Washington Black: A Novel

by Esi Edugyan

  Our guide beckoned the boy in a sharp voice, and in an exchange that struck me as both plaintive and tender, something was understood, some agreement reached. The boy finally gestured for us to follow, and I glanced questioningly back at our guide, at the folds of sweat in his dust-caked face. He gave his friendly smile, nodded.

  I began to drag our bags by the rope, so that an eerie sound echoed off the ground. We followed the boy in the direction of the courtyard. In the evening shadows I could see little before me, and an uneasiness rose in me, the hard knowledge of having arrived in a country in which I could not even speak to ask for water, into which I had brought Tanna unthinkingly and without defences. I stared at her veiled shape there, her body tiny and fragile.

  It was as though the courtyard contained its own weather; the air was suddenly stiller, cooler. There was a smell of boiled peppers, of clean fabric hung in the wind to dry. The dusk seemed younger here somehow, and in the open yard, its swept stone so white it had the sheen of a frozen pond, a great covered object loomed darkly. We paused, startled by the enormousness of the shadow’s size. It was silhouetted against the starlit sky and the walls of the compound like a natural obstruction, yet one could see that whatever lay beneath the tarp was not natural. My eyes adjusted, and still I could not make out what it was.

  There came some movement from the side of the courtyard. A man had stepped from a doorway, a live hen struggling in his hands. He held the bird by its legs, and in the darkness its feathers appeared very white, like wax. It was clear that the man meant to kill it for his evening meal; indeed, that it should have been brought inside alive in the first place struck me as strange. We watched in silence as he crossed the courtyard pinching and prodding at the chicken, testing for the meaty places.

  He shifted, and in the dim light of the moon I saw him, saw his face. And before I even understood, a great pain passed through my body and I called out, “Titch.”

  The man turned; in his surprise he let go of the hen. The bird flapped madly away, its free limbs scuttling across the courtyard and into the shadows.

  He watched after it some moments, his harsh breathing filling the yard.

  “You are late for supper,” he called back, but in the thin grey light I stepped forward and saw he was trembling.

  14

  THE DOOR WAS made of four weathered planks hammered together with metal, and he led us through this inside, into the yellow candlelight of his front room. It was cool in here, though warmer than outside, the walls thick, the few windows tiny. The room was small and fastidiously clean, and among the local tapestries and baskets were chairs and tables very much in the European style, as though he’d sought to bring order to this world through the familiar.

  We passed through this place to the smaller room in back, and it was this low-ceilinged space, with its doorway he had to dip his head to get through, that was evidently where he did his true living. There was a cot upon which the greyed sheets were strewn like a sleeping dog. Books had been stacked at the lone window; by the far wall, on a wooden block notched by scratches, sat a half-cut red pepper, spilling its seeds.

  He paused at the room’s centre, and it was as if he did not want to—as if he wished to keep moving so as to avoid our eyes. He turned to us with a tired smile, and at this full glimpse of his body, this full sight of his face, tears rose to my eyes at the great familiarity and difference in him. He was as he had ever been, his green eyes bright and inquisitive, the white scar rising like a thread from either side of his mouth. His dress was casual, and English, wrinkled white linen shirttails and pale trousers, and though he did appear different in them, older, they were not what jarred. Rather, some indefinable thing had shifted in his features, his eyes especially—there was beneath his gaze such concentrated pain that for a moment I thought, It is not him, we have come to the wrong place. He was like someone only slowly becoming aware of a malady taking root inside him, confused by the first stirrings of tiredness. It was as though, in the four years of his absence, he had come closer to an understanding of darkness, closer to knowing what his cousin Philip had always accepted, that destruction was within us, and nothing we could hide from.

  “Washington,” said he in his soft, low voice. “I dreamed you would come. How grown you are.”

  So empty a comment, after what felt a lifetime of being lost to each other. The urge was strong in me to embrace him, and yet I held back, I could not do it, I could not close the warm, dim distance between us.

  * * *

  —

  WE SAT IN the flickering shadows of the front room—Titch, Tanna, our guide, the young boy and myself—cupping warm bowls of vegetable stew in our hands. For all my hunger I couldn’t eat, couldn’t take my eyes from the changed and familiar face. In the orange light his jaw appeared long, horselike, and he chewed every bite with great consideration. He seemed to be feeling out each vegetable with his tongue. When he caught sight of me watching him, he smiled pathetically.

  “Toothache,” said he, abashed. “I have not the courage to pull it out.”

  “There are no doctors here?” said Tanna.

  Titch was chewing by one side of his mouth. “I fear their medicine.”

  I listened to the others eat, searching his face. He seemed not to look at me, to speak generally to everyone, his eyes meeting mine rarely. And though it had been but four years, I found I could not read him; if he was astonished or saddened or irritated at our appearance here, I did not know. His manners were elegant, and it was as though they created a barrier around him.

  “How serendipitous, then, that we arrived just in time to scare away your chicken,” Tanna smiled. “There are no bones to contend with in vegetables.”

  “A very merciful act.”

