Washington Black: A Novel

by Esi Edugyan

Across from me Mister Philip stared out at the distant tamarinds, their tops bowing in the dull wind. There were red fissures in the whites of his eyes, and under the mountain’s shadow his skin appeared grey. I noticed the flaking red knuckles, so strange on a man of leisure, and the mesmerizing whiteness of his teeth; I saw the oddity of a body used for nothing but satisfying urges, bloated and ethereal as sea foam, as if it might break apart. He smelled of molasses and salted cod, and of the fine sweetness of mangoes in the hot season. I eyed him uneasily.

  He glanced at me from under his darkened brow. “Perhaps it is easier for you,” he said again. “Everything is taken care of for you. You needn’t worry about what the coming days will hold, as every day is the same. Your only expectations are the expectations your master lays out for you. It is a simple-enough life, what.”

  It was as though he had spoken the words to determine their truth. He shook his head irritably.

  I stilled my face. I said nothing.

  He exhaled harshly, dragging the gun up his thighs. I looked at his hands, the pallor of them on the dark metal.

  “I am sorry.” His voice was so soft I barely heard him. He gestured with his chin. “Your face.”

  I stared, feeling the soft tremor of my hands in my lap.

  “I was in Vienna, some months before coming here,” he continued in the same hushed voice. “In Vienna, the bread is a wonder. Everyone says Paris, but the true artistry is to be found in the Viennese dough. It is their yeast perhaps, or their manner of kneading it.” He stared quietly down at the gun. “There was a very fine cemetery there, at the edge of a church. I’d grown tired that day, the light made my head ache, and I sat on a bench beyond the surrounding wrought iron fence, and ate my bread.” He moistened his lips. “The streets were utterly silent, deserted. But after a time I heard the clopping of a horse approaching, and raised my face.

  “The horse’s flesh—there was something wrong with it. It glowed pink through the white pelt, diseased. A rather miserable four-wheeler dragged along behind it, the broken spoke slapping along the cobblestones. There was no driver.”

  He paused, staring a long while in silence at his hands. “Curious,” he murmured. “Curious. Unsettling. I watched the horse trot by, a knot of flies at its face. The noise of its hooves on the stones faded, the scrape of the broken spoke. I shall never forget the eeriness of it, the sound.” He shook his head.

  “Some minutes later, a man appeared from round the corner of the cemetery. The owner of the horse, I presumed. He neared slowly, at no hurry. He was short, and very poorly dressed. His frock coat was green, his trousers yellow, the dress of someone from another century. I recall vividly he was chewing on a carrot. As he neared me, he started to tip his hat, but then he paused, staring at me. He had small eyes, ugly eyes.

  “I bid him good day, but he only kept staring. Finally he said, ‘I just passed your grave. I just passed your monument.’

  “I imagined he was jesting.

  “ ‘Come,’ he said, waving the carrot at me. ‘I will show you.’

  “I followed him into the cemetery. He brought me to a small cedar grove sloping away from the main path. And in that place, I came face-to-face with my stone likeness.”

  Mister Philip paused, staring still at the length of gun on his thighs. “There I was, carved in stone: the same hair, the same eyes, same mouth, same chin. Everything. I studied the gravestone. The man had died fifty years earlier, on the exact day of my birth.”

  He shrugged in resignation. “What is the truth, I ask you?”

  I shifted on the rock, saying nothing.

  “Who is the ghost in that tale?” Mister Philip glanced up, and the deadness of his eyes dried up anything I might utter. His pupils were large, black. He stared as if struggling to see through me, as if I were a sudden obstruction.

  Oh how I wanted to run from all this, to quit the dark, weed-strewn grove, its oppressive trees already silvering in the dusk. Above us a flock of gulls screeched, keening towards the sea. In the soft breeze, the grasses began to rattle.

  Something was wrong. All at once Mister Philip rose with the gun swinging upwards in his fists, his shadow black and blunt against the failing sun. How did I know what was coming? I threw my hands over my face, as if to obscure the horror, my heart stamping in my ribs, and though I opened my mouth to yell, no sound came out.

