individuals with distinct and perhaps unpleasant scents. Erasmus Wilde, the plantation owner: “a smell of wet paper seemed to come off his body.” Titch Wilde, Erasmus’s brother: “the cuttlefish stink of soap on his wrists.” Master Phillip, cousin to the Wildes: “wheezing out the smell of sweet milk.”
The modern — or perhaps not so modern — slur that Black people smell different from white people comes into play in Phillip’s comment to Titch when Wash shares a carriage with them:
“He glanced suddenly back at me. ‘What a smell in here.’
‘It smells fine,’ frowned Titch.”
As we learn later, Titch — unlike Phillip or Erasmus — is opposed to slavery, and this moment serves as an early indication of the ideological fissure between them. Edugyan uses smell not just for texture but as a social signal: Wash’s sensory world becomes a way of identifying power, difference, and intent.
Journeys aloft and adrift
Wash, assisting Titch in the testing of the latter’s hydrogen balloon, is maimed, scarred in his face, by an explosion of hydrogen gas. There are three who bear responsibility: Titch, for miscalculating the chances of an explosion; Phillip, for ordering Wash to go closer to the balloon when Titch had sent him to safety; and Wash, for obeying Phillip rather than Titch. I’m sure this was metaphorical of something, but I can’t think what. The scar Wash carries on his face after this marks him even more distinctly than his skin colour. Perhaps a deliberate device to isolate him further.
After Wash’s dramatic escape with Titch in the latter’s hydrogen balloon, the novel shifts into something else: part adventure, part episodic travelogue. Wash and Titch pass through a series of strange, vividly drawn encounters – a ship manned by orphans and captained by identical twins, an abolitionist with a penchant for dissection, a wilderness journey to the Arctic. All of it held my interest, yet none of it felt fully developed. The book began to seem as if it were gesturing toward a Victorian adventure novel. A cross between Dickens and Verne, perhaps, but without ever quite settling into that form.
Tethered to Titch
The central relationship between Wash and Titch is perhaps meant to remain a mystery, but I found it difficult to accept. Their bond is intense but uneven; sometimes tender, sometimes absent, always hard to define. Even as Wash grows older, begins a relationship with another character (Tanna Goff: a scent of tobacco, sweat and lavender), and starts to shape a life for himself, he remains emotionally tethered to Titch. I found this both plausible and perplexing. (As, indeed, does Tanna.) Perhaps that’s the point?
Clearly, this is a novel about slavery and racism, but also about reclaiming narrative space. Edugyan, a Canadian of Ghanaian heritage, seems to be reworking the historical novel from the inside out. Placing a Black character at the centre of a form that has often excluded such voices. Wash’s journey is one of survival, yes, but also of learning, creating, and searching for meaning on his own terms.
Would I recommend Washington Black? Yes. I read it right through in just a few days, and certain images (and scents) have stayed with me. But I did find myself wishing for more cohesion, and more resolution. In fact, I suspect this story might work even better as a television series. A medium in which atmosphere, symbolism, and unresolved threads can more easily co-exist. Still, the fact that I’m writing about it here, and puzzling over it hours after finishing, is perhaps its own kind of recommendation.
