Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

 

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Oct. 17th. Eleven of us met over Zoom. This amazing book begins in 1830 when 11 year-old George Washington Black is a field slave on a sugar plantation called Faith in Barbados. His caretaker, a field slave herself, is the indomitable Big Kit. One night he and Big Kit are called upon to serve dinner at the master's house, something highly unlikely, since field slaves never go into the Master's House. 

While serving this dinner, the master's brother Christopher examines "Wash" and decides he's just the right size to assist him on his "cloud-cutter," a kind of hot air balloon and implores his brother to let the child become his assistant. Christopher tells Wash to call him "Titch," and encourages him to read, to draw, and to find various plants and animals for study. But he's also a servant. Titch likes to act the part of the great abolitionist but it's questionable whether he has any real affection for Wash, who's really just a little boy. 

Shortly, Christopher's cousin Philip comes to visit and he 1) causes Wash to be severely burned, maiming him and 2) ends up blowing his brains out in front of Wash. A slave, being witness to a white man's death, is going to be punished as though he committed the act. 

Christopher, knowing this, chooses this time for him and Wash to escape the island on the "cloud-cutter." This begins the action packed adventure to Virginia, to the Arctic, to England, even to Morocco. One of our book club members said that the impossible parts of the story makes the whole narrative improbable. Susan commented on how Christopher kept leaving Wash. Wendy said that Christopher didn't want the responsibility of caring for Wash, he just used him. When Wash finally caught up with Christopher, he had another young boy as an assistant. 

Robin pointed out that Titch had loads of baggage himself.  Everything he did was to try to impress his father, a famous scientist who studied in the Arctic. Titch also had a great amount of guilt about how he and his brother treated their cousin Philip when they were young. Susan wanted to know what it was that enabled Titch and his brother Erasmus to do the cruel things they did to Philip when they were kids. Another one of the bookclub attendees said, "Are you kidding? Children are the cruelest beings, even more so than adults." 

Nancy remarked that this was one of the complications of this book. Titch is bad (not really caring about Wash) but yet he saved Wash's life more than once. 

Shelara drew our attention to the fact that the book is based on slavery. Everything about it was evil. Titch stands in for the so-called liberal. Titch doesn't see Wash as equal at all. Even in the very first scene when Christopher said "Call me Titch," this put Wash's life in danger, what if someone heard him calling a white man by a nickname in this setting? Shelara also made us remember the very beginning of the book when some slaves were killing themselves and the Erasmus beheaded them and displayed the severed heads on posts as a warning that "you're not going to wake up in your home in Africa without a head." Even the agency of taking your own life had been stripped from them. Philip shooting himself in front of Wash certainly endangered him. Amazingly, at no time did Titch say to Wash, "it wasn't your fault." nor did he show any concern for the trauma he must have suffered. 

I asked the group what they thought about Willard the slave catcher, to which Susan replied, "I think he was still a slave-catcher, I think he was lying. Stacy remarked that slavery in the West Indies was over and Erasmus was dead, it wasn't so much the point of returning Wash to the plantation as much as the hatred he had in seeing a Black man living in freedom, especially a Black man who had eluded him for years. 

I also asked the group if they thought that whether Wash having the severely burned skin was necessary to the story. Of course they all answered the obvious: Willard was looking for a burned Black man. Shelara added that the scars are the external symbol of the internal trauma. At one point Wash is in England about to enter Titch's family home, hoping that either Titch (who had long since abandoned him) is present at this home or that maybe Titch's mother knows where his is. Wendy read about his feelings approaching the house. (p.263 in this edition):

"I felt myself nearing the centre of a great darkness, a world from which my childhood, Faith - the endless suffering and labour there - was but a single spoke on a vast wheel. Here was the source, the beginning and the end of a power that asserted itself over life, death, the very birth of children."

Our next book discussion is Saturday Dec. 5, 2020 at 12 noon. We'll be discussing Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds.