Washington Black

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Part 4, Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “England, 1836”

Part 4, Chapter 7 Summary

The information about Titch and Big Kit leaves Wash reeling, and he is annoyed with Tanna for trying to help him feel better. For clarity, Wash realizes that he needs to seek out Peter Haas, whom he suspects might be the same man as Peter House. Wash writes Peter three separate letters over the course of several weeks but receives no response, and he is “disappointed” and “shaken” (322).

Wash and Tanna begin to get along again, and continue to plan the aquarium.

Tanna mentions that Mr. Goff has a distant colleague in Amsterdam with a potential new specimen, although they are uncertain of the truth of his claim.

Together Wash and Tanna visit the completed tanks and are happy with their progress. As they leave, Wash scans a newspaper article about a hanging, only to find a familiar name within the pages, for which he “stopped short in the street and could find no words” (326).

Part 4, Chapter 8 Summary

Although they are both disturbed by the news in the paper, that evening they have a winter picnic with Mr. Goff in the park. While Wash and Tanna are both in a bad mood, they try to hide it so that Mr. Goff might enjoy the evening. Wash reflects on Tanna, writing that “her whole life had something of this theatre, this desire to shelter Goff’s happiness at all costs” (328). Mr. Goff and Tanna swap stories about his sister Henrietta, an independent and headstrong woman who has gone through several French husbands and is on the hunt for more.

Part 4, Chapter 9 Summary

Wash and Tanna decide to attend the hanging on Wednesday. According to the paper, Willard is to be hung for murdering a freed black man. In the square, Willard and another man are led to the scaffold and hung. After the hanging, Wash catches a glimpse of Titch out of the corner of his eye and calls out to him, chasing him through the crowd, only to realize it is a stranger, “another man entirely, a stranger unknown to me” (336).

Part 4, Chapters 7-9 Analysis

Wash, desperate to find Titch, finds himself increasingly unable to forget about his own past. While Tanna attempts to help him process his feelings and move on, Wash’s complicated history is too significant and traumatic for him to merely accept and heal from. Wash is desperate to seek out Titch to confront him at last about the most formative experiences in Wash’s life, both to hold Titch to account for Wash’s suffering and to renew a connection that was once so central to Wash’s existence.

Wash is also preoccupied with his past in terms of Willard’s arrest and subsequent hanging. While Willard once represented an existential threat to Wash, Willard is now a sad and broken man, capable only of enacting violence. Although Tanna and Wash are in some ways repulsed by the hanging, at the same time it seems like a necessary conclusion that will finally free Wash from the shackles of his past. Chasing after a man who looks like Titch in the crowd, however, both Wash and Tanana realize that Wash can never truly be free until he has gotten closure about the people and events surrounding his escape from Faith Plantation.