Washington Black

by Esi Edugyan

  “I am not staying in any place,” he said bitterly. “Do you understand me? I am not staying in England, I am not staying in America, I am not staying in the Indies, and I am certainly not staying here.”

  A dread came over me then. We had reached, it seemed, the very summit of the earth; there would be no better place to hide. I tried to smile. “There is nothing in any of those places for me either. Where shall we go, then?”

  But Titch had turned away from me again and was silent. I felt a sudden misgiving. I studied the jagged outline of his profile, saw in the dim light the white line of his scar trailing like a fine hair from the side of his mouth. I felt there was more he was not saying, something that had driven him beyond anger, caused him to despair. Whatever else they had discussed, it had raised in him a deep anguish.

  “Titch,” I said gently. “I will go wherever you wish.”

  When he looked at me, his eyes were red.

  “I will go wherever.”

  “You are steadfast, Wash.” His expression was unreadable. He clasped my hands in his heavy mittens, the two of us kneeling in the small igloo, the smoky residue of the seal fat in the lamp darkening the air. “No matter how changed I am,” he said at last, “I know that you will know me.”

  I stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “Your life is not my own. Do you understand me? I did not ask you to accompany me here.” He cleared his throat. “What I am saying is, we are north, Wash. It is not Upper Canada, but you will be safe here.” He turned to me, and I saw the anguish in his eyes. “I have made arrangements with Peter. He will see to your safety. I have left you money, provisions.”

  “What are you saying, Titch?”

  He crawled from me then, taking up his pack of supplies. Shoving it ahead of him and out of the entrance, he wriggled out after it, into the blistering cold of the day.

  * * *

  —

  THE SNOW WAS BLOWING in at a sharp angle; the wind forced me sideways when I too crawled out of the igloo. All was very white, dazzling. There was a barrenness to the odd light coming down through the snow. I hunched my shoulders, squinted into the white. I could see Titch’s crooked silhouette leaning to one side to counterbalance the weight of his pack as he started south. His boot prints were already filling with new snow. I did not hesitate; I drew my hood tight around my face, clenched my teeth and floundered after him.

  Here again, as in Virginia with the sexton Mister Edgar Farrow, I felt Titch was trying to liberate himself from me. And again he would do it under the guise of granting me safety.

  How terrifying, to think of having to make my way alone here. Look at the white wastes. The impossible cold. I was thirteen years old, with no one at all in the world. And so I crunched stubbornly after him through the deep snow, my legs stiff in their heavy hides. I did not hurry; I struggled only to keep him in view. After a time he paused, clapping his mittens together and looking all around him as the snow came down harder. I stood some paces away, panting.

  “You are like a ghost,” Titch hollered to me. “Go back.”

  The roar of the wind and snow was increasing. It would be sometime past mid-afternoon by now, but the light had not dimmed, only shifted. We stood in that obliterating whiteness, as though the world had vanished.

  “You will not leave me, Wash,” he shouted. “Even when I am gone. That is what breaks my heart.”

  I did not understand. Yet it seemed to me he meant to kill himself by going into the snow. “Let us both turn back,” I called out helplessly. “At least until this weather has passed. Then we can make our way to the trading post together. To go further in this is madness.”

  I could not see his face, only the fur rippling at his hood. He shouted, “Go back, Wash.”

  I turned, pausing. I could not see our footsteps in the snow—everything was white, raging.

  “If you cannot find the path,” he shouted, “stay where you are. You will be found.”

  “We should both wait here,” I shouted. “We should wait out this weather.”

  Titch slung his pack down into the snow between us.

  “Yes,” he cried.

  He was facing me, but took several steps backwards into the storm.

  I struggled with the pack, swung it awkwardly up, stumbling back into the snow. “Wait,” I shouted. “It is too heavy.”

  “Yes,” he cried again. But he had turned his face into the wind, as if listening. He started to walk out into the whiteness.

  “Titch,” I shouted at him.

  He entered a white void, and the roaring oblivion of that place closed around him, ate him whole. And so it was that he walked calmly out of his life, and was lost.

  PART III

  Nova Scotia

  1834

  1

  I BEGAN TO CRY; the tears froze at once and pulled like sutures at the skin of my cheeks. Titch’s tracks had already blown clear, and I peered behind me, or what I thought was behind me, to find the white air churning. I turned and turned, my eyelids burning, my nose already dead and numb. A panic cut through me. I understood that I would not find my way from this place, that I would die.

  What happened? I have little recollection: a hand on my arm, a sensation of being dragged, half-carried backwards through howling wind. The snow all around. And the light, how it seemed to break and dissipate into smoke, and the taste of frost in my mouth, like rust. How much of that was real?

  I awoke in a smoky orange warmth. I rose up on one elbow, heard the rasp of my sealskin against a sleeping pallet. Mister Wilde was seated in the half-light of a smouldering lantern, sharpening a stake with a rude steel knife. I sat up.

  “You’ll be sore for some days, boy,” said he, smiling bitterly. “But you’ll keep your toes and fingers.”

  “Titch,” said I, my eyes fixed on the stake. I swallowed. “Is Titch—?”

  He paused in his work, studied me with bright, hard eyes. “My fool of a son,” he began angrily. But he did not continue.

  I shook my head, shivering. “Is Titch…is he still out there? In the storm? Mister Wilde, sir—”

  But the old man continued carving methodically, slowly, at the stake. In the dim light I thought I caught something in his face—a downward turn of the mouth, a softening of his ire—that told me he understood more of Titch than I.

  I grew uneasy; I became sharply aware that Titch was this man’s most-loved son.

  “Was it you who pulled me to safety, sir?” I said at last.

