Washington Black by Esi Edugyan; Hachett India, 432 Pages; Rs 699
Every time Canadian author Esi Edugyan writes a novel, it is nominated for several literary prizes. The latest, Washington Black, released in September 2018, is on the Man Booker short list. Edugyan, herself of Ghanaian origin, has made slavery and racism two of the three key themes in this work that starts thus: ‘I might have been 10, 11 years old—I cannot say for certain—when my first master died.
No one grieved him; in the fields we hung our heads, keening, grieving for ourselves and the estate sale that must follow’.
The voice of the eponymous hero, nicknamed Wash, is strong, confident and evocative as it describes the life of one born into slavery on a sugarcane plantation in early 19th century Barbados. Erasmus Wilde, the new master of Faith Plantation, is the archetypal Englishman slave owner, sadism personified. ‘I had a sense of pale eyelashes, an uncooked pallor to his skin. A man who has belonged to another learns very early to observe his master’s eyes; what I saw in this man’s eyes terrified me.’ Likewise, Erasmus’s younger brother Titch is the classic inventor and explorer.
Titch chooses young Wash as his assistant because he is of the right weight to provide ballast for his latest project—a hot air balloon known as the Cloud-cutter. Life improves further for Wash, who discovers a talent for drawing. Exploration is the novel’s third theme. The 19th century was remarkable for the technological advances and the speed with which they emerged, changing dramatically, not just the quality of life, but the view for the first time that this world was really One World—in both the physical and metaphorical sense. As Titch says, ‘Slavery is a moral stain against us. If anything will keep white men from heaven, it is this.’
Under Titch’s tutelage, Wash’s love for recording the nature through brilliant illustrations develops to the point where the narrative arc must set him free of the island and into the open world, where much lies to be recorded. For that to happen, he becomes the focal point of the sibling rivalry between the slave owner and the inventor: Erasmus wants him back. Wash makes a theatrical getaway at night with Titch in the Cloud-cutter. ‘The air grew colder, crept in webs across my skin. All was shadow, red light, storm-fire and frenzy. And up we went into the eye of it, untouched, miraculous.’ They fly seaward, into a storm, and land on the deck of a ship, captained by a German whose identical twin is the ship’s surgeon.
Wash’s escape is further complicated when Erasmus puts a bounty on his head and a transnational slave-catcher, John Willard, yet another clichéd character from the era, begins to dog him through Virginia, towards the Arctic circle where Titch’s explorer father, hitherto presumed dead, is now possibly alive. The story moves through polar ice fields and remote trading outposts, crossing the Atlantic to London, Amsterdam and Morocco. Meanwhile, slavery is abolished, but racism continues as do the many coincidences in the narrative which seems, at times, to be a quasi-Victorian alternate history, and at others, an intelligent spoof on the 19th-century adventure novel of the kind Jules Verne wrote. Exuberant language and rich description make it entertainment first-class.