Washington Black: A Novel

by Esi Edugyan

  Even if I alone would know it. For I was not naive. My name, I understood, would never be known in the history of the place. It would be Goff, not a slight, disfigured black man, who would forever be celebrated as the father of Ocean House. When I allowed myself to truly think of it, a tightness rose behind my eyes. Goff was not a bad man—he did not like to take credit for my discoveries in principle, but I understood he was getting older, and that the desire to make a late sensation burned deep in him. And I understood too the greater conundrum—for how could I, a Negro eighteen years old, with no formal scientific training, approach the committee on my own, or even be seen as an equal in the enterprise?

  I did not dwell on it, in these slow, hazy days. London narrowed the hours, so that my life became gauzy, drifting, strange. The Goffs kept a small house edging the city, and they offered me the smaller garden house behind it, once storage for Goff’s lesser-used instruments. It was cramped and stank of mud but bright and pleasant enough. I adored it. Its four walls solid and final; my life made private, finally my own. To me the house felt inviolate. I knew that for any who would seek me I could still be discovered, but the shade of its tall Norway maples made me feel walled off from the world. For the first time in all remembering, I felt truly invisible.

  It was no slight to me to be kept from the main house. I understood Goff was eager to maintain the illusion that Tanna and I were not lovers, though the fact must have been uncomfortably clear to him. I was happy to indulge the falsehood if it allowed me to live so near.

  He had of course resisted my accompanying them to London. It was only in my laying bare all my troubles that he relented. But he remained gruff and unfriendly in the journey’s first week, so that I kept my distance. And yet, somehow, things began to shift during the long days at sea. We started to talk more and to joke again as we cared for the live specimens, and soon we were often together, changing and aerating the water, feeding our creatures. A bond took shape, something richer than the uneasy truce of Nova Scotia. I respected his mind and he mine, I believe, and this seemed, finally, enough.

  There had also been his shock at how others treated me. Goff grew daily more uneasy with this. One evening a lady in dark, expensive finery paused at our bench on the viewing deck. Curling her lip, she stared at me with theatrical astonishment. When Goff asked sharply what she meant by this performance, she said, “Your nigger is best kept with the other animals below deck.”

  I had never seen him so outraged. It was only through Tanna’s cautioning that some larger incident was not made of it. After that, when each new insult arose, he’d speak roughly to the aggressor, low-voiced and shivering, as if he were the slighted.

  The winter crossing was rough, and some of the less hardy genera began to die off. When the octopus I’d caught in the cove grew colourless, lethargic, we stopped paying the steward to bring us sea water. Instead, Goff and I descended to the clanging, grim lower hold on the rare days we were in port and, stepping out into the blanched air, we’d disembark alongside a crewman to gather clean sea water into fir-wood casks. Using some rude instrument of my devising, we tested for impurities. The breeze would lift my hat, and I’d crouch there with my sticks and papers, sometimes cupping the water to my face to taste for deadly metals. Occasionally, a small, curious crowd would gather at the boat’s glistening rail to peer down at the strange old man and his ugly burnt slave who drank straight from the sea.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE DARK, rain-drenched afternoons Tanna would steal onto the deck and, sitting beside me on my damp blankets, open a book across our laps and listen to me read. She made no corrections; it was not a lesson but rather a recitation, and somehow my reading became fluid. Weeks before we reached England, I could comprehend the complex sentences of all my cherished books; and their drawings, which I had long admired as depictions, came newly alive for me, like remembered conversations. They went beyond mere likeness now; they were blood and wing and cell and breath.

  And so the hours at sea were rich and peaceful, and I thought with a kind of longing of those strange months of drifting towards the Arctic, when the days turned endlessly white and freedom seemed a thing I might live in, like a coat, a warmth I could draw around myself as some armour against the world. How far away it all felt, that journey with Titch. As if a hard crust had grown over the loss of him.

  2

  AND YET, I was not convinced he was lost.