  * * *

  —

  A GREAT, SHUDDERING BLAST, then all went white, the explosion dying sharply out. The sky emptied itself, the seabirds disappeared, and on the air the reek of fresh meat and chalk was pungent. The grasses wrestled to and fro, and in the brisk wind I felt a wetness on my face, smelled the sudden iron stink of blood. I was clutching myself on the outcrop, my body cowering in a ball, and I could not move. I listened for his breath, listened for any sound or movement. I felt small, wet shards on my arm and raised my face, staring in the dusk at the muck on me.

  It was teeth, or pieces of bone, other parts of his shattered face. In horror I swiped it away and stood, shivering—not from the sudden violence, which had been with me since birth, but from the terrible fact that I alone had been present at the death of a white man.

  Brushing at my clothes, I felt myself almost choking, and I did not look directly at what I could glimpse by the side of my eye: the whiteness of his large open palm, the dull grey sheen of his boots. And yet, leaving, I could not help but glance back. The flesh of his face was folded viciously away from the skull, like leather freshly cut. In the distance, a rook called out.

  I ran.

  * * *

  —

  TITCH AT FIRST did not understand a word of it.

  “I was just now coming in search of you,” he was saying when I rushed into his candlelit study from the fields. “But what’s this?” said he, rising immediately, his face blanching. “Dear god, Wash. Come, come—you will need to be examined at once. My god, that is a great deal of blood.”

  I could hear myself speaking but had no sense of my words. I was vaguely aware of the room’s warmth, its faint smell of fresh-cut hibiscus, its flickering candlelight and the odd bright spot on the wall that always looked as if someone had just that minute scrubbed it clean. I sensed my teeth tapping harshly against each other, and I tried to regain control of myself.

  Titch sank onto his haunches. “Where is the injury?” he said, examining me. “Show me the wound.”

  My teeth were chattering painfully, but I managed somehow to make plain that it was not my blood.

  Titch stiffened. “Wash,” he said quietly.

  Stuttering, I made to explain. And I watched as his confusion turned to slow disbelief. His lips parted gently, a slow frown growing on his drained face. Abruptly, he rose, wrenching a tense hand through his dark hair. He stood some seconds staring at the balding rug.

  Then, quite suddenly, he began to breathe noisily through his lips, rubbing at his forehead. I could not discern his thoughts and this panicked me beyond everything; I wanted to tell him again that I had done nothing, that I had been forced to watch, that Mister Philip had wrought his vicious end himself. This Titch already knew; this I had already said many times; and yet I wanted to emphasize it, to confirm that Titch truly accepted it.

  “Esther,” said he, his expression unreadable. “She came to Wilde Hall while I was with Erasmus. She informed us both that you had gone away with him, with Philip.”

  I was still shaking softly, and did not answer.

  “Why would he take you along?” he said softly.

  Still I said nothing.

  He stared thoughtfully at me. “Where is he?”

  I moistened my lips, but it was some while before I could speak. “At the hunting grounds, still. In the scrub of Corvus Peak.”

  “You must take me to him at once.”

  I blinked and blinked—how could I will myself to
go back there?

  He closed his eyes a long while. Opening them, he looked faintly surprised to find himself still in this room. He came forward and placed a hand on my collarbone, his palm cool and gentle. “I cannot find him unless you show me.”

  I breathed out; I knew I could never return there.

  “Wash. Please.”

  And so I found myself walking to the door, and I stood waiting as Titch pulled on his frock coat to go out into the soft evening air. At the threshold he frowned down at me, uneasiness in his waxen face.

  I followed him out. He moved slowly, stiffly, and in the reluctance of his gestures I saw Mister Philip’s own slow passage through the grass, his steps ghostly, belaboured, as though he were savouring the rustle and cries of those green fields one last time.

