Washington Black

“I had already seen many deaths: I knew the nature of evil. It was white like a duppy, it drifted down out of a carriage one morning and into the heat of a frightened plantation with nothing in its eyes.” 

As a child, Wash has already seen slaves beaten and killed, and he understands that the institution of slavery itself, along with the white slave owners who uphold it, is the true source of evil. To Wash, the new master appears frighteningly detached and out of reach, like a ghost or a devil.

“Death was a door. I think that is what she wished me to understand. She did not fear it. She was of an ancient faith rooted in the high river lands of Africa, and in that faith the dead were reborn, whole, back in their homelands, to walk again free.” 

According to Big Kit’s beliefs, suicide is a valid option to escape the brutality of slavery. Rather than fear death, Big Kit welcomes it as a way to change her circumstances and finally achieve freedom for both Wash and herself.

“Ask yourself what you know of your own beginnings, and if your life is so very different. We must all take on faith the stories of our birth, for though we are in them, we are not yet present.” 

While, as a slave, the history of Wash’s birth and parentage is especially shrouded, he invites readers to consider their own origins, all of which are unknowable. So much of one’s life story rests on the testament and memory of others, rather than one’s own firsthand knowledge.

“Moistening my lips, I sat at table in the soft, monstrous upholstered chair, across from a white man who possessed the power of life and death over me. I was but a child of the plantation, and as I met his gaze with my own, my mouth soured with dread.” 

In his interactions with Titch, Wash is still afraid and uneasy, even though Titch is ostensibly a kinder master than Erasmus or the other plantation owners. Wash recognizes that, no matter how benevolent, a white master still has complete control over Wash’s life and death.

“I felt something vital, some calming thing, go through me as I worked. Almost from the first it seemed a wonder to me, less an act of the fingers than of the eyes. I drew whatever I had at hand, and studied the ways shadows created a sense of weight, working without method or training.” 

From the first time Wash begins to draw, he is amazed and excited by his own capabilities. For Wash, drawing is as natural as breathing and taps into his intelligence and creativity in a way that nothing else does.

“What I knew was that a day would come when she would no longer stand to be enslaved, and on that day she would slaughter many before she carried me off to freedom.” 

Even when he has not heard from Big Kit for some time, Wash still believes that she has the power to come and save him, killing whoever is in her path. This belief represents Wash’s naïve understanding of the plantation and its structure, in that he truly thinks that Big Kit might be able to rescue him, when she is powerless to do so.

“Oh, how different the world did look from that height. Imagine it: my whole life I had lived on that brutish island and never had I seen its edges, never had I seen the ocean in its vastness, the white breakers rolling in upon the beaches. Never had I seen the roads, with their tiny men and tiny horses, the roof of Wilde Hall winking in the light. The island fell away on all sides, green, glittering.” 

Upon seeing the view of the entire island for the first time, Wash’s conception of the world is immediately broadened by this new information. Wash reflects upon how tiny and limited the view from the plantation is when compared to the view from Corvus Peak, mirroring the drastic constraints that the conditions of slavery impose upon his life.

“I realized I was troubled by the enormous beauty of that place, of the jewel-like fields below us, littered as I knew them to be with broken teeth.” 

The uneasy confluence of both extreme beauty and extreme suffering present on the plantation make Wash anxious. He is unsure how both can exist in the same place, but he cannot help but admire the natural beauty of the island even as he reflects upon its violent history.

“He had never struck me, but the possibility floated between us like a thread of music.” 

Although Philip is never physically violent towards Wash, both Philip and Wash are aware of the power that the one has over the other. While Wash and Titch may at times stray from the dynamic of slave and master, Wash is never able to forget that he is a slave when he is with Philip.

“I feared my eye would not recover; I feared my face in all its new grotesqueness. But most of all, I feared that I had been burned beyond use, that I had been made a ruined creature.” 

After being badly burned in an accident, Wash worries that he no longer has any use as a slave. He knows that if he is a useless drain on resources, his life will be brutal and short. 

“It was a wonder to me that a world of cruelty and hardship existed, even now, only some miles away. How was it possible, thought I, that we lived in such a nightmare and all the while a world of men continued just over the horizon, men such as these, in ships moving in any direction the wind might lead them?” 

After escaping with Titch on the ship, Wash is amazed that the horizons of his world have expanded so dramatically. As with the view at the top of Corvus Peak, his experience on the ship causes Wash to reflect upon the limited and constrained nature of his life as a slave. Even as he faces an uncertain future, Wash is hungry for freedom and to see the world.

“‘I do not much care for childhood. It is a state of terrible vulnerability, and is therefore unnatural and incompatible with human life. Everyone will cut you, strike you, cheat you, everyone will offer you suffering when goodness should reign. And because children can do nothing for themselves, they need good advocates, good parents. But a good parent is as rare as snow in summer, I am afraid.’” 