  Some weeks after we arrived in London, during a brisk walk in Blackfriars along the northern bank of the Thames, I caught a chill. Within hours I was too weak to stand, even to lift my head. I shivered and shivered, my teeth clicking in my jaw. And what filled my mind in that wretched state were scenes from the past: Willard’s attack, that last sad dinner at which I’d caught my final glimpse of Big Kit, the flash of Titch’s eyes as the pane of hydrogen exploded in shards between us. And I thought also of Titch still alive somewhere among these green fields of his country, pacing the same London streets with their laughter and dirty-cheeked children, their ill-lit alleyways alive with the bright hiss of rats. And a strange fog settled across my mind, a kind of dull, fireless anger.

  Tanna crept in every few hours and set the iron kettle on the coals. I sensed her presence flitting about the darkness, the pale weight of her lying beside me on the bed. I felt the warmth of her hand on my brow, and it was like a touch of sun seeping through the linens nailed at the window. Faintly, I called out, “Kit.”

  There was a rasping sound as of a machete being sharpened.

  “Kit,” I said again.

  “Shh. You must eat something.”

  The sound of the machete thinned, became, strangely, the sound of boiling water.

  “This is no evening,” I said. “Not now, not tonight. The moon is too low.”

  Her breath was close on my face. “Wash?”

  I felt myself surface a little, aware now that the voice was Tanna’s. She sounded distant, as if she were in another room, and when I raised my hand to touch her I felt only the unpleasantness of my own skin slick with sweat.

  I felt my shoes and socks quietly being removed, and I began to murmur, something about ashes in water, about winter.

  “Rest, Wash.” All at once there was a damp scrap of cloth across my eyes. “You will never recover unless you rest.”

  I do not know how many nights I lay delirious, only that I felt hot then cold then hot, my skin wet and my breath tasting of paper.

  I began to remember the weekend before last, when we had made the long, slow trek out to Weymouth, to the shoreline; and suddenly I was there again, wading into the cold waters. The dawn was calm, the beach deserted, and I removed my waistcoat and set to floating on my back, the sea plants shivering blackly on the surface all about me. I lay weightless with the water filling my ears, staring high above me at the brittle stars fading in the rising sun.

  * * *

  —

  I WOKE WITH a heaviness, as if a large cat had leapt upon my ribs. Around me the cottage’s wood creaked in the damp weather. I turned and twisted in the wet sheets, bleary-eyed, my head aching still. But the fever had finally broken. At the window the horizon burned redly over the dead grey grasses. I stood and I wetted my face and scraped at my teeth with the harsh brush, dressing without care. Then I pulled on my boots and coat and went out.

  I knew I should not venture outside, so shortly after recovering from my chill. But the cottage felt dark, close; I had been confined too long. The day was overcast, clouded, a thin fog silvering the maples. I waded through the brambles and mud, my boots squelching. Breath threaded from my mouth like vapour.

  How was it that I had lately given more thought to the possibility of his being alive than to Big Kit’s death? It was shameful. But my sense of betrayal shook me deeply—the idea that Titch had cut, rather casually, my tie to him, which was all I’d had in the world, my lifeblood.
I trod past a grove of dead elms and then into a grove of live ones, their leaves glistening. It seemed too early in the season for so great a rain, but here it was, vast and hanging over the fields in a mist. I felt as though I were passing through a canvas, a landscape of grey strokes.

  It struck me that his disappearance had been nothing but another desperate act to rid himself of me. That he had survived, and walked quite comfortably into another life.

  And yet what lengths, to shuck off one small, hopeless innocent. Perhaps he did not like to think of me unprotected in the world, and so was finally relieved to see how I might make a life with his father and Peter House. I thought of all the protections he had offered, his speeches that my humanity should be everywhere known and accepted. And yet Tanna’s objections to him bore some truth, I now saw. Titch’s actions were the truer measure, and he had abandoned me, in the end. Once he’d finished his papers on aerostation and the treatment of slaves on Faith, I had lost some value for him. I had become, perhaps, too solid, too heavy, too real—an object to be got rid of. He had mounted a frail Cloud-cutter, crossed a heaving black sea and walked vulnerable into a wall of snow, as though even the risking of his own life were worth being shed of me.

