Washington Black: A Novel

by Esi Edugyan

  Titch called to me urgently, and I clambered into the wicker-and-wood gondola, its oars stretching like antennae into the sky, its four odd wings creaking like rudders in the wind. How terrifying it all looked, in the dark; a great hot fear of death went through me. As Titch was double-checking the bolts and knots, he paused to give me a strange, quiet look. But I said nothing, and he said nothing, and in the silence he turned back to his preparations.

  “Well, Wash,” he said at last.

  “Well,” I said, terrified.

  Then, without another word, he adjusted the canister. A higher column of fire surged upwards into the canopy, and the fabric began to shudder and shake. The shaking was terrible. My teeth rattled in my skull. I stared in fascinated terror at the broad black mouth sucking up fire.

  The air stank of char and smoke, of burning oil. Finally Titch leaned over and severed each rope in its turn. All around me I could hear the hissing of the grass as the wicker basket was dragged across it—a vicious, final sound.

  In the half-light I could just make out the hollows of Titch’s face, his eyes blacked out, only the white shards of his teeth distinct and visible. I felt a give in my belly; I clutched at the oars of the Cloud-cutter in dread. The air around us began to howl; the sky rushed towards us. We were rising.

  I can barely describe the sight of it. I saw the threatening sky below, a great red crack of light, like a monstrous eye just opening. The sky was still black where we were, but the wind was already hurling us seaward. I watched the half-cut cane fields in the faint light, the white scars of harvest glistening like the part in a woman’s hair.

  What did I feel? What would anyone feel, in such a place? My chest ached with anguish and wonder, an astonishment that went on and on, and I could not catch my breath. The Cloud-cutter spun, turned gradually faster, rising ever higher. I began to cry—deep, silent, racking sobs, my face turned away from Titch, staring out onto the boundlessness of the world. The air grew colder, crept in webs across my skin. All was shadow, red light, storm-fire and frenzy. And up we went into the eye of it, untouched, miraculous.

  PART II

  Adrift

  1832

  1

  THE SQUALL STRUCK us not an hour out from the island. It fell upon us with sudden force, roaring, and I stumbled back against the oarlock, my arms outstretched as the small craft swung wildly from its ropes. Titch hurled himself across the Cloud-cutter and, fumbling with the ballasts, hollered at me in the darkness. But I could see very little, only the pale, lithe shape of his face, the shadow where his mouth should have been.

  I think now that he was not so surprised as I. As we had sailed out into the blackness, I recall how he tapped at the barometer and exclaimed softly to himself; how he shuffled about on his knees in the bed of the Cloud-cutter, sifting through our packages; how he separated the least necessary into a pile at the stern. And I have not forgotten how, in the moments after the storm struck, Titch at once took up that small pile and hurled it over into the darkness.

  He leaned in close to me, the winds flattening his hair, crying out, “We must try to get above it. We must go up!” He stabbed upwards with his fingers, as though I might have any notion as to how to manage this.

  A strong wind suddenly buffeted us, and Titch was thrown backwards, seizing one of the guy ropes at the edge of the drop to steady himself. “It will not do, Wash! It will not do!”

  I shut my eyes.

  I felt us descending, plummeting through the storm. The rain came on now and it lashed at us, the coated fabric of the balloon crackling under the onslaught. Titch brought us down, the covered lantern still fixed madly to the prow of the Cloud-cutter. I gripped the edge and peered up over, could see now the distant, black, roiling waves of the ocean below us. We were falling fast.

  “Titch!” I shouted. “Titch!”

  He did not hear me, and I grabbed for his arm, gesturing at a far swell. A light seemed to be shimmering off the crests of the waves, and then it was gone, lost, everything so dark that I did not know if I had imagined it. A cavernous blackness rang out.

  Titch leaned into the guide ropes, drawing the aerostat with all his might towards that darkness, steering us in. From between the wide, mountainous swells I glimpsed a leaning spike of wood. A silhouetted ship hove into view, rolling almost on its side, and then it crested and rode foaming down the swells to disappear again. A moment later it rose up. I swallowed and, turning, stared at the madman leaning soaked into his ropes. For I understood: Titch was aiming us directly for that ship.