According to Edgar, childhood is a state of vulnerability and suffering. In a cruel world, with absent or neglectful parents, children are abused and cheated almost by default. While Edgar acknowledges the possibility of good parents and a peaceful childhood, he argues that in most cases, children are helpless and suffer.

“Though a child, I did not picture a monster—he was no creature all teeth, all vicious blue eyes behind mangled wire spectacles; his voice was not slow and reptilian, his hands not huge black claws. I knew the nature of evil; I knew its benign, easy face. He would be a man, simply.” 

Wash again reflects upon the nature of evil, realizing that Willard will not appear as a monster or a demon, but as a regular man with a regular countenance. True evil doesn’t make a mark upon a person’s appearance and can exist in any type of person.

“Then he smiled at me, and it was like a flash of violence, all wooden teeth and gums. Seeing it, something shrank in me. I felt both his intense awe and his mockery, as if he were watching some insensible creature perform an unnatural act, as if a hothouse plant had learned to speak.” 

In his interactions with Mr. Wilde, Wash realizes that the older man sees him as a curiosity rather than as a human being. While Mr. Wilde admires Wash’s facility with art, Mr. Wilde thinks of Wash as a slave who can draw, an aberration rather than the norm.

“He entered a white void, and the roaring oblivion of that place closed around him, ate him whole. And so it was that he walked calmly out of his life, and was lost.” 

Unable to escape the pressure of his relationships with others, Titch flees from his former life. Wash is unable to accept Titch’s casual abandonment.

“For there could be no belonging for a creature such as myself, anywhere: a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind and a talent on canvas, running, always running, from the dimmest of shadows.” 

Even when Wash achieves nominal freedom, he must still deal with the consequences of his appearance, his oddity, and his past. Because he is dark-skinned, disfigured, and of an artistic disposition, Wash doesn’t fit in anywhere.

“You speak of slavery as though it is a choice. Or rather, as though it were a question of temperament. Of mettle. As if there are those who are naturally slaves, and those who are not. As if it is not a senseless outrage. A savagery.” 

When Tanna claims that she would never think of Wash as a slave, no matter his history or background, Wash becomes angry that she might think that a slave could be anyone, no matter their character. For Wash, it is insulting to suggest that anyone might be worthy of enslavement, regardless of their capabilities or background.

“How could he have treated me so, he who congratulated himself on his belief that I was his equal? I had never been his equal. To him, perhaps, any deep acceptance of equality was impossible. He saw only those who were there to be saved, and those who did the saving.” 

Wash realizes that his relationship with Titch has always been a shallow and unequal one. Titch is never able to overcome his racial prejudices and consider black people as actual human beings.

“And how he had wasted all his talents, all his obvious facility for learning, twisting every new fact and arranging it into senselessness and cruelty. He had spent years trying to cultivate an ethos, and despite possessing a clear intelligence, he had lived his whole life in avoidable savagery.” 

Wash reflects that Willard is not necessarily an inherently bad man, but that Willard has been so warped and twisted by society that he is no longer able to live a good life. Instead, Willard has devoted years to senseless cruelty, rather than using his talents to pursue a more useful occupation.

“You did not see me—you did not look at me, and see me. You wanted to, but you didn’t, you failed. You saw, in the end, what every other white man saw when he looked at me.” 

When Wash finally confronts Titch, he argues that Titch has never considered Wash’s thoughts and feelings, and has been unable to view him as anything other than a slave. While Wash concedes that Titch tried to move beyond this dynamic, Titch is unable to do so.

“He was a man who’d done far more than most to end the suffering of a people whose toil was the very source of his power; he had risked his own good comfort, the love of his family, his name. […] His harm, I thought, was in not understanding that he still had the ability to cause it.” 

Wash reflects upon his and Titch’s fundamental inability to communicate with one another. Even though Titch has made sacrifices and risked his own comfort to help slaves, including Wash, Titch still doesn’t treat Wash like a real person with whom he might be capable of having a relationship. Wash is grateful for Titch’s actions, but he is hurt that Titch cannot see the emotional harm he has caused.

“I thought of my existence before Titch’s arrival, the brutal hours in the field under the crushing sun, the screams, the casual finality edging every slave’s life, as though each day could very easily be the last. And that, it seemed to me clearly, was the more obvious anguish—that life had never belonged to any of us, even when we’d sought to reclaim it by ending it. We had been estranged from the potential of our own bodies, from the revelation of everything our bodies and minds could accomplish.” 

Before Titch plucked Wash from the fields to assist him in his experiments, violence and precarity plagued Wash’s life. Wash thinks that the worst thing about slavery was the way in which it estranges slaves from their own potential, forcing them to live short, brutal lives devoid of meaning.

“‘What is the truth of any life, Titch? I doubt even the man who lives it can say.’ I raised my face. ‘You cannot know the true nature of another’s suffering.’” 

This passage highlights the way in which truth and falsity are shifting and unstable according to each individual observer. One can never have direct access to another’s experience, and it is difficult to understand even one’s own life.