  How could he have treated me so, he who congratulated himself on his belief that I was his equal? I had never been his equal. To him, perhaps, any deep acceptance of equality was impossible. He saw only those who were there to be saved, and those who did the saving.

  * * *

  —

  I RETURNED TO FIND a smudged note pinned to my cottage door. Tanna had come to seek me out; when I returned, I should come to the main house to dine, if I felt myself so recovered that I could go out in this weather. The sharpness of her words made me, despite myself, smile. I set the note aside, and folding my coat on my cot, I sat instead at my tiny wooden table to draw.

  I drew and I drew, and I thought irritably of Titch. It turned black at the window and my hands began to ache, and still I drew, the lines fine and threadlike, taking on great dimension. Never, since leaving Faith, had I been compelled to depict it. Yet here it was, all that I could remember of it, in brisk, vicious detail. There were the huts, their roofs stripped half-bare by decades of hurricane weather, the Spanish cedars nearby and the great royal palm with its wondrous purple-and-yellow berries. There were the bright frogs croaking in the underbrush, and the old sugar boiler, its stone chimney piercing the aquamarine sky. There was the dry, stony path leading up to Wilde Hall, its canopy of redwoods eerie with moss that hung like white men’s hair, the sun’s glow red in the strands.

  There were the four tall walls of the hothouse I had lived in after Big Kit had broken my ribs as a child, the stone traced with water stains like large maps. There were the bullfinches that creaked from a high-up crater. And there was the tablet mounted above the hothouse’s entrance, the Latin script upon it: Not Unmindful of the Sick and Wretched.

  There were the fanged metal jaws of a mantrap meant to catch runaways, and the blood-blackened boulder upon which several men had been whipped dead, and there was the solitary redwood wide as a carriage, from which a weathered noose hung. And there were knife marks in the tree’s bark, where men had been pinned through the throat and left to perish, and there were the raw patches where the grass had not grown back since the bodies of the old and infirm had been set there to rot.

  And above it all, pristine and untroubled, sat Wilde Hall, with its clear view to the sea—a sea turquoise and glistening with phosphorus, the miles of sand pure and white as salt.

  3

  AT LAST I UNDERSTOOD what was working its way through me: I desired, despite every apprehension, to find Titch. The need was strong in me; to know if he lived still, and to confront him. My life had been one life before he had taken me up; this he had wrenched off course into a thing of wonder and then loneliness and destitution. My current life, I realized, was constructed around an absence; for all its richness I still felt as if the floors might give way, as if its core were only a covering of leaves, and I would slip through, falling endlessly, never again to get my footing.

  I could delay it no longer. I would go to Granbourne. I would seek him out there.

  Would I find him in residence? I did not know. But it only made sense for him to have returned to its halls. He had griped and complained and hated it with a passion. And yet it struck me as his only true sanctuary from a rough world that misunderstood him, the seat of his wealth and his privilege, a place he would forever be drawn to as water is drawn to its source. And so I addressed a letter to him there and received, surprisingly, a response from his mother, inviting me to afternoon tea.

  The reply made me uneasy. Why had not Titch himself written? Was it as Tanna had foretold? Was he dead?

  Over a cold herring lunch the next afternoon I mentioned my intentions to the Goffs.

  Tanna quietly set down her fork. She did not frown, but there was something of that harshness on her brow.

  “But why?” she said. “Why seek him out? Where is the sense in it?”

  Goff sat chewing with swift, squirrel-like bites, clearing his throat gruffly but not speaking. As usual he seemed unaware of his daughter’s annoyance.

  I had grown flustered; Tanna seemed, in that moment, incapable of all understanding. “I would just like to speak with him again. To have him explain where he went.”