  His comment somehow brought to Tanna’s mind the scene of the bleeding camel, and she began to describe it.

  “It was rabid, perhaps,” said Titch. “When one goes rabid it must be killed, or it will kill people.”

  “Kill people?”

  “They creep up on sleeping men and crouch on the chests of sleeping men, suffocating them.”

  Tanna brought a hand to her mouth, but the gruesomeness of the story obviously interested her.

  How strange all this was—that after months of speaking harshly of Titch, Tanna was as gentle and polite with him as I’d ever known her to be with anyone. I had watched the slow transformation taking place within her—the coldness with which she’d first given her name, then the growing interest in his formidable presence, as if she could not help herself; and finally her apparent pity at his outcast circumstances, as though he had not himself chosen them. Perhaps it was a question of his mental fortitude: she too saw the anguish in his eyes and did not wish to tax him further, knowing that our surprise arrival here would be strain enough. And she was right to be kind. But I did feel as though she’d left me standing alone, in a resentment I alone would carry. I stared at Titch’s face and a great sadness rose up in me, but I felt wounded too, angry, adrift.

  Outside, the tarp thrummed in a sudden wind.

  “Your arrival could not have been better timed,” said Titch. “We are awaiting a storm. You would not have wished to be caught out in it.”

  “And yet there was so little wind earlier,” said Tanna.

  “Change here is swift. It burns hot and then cold. Bright and then dark.”

  “I’ve heard it said there is no weather like African weather.”

  “The regions differ vastly. Though I suppose it could be said generally.”

  I peered across at the boy, at his thin, intelligent face. The traces of dust in his hair gave him an air of age, but he was so very young, and hopelessly at sea in our English conversation. He had not been formally introduced to us and it began to seem he would not be. Titch looked at him rarely, and always with an instructive frown; I sensed a tenderness there, so that a pain ro
se in my throat and I looked swiftly away.

  “What is that outside, under the tarp?” Tanna said. “We had such a fright.”

  Titch was chewing thoughtfully. I sensed again his great effort not to look at me. “You called at Granbourne, you mentioned. My mother was well?”

  “Extremely well,” said Tanna. “She had just returned from a ride.”

  “So her bile was up. Was she perfectly horrid?”

  Tanna paused. “I believe she was tired.”

  “She is my mother, and you are therefore too polite to impugn her. But your good manners do not make her bad ones any less awful.” Titch sighed. “Did she feed you, at the very least? I do hope you got a good supper.”

  Tanna shrugged helplessly. “It was for the best, I believe. We might have found ourselves on the menu.”

  Titch smiled. “Well, I do apologize for anything she might have said to upset you.”

  How eager he was to accept responsibility for a slight done by his mother; but where was the remorse towards me, the guilt?

  “At the very least she let you know of my whereabouts, and so I am grateful to her,” said he.

  Tanna paused, then explained how we had come to find him.

  Titch laughed. “Well, all the same, you are here. I cannot believe you came all this way.” For the first time since our arrival he looked squarely at me. And to my surprise I thought I glimpsed, in the sheen of his eyes by the dim candlelight, an uneasiness nearing fear.

  “You said you dreamed me,” I said abruptly. They were the first words I had spoken and I felt the others turn towards me in surprise. “What did you mean?”

  “Dreamed you?” said Titch.

  “When I arrived. That you had dreamed I would come.”

  “Did I?” Titch shook his head, as if genuinely puzzled. “I cannot imagine my meaning.”

  15

  THE HOUR GREW LATE. Titch insisted Tanna take the back room with the cot; I was invited to sleep on the settee in the front room we’d eaten in. He himself would sleep alongside the boy in a tent pitched outside. When Tanna objected, Titch explained, “We might have done so anyway, on a night such as this. To observe the stars.”

  “You said there was a storm coming.”

  “It is well sheltered from the weather,” Titch said. “I’m more concerned about scorpions and snakes.”

  “Dear god.”

  “Rest easy.” Titch smiled tiredly. “Do stay off the floor.”

  And taking the boy by the shoulder, he went out, our driver following quietly behind.

  I could not get comfortable for the sensation that I was lying where Titch’s own body sat, day after day. I twisted and turned. There was also the cold; how surprising that such cold should exist in the desert. When finally I did drift off I dreamed of Ocean House. But it was no grey wood building half-salvaged from a fire. It was a huge glass structure, an enormous greenhouse, its sides all windows, reflecting the frenzied trees around it. Everything was shimmer and light. I stood staring, my eyes wincing up at the bright, rattling panes.

  All at once Big Kit was beside me. I felt no tension from her, no pain—she appeared to be in a state of resolute calm, as if the hard layer of fury she’d worn about her like an armour had been scraped away. Her cheeks looked hollowed in the dusk, her face speckled with the late afternoon light sieving through the trees. She seemed in her silence neither fully awake nor sleeping, nor even dead or alive. She had outgrown such borders, passed through them into some murkier place. There was in her orange eyes a brightness like copper, a hot, lucent sheen. But she did not glance at me. I thought I should reach out, take her hand as I’d always done. Instead I only stood quietly beside her, feeling the heat pouring from her skin, the good living warmth of it. The wind held a smell of rain, of mud, though the sun lingered. Our reflections shivered in the mirrored panes like spectres.