  We struck the mast at an odd angle and tilted, then smashed downward in a great splinter of wood. We lifted again and crashed again down, before the Cloud-cutter was dragged across the deck with a hissing screech, hopping gently into the air, then turned over upon itself in a bellow of splinters.

  Dazed, I shook my head. Something warm was pouring over my face. I felt myself hanging upside down, and knew I was tangled in the Cloud-cutter’s ropes. And then I saw Titch’s face in the rain, upside down, shouting at me, and then I could see nothing again but darkness.

  The Cloud-cutter groaned terribly, and started to slide towards the edge of the ship.

  “Wash!” Titch cried. He was pulling at the ropes with a frantic energy, but I could not be freed. I could feel the Cloud-cutter pull away in the wind, light, boneless. My stomach lurched.

  “Wash, free your hand!” Titch was shouting. He had set a boot against the Cloud-cutter’s prow, was leaning with all his might.

  The ship rose again, vertically, coasting up a wall of water. I was staring upside down into the darkness, and it seemed the world had gone mad.

  Then out of the rain and wind a figure appeared behind Titch, staggering. It shoved him to one side. A thick, bearded brute of a man, spray flying from his beard, dragging beside him an axe. He heaved back and swung, chopping the knot of ropes pinning my throat. I collapsed forward, free, onto all fours, gasping into the rain.

  The deck was slick, cold. I half-lifted my face.

  I could hear the man hollering something in a guttural tongue. Titch too was shouting.

  A sudden gust of wind dragged the balloon crackling up into the air over the black waters. The Cloud-cutter lifted upright and scraped sharply backwards, making a terrible shriek. I watched it smash into a row of barrels in the fore-rigging and ricochet up, and then suddenly it was sucked out into the storm, leaving only wreckage and blackness. All the while the rain, silver by the ship’s lanterns, sliced painfully down upon us.

  2

  AND SO we did not die.

  The burly man with the axe proved to be the ship’s captain, a German by birth, an Englishman by chance, who went by the name of Benedikt Kinast. He was sixty years old at least, with pulsing red hands and extravagant wrinkles. He dragged us down, soaked, gasping, out of the storm and into the swaying, creaking hold of the ship. There were sailors moving rapidly in the shadows, tying ropes fast, working at the hatches. At each sudden shift of the vessel a great dunk of water poured in through the hatch, sloshing at our feet.

  There was a single lit lantern hanging from a nail on a beam above Mister Benedikt’s head. He turned on us in the swaying light and swore. “You cracked the mizzen and damaged my victuals,” he bellowed. “What business have you, anyhow, being out in a storm like this, in a contraption like that?”

  “It was a Cloud-cutter,” said Titch.

  “I do not give a shit what you call it. You don’t drop it on my aft-deck. Who are you?” he said, turning on Titch.

  “I might ask you the same, sir,” Titch replied. “And your vessel, in fact, did not damage my Cloud-cutter, but rather destroyed it. Entirely. I might suggest you owe me for the expense of an entire new contraption, as you call it.”

  The captain wiped at his wet beard with a big red open hand. He glanced over my shoulder. “Mister Slipp, get back and lash the barre
ls fast. I won’t have more damage this night.” His eyes fixed again on Titch. “I was on course here, steady as the fucking stars. You fell on me.”

  “Captain!” a second man called from above. “Cutter’s like to give!”

  “Fix it fast, you bastards!” he roared.

  “We, Captain, were in complete control,” Titch continued smoothly, as if the burly man had not just shouted. “We were flying low to keep out of the storm. You sailed into us. Where were your deck lanterns, sir? How is it you sail so unmarked?”

  “A goddamn storm,” Mister Benedikt muttered. “A balloon in a goddamn storm.”

  Titch’s head was bent forward to keep it from striking the low ceiling, and he reached up now with both arms to grip a beam for balance. He said, angrily, “One would be forgiven, sir, for mistaking this for a smuggling vessel. Who else sails at night, without lights?”

