2023 read #100: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

337 pages

Published 2018

Read from September 15 to September 18

Rating: 4 out of 5

I don’t feel stuck in a reading rut, necessarily, but in recent months I find I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy novels and dinosaur fiction and not much else. I miss the variety of genres and topics I used to read. As a writer, it’s insufficient to read only the genre you write. So when I found this historical fiction novel at my local library, I thought, why not?

It is unsurprisingly excellent, an assured work from the sort of literary author who makes you realize genre writers rarely bother with good prose. Edugyan weaves a marvelous, absorbing descriptive flow and makes it look effortless. She could write rings around most fantasists, even 21st century fantasists.

George Washington Black is born into the horrific conditions of chattel slavery in Barbados. His cruel “master,” Erasmus Wilde, has a scientifically-inclined brother, nicknamed Titch, who arrives with the makings of an aerostat, with which he proposes to make the first aeronautical crossing of the Atlantic. Titch requests eleven year old Wash as his personal and scientific assistant, planning to have Wash along as “ballast” on the trip. Wash discovers a natural talent for drawing, but knows this brief reprieve is not to last.

When family dramas, stoked by their own cruelties, convulse the Wildes, and leave one of their own dead, Wash is blamed. Commandeered by Titch into his aerostat, Wash escapes Barbados in the night, but the balloon doesn’t get them far. Turns out that escaping structures of power and violence isn’t as easy as spinning away in a balloon.

Washington Black is an intimate, subtle examination of one man’s navigation through the structures of white supremacist power, a Bildungsroman of Wash’s maturation against a backdrop of vicious cruelties and ingrained attitudes. Would-be white savior Titch commandeers Wash’s life; years later, a scientist who treats Wash as his intellectual equal nonetheless accepts that Wash’s name will never be given due credit in their shared projects. The book is horrifying and delicate and beautiful. I quite liked that Wash is never under any narrative pressure to forgive anyone. Rather, he is driven by an almost scientific need to understand, even — or perhaps especially — to understand those who have wronged, used, abandoned, and brutalized him.

“We had been estranged from the potential of our own bodies,” Wash narrates in the coda, “from the revelation of what our bodies and minds could accomplish.”