  12

  FROM A DISTANCE the body looked whole. And yet, as we trod across the damp night grass towards the twist of clothes in the clearing, its desecration was obvious. It was as though a trunk of clothes had been split open in the field; bits of fabric hung off nearby branches. It shocked me to notice it; I could not recall seeing this before, I remembered nothing beyond his maimed face. The rags were like the radiance of some terrible star, bright and emanating from something already extinct. I thought suddenly of the night Titch had summoned me to live with him, the awe in his slender face as he bade me observe the pure surface of the moon.

  He had been silent the long walk to the hunting grounds. Seeing his cousin’s dark form in tatters there, his face filled with anguish. But he did not cry out; he spoke no words at all. With damp eyes, he circled the mess in the clearing to retrieve from deep within the high grasses the gun.

  I could go no farther. A vicious itch had broken out in the crooks of my elbows and knees; my breath caught in my throat. I could see the ruin of Mister Philip’s torn red face, the explosion of teeth and bone like bloated rice on the blood-slicked grass. And I could hear again the thin horn of his final cry, the moist thud of his body, as though a damp blanket had been thoughtlessly thrown. I heard also the strange punctuation of his phrases with that word, what, and the faint hiss of his gun being dragged through the grasses. I saw his hands on the barrel of that gun, I smelled the vile brown stink that filled the air. And I saw his weariness as he walked through the field, as if in his last minutes he were picturing the late morning hours spent on the verandah’s rocker, the honeyed light pooling on his skin, the warmth and the ease of it.

  I could not bring myself to touch him.

  * * *

  —

  OF COURSE, that night I did not sleep. I pinched my eyes shut, but the images kept coming. Breathing hard against the sheet balled in my fist, I felt my heart would explode. Horrifying as the act itself had been, I understood it as Titch was not able to. Death by choice was an opening door; it was a release into another world.

  What I did not understand was why Mister Philip had involved me. He had offered apology for my face; the decency of that gesture had been undermined by the utter destruction his act had now wrought upon my life. For though I was very young I understood beyond all doubt that his death must mean my own. I would be blamed; Titch could do nothing to shelter me. The master would discover the accident, and my presence at it, and I would be killed. My only hope was for a swift, unsentimental hanging, or an axe to the back of the head. I could only pray he would spare me the agony of grotesquely drawing it out.

  Thinking I heard a noise, I raised my head, turning from the wall. But the room was silent, smelling of freshly washed stone and my own sweat. There were, I knew, only some hours till daybreak. I lay my head back down, thinking with bitterness of the great journey denied me and Big Kit when she could not kill us, the voyage back to her Dahomey. For I had come to believe that all Titch had said about death—that it was an ending, a blackness—applied only to deaths not chosen, which meant of course to killings. When I pictured myself being cut down by the master’s hands, severed brutally from the world, a taste like unripe apples filled my throat, and I saw the blackness Titch spoke of, the finality of it.

  There it came again: a low silver tinkling in the hall, the hiss and drag of something being slid across the boards. I shifted onto one elbow, swung my feet down onto the floor. Finally I padded out.

  It was Titch: fully dressed, barefoot, his boots folded up under one arm. He was creeping from room to room in the house, the dancing incandescence of his lantern cutting the dark. My heart was stamping hard in my chest. I followed him into his bedchamber.

  “Titch?” I hissed.

  He whirled, and stared at me a long, dark moment as though he did not know me. Then he nodded. “There you are,” he whispered, though from his tone I understood he was somewhat surprised to find me there. He lifted the lantern higher. I exhaled at the sight of his strained green eyes, the red skin beneath them raised like wax seals.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Lower your voice,” he whispered. In the gauzy yellow light I could just make out his form cutting through the room. I heard the unsticking kiss-like sound of the tacky varnish on his armoire doors. Then came the muffle of clothes, the lisp of papers. The room was humid.

  “Titch,” said I. “What is happening?”

  “We are leaving, Wash. Keep quiet. Do not wake Esther.”

  “Leaving?”

  “For Saint Vincent. Or Saint Lucia. Any other island. Whichever way the winds will take us.”