  “You’ll want to watch your bloody mouth.”

  “You mean my bloody mouth, sir,” Titch snapped.

  The two men glared at each other as the ship swayed; both were leaning into their thigh muscles to keep in place. My stomach lurched. The captain was powerful, all spit and outrage, an extension of the storm itself.

  “You’re a bold one, aren’t you?” he said. “You have a name?”

  Titch remained silent.

  “Don’t care to say, eh?” said Mister Benedikt. “Someone after you, then? Pair of fugitives?”

  “Christopher Wilde,” Titch said, looking leadenly at the man. “Son of James Wilde, Fellow of the Royal Society, recipient of the Copley Medal and the Bakerian lectureship.”

  Captain Benedikt puffed out his cheeks. “Royal Society.”

  “My friend here calls me Titch.”

  Though the storm had not abated, still something had shifted, eased, between us three below decks. Captain Benedikt turned an angry smile on me, and grunted. “Friend? Ain’t you property, boy?”

  Titch let go of the beam he had been clutching for balance and set a hand on my shoulder. “Indeed, the boy is my property,” said he, and I was rattled to hear him speak these words. “He has shown himself an excellent scientific illustrator, and so, rather than wasting his talents in physical labour, I’ve made better use of him as a personal assistant. He has quite a gift for expressing aeronautical methodologies in ink. You and your crew would be wise to treat him with the respect he is due. There are powerful men in England studying our latest report with interest.”

  Mister Benedikt chewed at his pipe stem. “Oh, give off,” he said. “Looks a plain old nigger slave to me.”

  “The first rule of science, Captain, is to doubt appearances and to seek substances in their stead.”

  The ship rolled, turned, rolled. “Substances my arse,” Mister Benedikt said, paying the movement no mind. “You still owe me a ship’s worth of repairs, Christopher Wilde, and we’ll be talking to the substance of that right enough.”

  * * *

  —

  MY SCALP WAS bleeding. Captain Benedikt had handed across to me a large red handkerchief cold with salt water, and when I pressed it to my head, the wound at once started to sting. He explained that a ship’s surgeon was on board, though violently ill in his cabin. He scowled and told us to find our way aft to the fellow, and to keep out of the way of his bloody sailors.

  “Go on,” spat Mister Benedikt, “the both of you. I won’t have you expiring on my damned deck. Go.”

  “Where do we find this surgeon?” Titch asked, his knees shifting as the ship ascended another swell.

  There was a crash and the sound of men hollering from above.

  “Do I look like a man with the time to offer directions?” Mister Benedikt roared. Nevertheless, he said, “Straight along past the hammocks and up the first ladder. You’ll know it by the bile between your toes.” He turned to go, muttering and shaking his head. “It’s a goddamn barque, you can’t walk far without finding open water.”

  Titch gave me an exhausted look, and I could see the toll the evening’s events had taken. He led me on, into the darkness of the ship, falling against the narrow walls, ducking his head as he went. A single lantern swayed on a hook near some webbing, and the shadows crawled across the walls. A sealed wooden box slid the length of the cabin; it splashed up against the far wall then rolled back in the ankle-deep surf.

  An image of Mister Philip’s wrecked face flashed in my mind, and I was overcome with a sick sort of panic. It seemed inevitable to me we’d be found out; that the stink of blood was on me still.

  The old surgeon opened his cabin door at the second knock. I caught my breath, staring. I did not understand the nature of the joke. For it was Captain Benedikt who stood before us, groaning, his coat changed and dry now, his hair drawn tightly back from his pained face. He wore the same beard, coughed the same damp cough. “What is it?” he barked.

  “Captain?” said Titch.

  Then I saw the missing fingers on the man’s left hand and shook my head, confounded.

  He stepped back, gestured us in with his chin. “I take it you were sent here to be examined? Come, let me have a look at you. You are the gentlemen who fell upon our deck, no doubt. Come in, do. My brother will be cross if I do not at least bandage that cut on the boy’s head.”

