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What it argues
Washington Black opens on a Barbados sugar plantation in the 1830s, where George Washington Black — Wash — is an eleven-year-old enslaved boy. His life changes when he is assigned to Titch Wilde, the eccentric brother of the plantation owner, who is building a hot-air balloon called the Cloud Cutter. Titch sees Wash's intelligence and artistic talent and pulls him into his world of scientific curiosity and amateur exploration. When a death on the plantation puts both their lives at risk, they escape together in the balloon, beginning an odyssey that will take Wash from the Arctic to London to Morocco.
The novel is fundamentally about the making of a self under conditions that deny selfhood. Wash is a gifted painter and observer of the natural world — his scientific illustrations become a kind of way of seeing the world with precision and wonder. But Edugyan is also interested in what it costs to move through the world as a person who was once owned. Wash's freedom is real and hard-won, but it is never complete. He is always being misread, threatened, or defined by his visible body and its history. The question the novel asks, with increasing urgency, is whether Wash will be able to build an identity that is truly his own — rather than one granted or shaped by the white men around him.
What it gets right
- 1.
Freedom is not a single moment of liberation but a condition that must be built and rebuilt, often against the expectations and demands of others.
- 2.
Scientific wonder can coexist with moral blindness. Titch's curiosity about the world does not prevent him from participating in structures that harm Wash.
- 3.
Art and natural illustration give Wash a way of asserting his own perspective on the world — a form of agency in a context where formal agency was denied.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Esi Edugyan is a Canadian novelist born in Calgary to Ghanaian parents. She is the author of four novels: The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, Half-Blood Blues, Washington Black, and A Strange and Stubborn Endurance. Both Half-Blood Blues and Washington Black won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, making Edugyan the first author to win Canada's most prestigious literary prize twice. Washington Black was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018. Her fiction often takes up questions of race, identity, and the African diaspora across different historical periods.