  I was beginning to understand. “Titch.”

  “Go now, Wash. Dress yourself. Take only what you most value; we will find everything else anew. But be as silent as you can.”

  “I will be in chains before we even leave port.”

  “We will not take a boat, of course.”

  I paused. “You cannot mean the Cloud-cutter. In all this darkness? The Cloud-cutter?”

  He shoved something into what appeared to be my journeyman’s sack. “I have your sketching leads and your notebooks, some clothes, your magnifying lens.” He slapped it anxiously against my chest. “You may collect one or two things more. But think of the weight as you do.”

  I stood quite numb in his doorway.

  “Heaven’s sake, Wash,” he hissed. “Be quick about it.”

  Hearing the bite in his voice—he who rarely grew impatient—I felt suddenly cold. I heard then what must have been there all along: the vague hiss of wind in some cracked window.

  “Victuals are already packed and on the porch,” Titch whispered. “We can take little, given the weight. But they should do us fine until landfall.”

  Suddenly it became real, and I was filled with a sort of disbelieving terror. I shuffled nervously in the doorway. It struck me then, all he was risking to save me. “Please, Titch. I will accept whatever punishment awaits. I will hand myself over to Master Erasmus.”

  He turned sharply to me. “Get dressed. Make haste. We have not time at all.”

  When still I hesitated, he said something that has stayed with me all these years. “I am not doing this for you alone. I will not stay in this awful place. This is not a life for me.”

  Did he say this because he knew my mind? Because he knew I would not decline, if he were to risk his life regardless?

  I frowned. “Do you truly feel the Cloud-cutter is ready?”

  “If it will not rise now, it will not rise ever. I have been inflating it all night. Now, enough, enough talk. Quickly.”

  I hesitated.

  He turned fully to me in the dark. “Esther has already revealed that you went away with him—you understand she despises you, don’t you? She will do everything she can to implicate you in the death. Not that Erasmus will actually believe you responsible—but he will most certainly pretend to as a means of forcing me to hand you over. Consider, Wash—he had already requested your return even before this misfortune. What do you imagine will befall you now? What do yo
u imagine awaits?” He paused, his voice going quiet. “Sadly, you are caught in an ugly game between brothers. More than a game, now.” He exhaled slowly, harshly. “You are welcome, of course, to choose your own path, but in doing so ask yourself what is just. Look at the truth of this matter, and ask yourself what is rightful.”

  I faltered; his tone was flat, but still his words unsettled me. I stepped forward into the stain of the lantern light, and I took up my bag.

  In the hot, mulchy room a silence passed; then he raised the lantern to his face and blew out the light.

  * * *

  —

  AND SO WE FLED, staggering under our sacks in the grey half-light.

  The moon had dimmed. Titch relit the lantern and dropped a cloth over it, and we walked by the weak orange light, stumbling over the path we had traversed so many times. In silence we fumbled and scrambled our way slowly up towards Corvus Peak. I could see the mountain, black and alien against the grey sky. I felt an increasing dread, thinking of Mister Philip’s body nearby, for in the end Titch had not been able to collect up the remains, so that we’d only covered the outrage with a blanket he had brought. On the desk in his study he’d left behind a note detailing the suicide and a map where his cousin might be found.

  I feared we must be discovered; I feared the master must have some manner of guard or watch that would alert him to our passage. But Titch did not seem to share my fear; he walked steadily, distracted, weighed down by the seriousness of what he was about to do. As we neared the scrub edging the mountain, I searched and searched for the blood-marked blanket but could see nothing in the darkness.

  When we reached the peak, we slid our packs off, our legs trembling, our faces damp with sweat. A wind was blowing; the Cloud-cutter roared, creaked, leaning into its ropes. The wind was warm, unpleasant, with the scent of iron and rain in it. I watched Titch’s dark figure move to adjust the canister of gas in the blackness, grunting and cursing softly. The canopy hung high above me, a scorch against the lighter sky.