  And then I awoke.

  * * *

  —

  MY BAD RIBS ACHED, so that I rose from the settee and paced the small room. I wanted to go outside, to take the air. The cold was as suffocating as any heat. I flattened my palm along the wall, guiding my slow way forward by the coarse plaster. The room smelled still of boiled vegetables.

  I was disoriented, and found myself instead in the back room with the cot. How I could get lost in a two-room dwelling I did not understand. In the dark I could see Tanna’s sleeping form breathing softly. It was the smaller of the rooms, the walls painted stark white and left bare of portraiture. There were thin cracks in the plaster and I could hear small creatures scuttling in and out of these breaches.

  I was feeling my way towards the door when I heard Tanna call out, “Who’s there?”

  “You are awake?” I said, going to sit by her cot. Moonlight fell in a large pane on the wall above her prone body. “Forgive me, I did not mean to frighten you.”

  I felt her soft grip on my shoulder, and I pressed my lips to her moist hand.

  “You could not sleep?” she yawned.

  “I had a dream,” said I.

  “What was it?”

  I kissed her hand again, patted it. The moonlight began to drift slowly across the stippled whitewash, so that the wall appeared almost lunar.

  “England feels very far away,” she murmured.

  “It does.”

  “Ocean House feels very far away.”

  Indeed, it was as though many years had passed, so much another life did that seem.

  “Do you despise me?” she said softly. I turned to her in the darkness, not understanding. “For being kind to him?”

  “Of course not—you are decent, merciful. It is why I love you.”

  She hesitated. “His eyes—never in all my life have I seen such pain in a man’s eyes. You did not tell me he looked like that.”

  “He did not always. When I knew him he was different.”

  “It must be so shocking to you.”

  I said nothing, brushing grit from my hand.

  “Is it as you imagined?” she said, yawning again. “All this? Is it what you had pictured?”

  “One could hardly imagine this.”

  “No.” She fell suddenly silent.

  “What is it?”

  I sensed her turning away in the dark. “Nothing.”

  But I thought I understood what she would not ask. I understood she desired to know if I had found what I was seeking, if this trip would finally satisfy my erratic pursuit of an unanswerable truth, if it would calm my sense of rootlessness, solve the chaos of my origins for me. She wanted to know if anything would be laid to rest, or if we’d continue to drift through the world together, going from place to place until I made her like me, so lacking a foothold anywhere that nowhere felt like home.

  “It was a madness, coming here,” I said quietly. “I am sorry.”

  But she had already softened into sleep.

  * * *

  —

  I NOTICED THEN a door just beyond her cot, leading outside. I went forward slowly and opened it, the breeze rushing in. Above the low roof the heavens were vast, filled with bright stars. I could hear a thrumming in the distance, and I thought it must be the large tarp in the courtyard out front, shuddering in the strong wind. The air was even cooler, denser, and I shivered. I looked up into the illuminated plate of the sky.

  I saw a door to the very right of me, as if there were another room. It was half-open and spilling with light, as in a dream. Uneasy, I went towards it.

  Going in, I stepped instantly back.

  Dozens of scientific instruments had been piled here, so many papers and scales and scopes that the door could only open partway before striking a desk on which a candle was set. It was as if a single obsessive thought had been made manifest in these tools; each steel piece seemed an idea cast aside, each glass scope a possible answer. />
  Nailed to the walls were several glossy black sheets; in the middle of them, like drops of milk dissolving in ink, were blots of the purest white. They were ghostly, strange, like phantoms of the human brain. I stood mesmerized before them, so that it was some time before my eyes roamed to the picture pinned beside them. It was a portrait of the boy, his eyes clear and dark-lashed, his right cheek distorted by poor fixatives. It was as if light had attacked one side of his face, as if the chemicals had been unstable.

  “Those are the moon.”

  I turned to find Titch still dressed in his clothes from the evening. He appeared less nervous, though the uneasiness was there still. He stepped forward. “I attempted to capture an image of the moon by polishing sheets of silver-plated copper, treating them with fumes and exposing them at midnight.” He traced his slender, emerald-ringed finger from the white blots to the child’s face. “The process works much better with human faces than astral features, as you see. But my goal is to have them be equally sharp. I think it is a question of distance. Of distance from one’s subject.”

  I searched his face, feeling there was something now more recognizable in it.

  “But human faces are so interesting,” said I.

  “Yes, to be sure. But when you are looking at one face, you are not looking at another. You are privileging that face. You are deciding who is worthy of observation and who is not. You are choosing who is worth preserving.” He shook his head, and it was as though he was too tired to hear the irony in his words.

  I gestured at the portrait of the young boy. “He is your assistant?”

  Titch hesitated. “He is learning.” He glanced away. “It comes, though slowly.”

  I nodded.

  “I did not—” said he, and I turned to find him flushed. “I was afraid you might think…I did not want you to think I had merely replaced you.”