  In truth, my reasons proved as murky to me as they did to her. I suppose I wanted an apology, some expression of his remorse. Or at the very least, an explanation. I wanted him to tell me why he had plucked me from my life of toil in the first place, if anything had existed for him beyond the possibilities of my being useful to his cause. I wanted to know why my loyalty had moved him so little that he’d abruptly abandoned me. Perhaps his words would never be enough, in the end. Perhaps it was stupid to seek any peace from him. But I wanted very much to hear him speak my name, and to read in his face the guilt, the shame. And if there was no guilt or shame, I wanted to see that too.

  “What good will it do, seeing him?” said Tanna. “What will it resolve?”

  I made no answer.

  “Does it not seem more likely that Willard lied to you? That Christopher Wilde is dead?”

  “It does. But that still does not mean it is impossible.”

  “Who?” said Goff suddenly, abruptly. He gave a sharp cough. “Oh, yes, I remember.”

  “And in any event, why should Wilde go to Granbourne?” said Tanna. “Why would he retreat there? He despised the place. You said it yourself.”

  “It was his home. He hated it, but he was tied to it in a way I think he himself little understood. I know him. If he is not there currently, he will have recently passed through it.”

  “If he is still alive.”

  “If he is alive, yes.”

  Tanna drew a breath, as though to calm herself. “The truth of the matter is that Wilde did nothing to further your cause that did not further his own. You were a convenience for him.”

  I rubbed at my face in frustration.

  Her cheeks reddened. “Well, you cannot go Tuesday next. We promised Father we’d source the Portland cement for the artificial rocks.” She glanced over at Goff, who was wholly absorbed in his meal. “Father?”

  “What’s that?” said Goff.

  “Surely it can wait a day, no?” I turned to Goff. “Or perhaps you might go yourself, sir?”

  “We’ve also to drop the plans for the tanks at Wolcott and Sons,” said Tanna. “He will need us to explain them.”

  After months of searching we had finally found engineers competent enough to build my complex designs.

  “Mister Wolcott likes and respects you,” I said testily. “He will not mistreat you if you go alone.”

  She appeared wounded by the suggestion. “Finding Christopher Wilde is important to you. Surely I should be at your side.”

/>   Something twisted in me. I had been anxious about going alone, and yet I did not wish to be accompanied by her criticism, by her vocal insistence that my search was foolish and futile. My nerves, I was surprised to learn, were raw already.

  “I will bite my tongue in silence,” said she. “I promise.”

  “Bite your tongue in silence,” Goff grumbled. “It will be a bloody stump before you’re halfway down the lane.”

  She smiled nervously across at me, and I lowered my eyes.

  * * *

  —

  WE WERE DAYS in preparation. The visit to Wolcott and Sons was delayed until our return, and Goff was left unhappily with the task of sourcing eelgrass. And then we set out, the cool morning still damp with the evening rains.

  We spoke little on the journey. I sensed Tanna’s confusion, her lack of understanding that we should be going at all. I was tired, and did not wish to defend myself. We leaned softly against each other, silent, watching the city thin out and fall away.

  Finally we reached the edge of the great estate. Driving up the gravel path, through the silver maples, we glimpsed buildings so rotted it was impossible they should be standing. I could see a gathering of thatch-roofed cottages, and a crumbling gardener’s shack seemingly held together by vines grown through the stone. Against a rain-soaked carriage house someone had lined up broken axles, black as burnt bones.

  I felt myself nearing the centre of a great darkness, a world from which my childhood, Faith—the endless suffering and labour there—was but a single spoke on a vast wheel. Here was the source, the beginning and the end of a power that asserted itself over life, death, the very birth of children. We cantered through a grove of low-hanging branches. I listened to the horse’s shoes biting into the gravel, mud grinding under the carriage wheels. The air tasted of metal, and I remembered suddenly the Far North, the ferocity of the cold.