Washington Black

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Part 3, Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “Nova Scotia, 1834”

Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary

Back in his own room, Wash has an idea for an aquarium that will preserve Goff’s specimens and keep them alive. He collects plant life by the sea, realizing that fish and aquatic plant life need one another to survive in a closed environment. Wash joins Medwin on a trip to Halifax to consult a foreman about the possible construction of the aquarium. When Wash comes home, he draws out plans for the tank and constructs it himself. Wash is eager to impress Tanna with his creation, writing “[I] prayed in the end that I could give her something to draw out the astonishment in her fine, sharp face” (261). Wash goes to an eatery to order food and continues his calculations for the fish tank at his table. While he works, Willard approaches him. As the man speaks to him, Wash is calm and resigned, “filled with a bitter sense of inevitability” (263).

Willard tells Wash a story about riding a carriage through the plains of America and coming to a village full of scarecrow dolls. According to Willard’s tale, the children of the village became sick and were sent away, and the old people of the village died or moved, until there was just one woman left. She made dolls to replace the people the town had once held. Wash recognizes that the strange tale functions as a parable about the end of slavery and race relations, and thinks of Willard as “ridiculous, beyond fraudulent, memorizing fine quotations from the Greeks in order to twist their meaning” (267). Willard confesses that he has not come for Wash after all, but now works in the insurance industry. Before leaving the restaurant, he tells Wash that while Erasmus is dead, he has seen Titch alive in London.

Part 3, Chapter 11 Summary

After Willard’s visit, Wash is disturbed, afraid, and hopeful all at once. He reflects on the man, “the one from whom I had been running these three years, […] whose face I’d pictured so many waking days and imagined so many sleepless nights, the man who’d forced me away from all I had known” (271).

After he leaves the eatery, Willard strikes Wash from behind in the street. They wrestle in the dark until Wash remembers his knife and stabs Willard in the eye. Wash describes the aftermath of the fight, writing that “we kneeled side by side, like worshippers at an altar, him screaming in agony and me just breathing” (272). Wash stumbles away, injured and confused.

Part 3, Chapter 12 Summary

In a daze, Wash goes to the Goffs’ house. Tanna greets him at the door in her nightgown and welcomes him in. Tanna is shocked by his wounds and attempts to treat them, describing him as “an interruption in a novel […] the agent that sets things off course. Like a hailstorm. Or a wedding” (277). Meanwhile, Wash builds up the stuttering fire.

After an unspoken exchange, Tanna undresses before him, and they have sex.

Afterward, they lie in bed and talk about Mr. Goff’s tract and their favorite marine animals. Moved by their shared intimacy, Wash confesses his life story to her. Tanna correctly guesses that it is Willard who has just attacked him, and learns that he has not been fatally injured. She insists that Wash accompany the Goffs to England for his own safety, because “she cannot bear to think of [him] staying here” (284).

Part 3, Chapters 10-12 Analysis

These chapters bring Wash’s escape from Faith Plantation and subsequent wandering full circle. In meeting Willard for the first and last time, Wash is finally free from all the pent-up fear and anxiety that has been dogging him since his initial escape. While the world is still a frightening and often cruel place, Wash will no longer have to worry about the sort of cruelty that Willard, Erasmus, or others associated with Faith Plantation might have in store for him. In his conversations with Wash, Willard represents the twisted opinions and beliefs of a dying age. Warped by racism and cruelty, Willard fears the change and progress brought by scientific improvements, the disintegration of the institution of slavery, and the end of the slave plantations of the West Indies. In this final confrontation, Willard seems like a man out of place in time, unable to move on from a time period that no longer exists. So long a source of terror for Wash, Willard now seems almost pathetic, a violent man without purpose.

While Wash is no longer afraid of Willard the way he once was, both Wash and Tanna recognize the potential dangers Wash might face if Willard were to accuse him of assault. Although Wash is a free man and acted in self-defense, white men often receive the benefit of the doubt. Even once he has broken free from the threat of Faith Plantation, Wash is still not entirely free of prejudice and violence.

In these chapters, Wash also conceives of a new scientific idea that will set the next stage of his life on its course. His prototype for an aquarium represents a new way of thinking about marine life and preservation that will allow him to display and study plants and animals without ending their lives. Wash also takes a significant step forward in terms of his relationship with Tanna, and he seems to have fully matured into a confident and free young man.