  “Look at him, Titch,” said I, astonished. “He is the very image.”

  “They are twins, Wash,” said Titch.

  “I trust we are,” the surgeon said. “Or there is more mystery to my origins than I can account for. Will you sit?” The surgeon gave us a weak smile. “Theo Kinast, sir, ship’s surgeon and general source of sailors’ misery,” he said to Titch. “And you, boy. Hold yourself steady so I can see to that gash. Though from the looks of it the cut is nothing to your past injuries. What a ghastly burn.”

  I gripped the edge of his narrow bed frame as the floor shifted under us. I clenched my teeth as he poked at my wound, though I knew better than to speak or cry out.

  The doctor muttered as he worked. “Gave the lads quite a scare, you did, dropping like gods from the sky. Some of them are quite superstitious.” He coughed, turning to Titch. “Now, what is your name?”

  “Christopher Wilde, sir.”

  “The nigger called you Titch.”

  Titch frowned. “The boy is called Washington. And yes, he did call me Titch.”

  The surgeon eyed us both, grunting. “Well, Mister Wilde, what do you mean by flying about in this weather? What were you flying away from?” He poked some sharp thing at my scalp and I let out a cry. “Stop it, now,” he said to me, but not unkindly. He glanced wearily at Titch. “The lads tell me my brother believes the boy a fugitive. Believes that you, sir, are stealing this black away from his rightful master.”

  “I am his master,” Titch said patiently. “As I explained to your brother, the boy is my assistant on the plantation. I was launching a prototype of my aerostat.”

  “And which plantation would that be?” said the surgeon.

  “Hope, on Saint Lucia.”

  “Why would a planter venture out in such a fashion, leaving his plantation to the whims of others?”

  “I am not the planter—I oversee the slaves who operate the mechanized tools. I am trained as an engineer, you see. I was given full use of the plantation’s resources, as well as some few days off to make a successful launch of my aerostat. If I’d triumphed, the Cloud-cutter would have proved an invaluable tool in our daily operations there. This boy you see here was granted me as an assistant. He has played a crucial role in the assembly and launching of my aerostat.”

  “The balloon that is now at the bottom of the sea,” said the doctor.

  “It is not a balloon,” said Titch.

  The surgeon smiled tiredly.

  “What is progress, sir, without error?” said Titch.

  “Hold still,” said the surgeon.
But he leaned back and gave me a curious look. Above his beard he had a long, needling nose and deep-set black eyes. His brow jutted outwards like some awesome precipice. And despite all, his dark eyes seemed to me soft, restless, thoughtful, with a kindness so rarely granted to one like me that, meeting his eyes, I shivered.

  * * *

  —

  THE MORNING WATERS were calm. The ship smelled of tar, of vomit and salt water. Again I had not slept; I lay in a twist of blankets beside Titch on the planks of a tiny, unfurnished cabin. Titch had been so tired he’d begun to snore as soon as he’d lain down. In sleep he looked easy, emptied of all striving, like someone granted a clemency. I recalled his lie of the night before, the chill it had sent through me to hear him claim me as his property. The ruse had of course been necessary, but still it felt eerie to me, like a sudden breach of reality. Most strange, I think, was that in a parallel life—or perhaps even a prior one, before his moral awakening—Titch’s story might have been the truth.

  He stirred now, his bones cracking softly, his face pale with exhaustion. He sat up, rubbing at his cheeks, and for a moment I glimpsed in him the anguish of the earlier evening. Catching my eyes on him, he gave a slow, sad smile. “We have made it away, Wash,” he murmured. “What a miracle.”

  I returned the smile, but could not help but think of Mister Philip, and of the master. I knew Titch could not possibly fault me for all that had happened, but still I felt uneasy at having been the sole witness of his cousin’s brutal death, and for wrenching both of our lives off course. I was terrified also of being found out by the Kinasts. Did the brothers have some method of detection to discover where we had come from, what we actually were? What would they do with us then? The boat rose gently under us on the swells, and I got up in silence to clean my teeth and face.