An exalted flight to remember

Ratna Raman

On the shortlist to the Man Booker prize 2018, Washington Black, Esi Edugyan’s third novel, has a three-part structure. Its eponymous hero, Washington Black, nicknamed Wash, recounts his experience as a 10-or-11-year-old slave in Barabados, in a first-person narrative. Beginning a little before 1830 and concluding a little after 1836, the book records the death of Wash’s first white master and the transfer of Faith Plantation to his nephew.  

The first part of the book exposes the vicious brutality, gore and horror that permeate black lives. Set in Barbados in the 1830s, Faith Plantation in particular is a living hell for every black man, woman and child. Although slave trade was outlawed in 1807, the practice of slavery continued. Legislation abolishing slavery came into force in 1834, but slave lives remained irrelevant and continued to be traded for cash, ironically provided by the British State as compensation for loss suffered by slave owners after slavery was abolished.

While Erasmus Wilde brutalised, maimed and violated black men, women and children, Wilde’s brother, Titch, an inventor and naturalist, and a member of the Abolitionist Society for the Betterment and Integration of Former Slaves gathered data on the brutal treatment of blacks and enlisted some of the black workers on the sugar plantation to further his project, a cloud cutter, designed for flight, and is a bit more humane.

 A mishap with the cloud cutter leads to Wash being severely burnt and things come to a head with the suicide of Cousin Philip. Fearing that Wash would be implicated, Titch escapes with Wash from the island in the cloud cutter, eventually crash landing on a ship whose captain takes them onward to America.  Titch leaves Wash to fend for himself in Nova Scotia with a bounty on his head. Eventually Wash returns to England, with Tanna and her father Goff, working as Goff’s assistant, but continues his search for his mentor and protector.

In a well-crafted tale, Edugyan focuses not merely on the violence in the world wherein Washington Black comes of age, but upon the damage incurred by an indomitable spirit with great gifts.  Titch encourages Wash’s gift for drawing and reproducing details of species and objects in the natural world. Wash’s  ingeniously shapes technology and uses it to share his discoveries with people, as he sets up prototypes of aquariums that will introduce lesser-known sea creatures to ordinary folk in London. 

The narrative pace is effortless and the story seldom flags as it introduces us to the decade of the 1830s and the destinies of black men across the globe governed by laws that continue to stunt lives.

 This unconventional adventure story follows the pattern of the Daedalus myth, wherein the inventor designed wings for his son Icarus to fly.  Icarus eventually drowns when his wings melt in the hot son. Washington Black is burnt and maimed, not by the elements of nature, but by the viciousness of humans and the fact that despite laws, the cash price placed on his head encourages bounty hunters to pursue and kill him if required.

Such beginnings cannot warrant happy endings. Wash becomes the eternal traveller carrying upon his body the marks of violence and within his soul unending vortexes of loss and pain. The meeting with Titch at the end of travel expeditions in Morocco reiterates how an unequal world estranges most humans from potentialities that bodies and minds could have accomplished. An adult Wash walks out into the eye of a Moroccan sandstorm.