  He sat back on his haunches, regarded me a long moment before answering. “Not I,” he said finally. “Peter. You were born with a ring of luck around your neck, I will say that, boy. An hour more and you would have been buried in ice.” He went grimly back to scraping at his stake, his hands wrinkled and trembling. “The men have been out now some hours. I expect word to come soon.” He coughed, scratching at his whiskers.

  I stared at Mister Wilde, his face stubborn as an Old Testament god’s, his eyes ferocious and damning, an old man stooped in a bad light, carving away at his worry.

  My voice, when next I spoke, was soft. “How long has it been, sir? How long have I been asleep?”

  He did not reply.

  The hours passed. Mister Peter and the Esquimaux returned without Titch and rose again at first light to go back out. That day came and went and still there was no sign of him. I could see Mister Wilde growing more and more restless; he slept little and ate less, his hands working constantly at some small task. He did not visit the traps anymore, preferring instead to whittle at some object and stand guard at the entrance of his igloo, his eyes always on the horizon.

  Then one morning he had had enough. He gathered all his tools of survival into a large green sack and, stepping his withered, bowed, hairless legs into a freshly oiled caribou skin, he set out under the enormous weight of his bag into the
snowy wastes. The Esquimaux tried to discourage him, but he would not hear of it, roaring at them to be gone. Mister Peter gestured for them to let him go, and then, with a tenderness that was quite moving to me, though I could not explain it, he followed, keeping some fifty paces back, to ensure old Mister Wilde too would not be lost.

  Mostly what I felt at the time, though, was worry. When every night the searchers had returned without Titch, my stomach twisted, and I’d sat fingering the edge of my tattered pallet, praying for his safe deliverance.

  Several days passed before Mister Wilde and Mister Peter returned together, loping slowly over the scoured, bright plain. I could hear Mister Wilde’s breath before he even reached me, so raggedly did it pass through his lips, which were cracked and raw.

  “You did not find sign of him?” I asked as he reached me at the mouth of the igloo.

  It was as though I had not spoken. He passed me by, his face still fixed in a grimace against the bitter air, his body trembling softly. He entered the igloo, and I followed. In the smoky dimness he began to strip off his caribou skin and all the woollens beneath, crouching there bare-chested, his white ribs heaving. The sight of his sweat-laced skin shocked me, the ugly grey hairs matted there. I lowered my eyes.

  “A damn foolish boy,” he cursed. He began to wipe himself down with his cast-off clothes. “Always running away. Even as a child. Always hiding in some tree or ditch or another before deciding to come back.” But I could see by the suppressed pain in his face that he did not believe his son would come back, not this time.

  I turned my face away. For I understood in that moment I had well and truly been abandoned, and that no one but myself would see to my safety now. Titch, out there in the snowy wastes, would not be returning.

  Mister Wilde cleared his throat. “I daresay you will be all right,” he said quietly. I startled at the rough grip of his hand on my shoulder. I peered up at him.

  The pity in his eyes surprised me, the gleam of something there. It was not anger. He turned and began to dress in silence. I sat with my back resting against the igloo wall, my knees drawn to my chest.

  “We have provisions enough,” he continued. “We have food. Clothing.” He coughed a racking cough, grunting against his fist. “Your sketch of the whale’s horn the other day was very faithful, very pretty. Perhaps you will do some more.” But he shook his head then, as though exhausted by these words, and, muttering something, turned away.

  Some hours later he fell very ill. In the igloo he shared with Mister Peter he lay on his pallet, his thin, hairless old man’s body bundled in furs, shivering. At times he would half-rise and fling the furs away, his face ablaze and damp with fever. Then he would claw them back into place. Mister Peter came and went with a dull lantern, the rope of light swaying over the snow. To his companion he brought all manner of soups and potions and tinctures meant to kill the infection.

  But the days passed, and as Titch failed to return, so did his father’s health. Though Mister Peter showed little emotion, as if nursing his friend was only one more duty, a restlessness crept into his pale eyes, and his body seemed to tense, contract. His gestures became abrupt. I went every morning with him to check the traps at the perimeter, but it was only to distance my mind from my troubles; we collected nothing and spent most of the hours walking silently, gazing out at the hardened cataracts of ice.

  In the afternoons I watched over Mister Wilde as Mister Peter made his trips to the outpost. The old man lay there with his eyes pinched shut, breathing shallowly, his thin body bundled. What a shock he appeared: the inner hollows of his eyes dark blue, his cracked, bleeding lips upturned as though at some private pleasure, a smell like young butter coming from his skin. Observing the fine grey hairs lining his ears, I went and fetched my leads and sketchbook.

  As I drew, I thought of Titch, of his lying alone out there. It seemed impossible that after all these days he should still be alive. I turned my mind to John Willard, and to Philip, and in a vision I saw him again—the abomination of him on the dark grass at the mountain’s base. It struck me that his single vicious gesture had granted me my new life. For Titch would never have risked taking me away were it not for the danger in which his cousin’s death had placed me. I would surely have continued on at Faith. And what would that existence have looked like, after Titch’s departure? A return to the fields, to the huts where I had come to be even more despised and pitied, a twisted black Englishman. To Big Kit, who had already replaced me with another. And all this only were I lucky enough to survive the master, when I was returned to him.

  I glanced again at Mister Wilde, and paused. I could no longer hear his breathing. His face, turned towards me, had stilled, as if an invisible film had been stretched tight across his features. One yellowing arm was flung across his body. He was dead.

  * * *

  —

  HIS FABLED DEATH WAS now a true death; the new order Titch had sought to prevent was now reality. I stood in the cold as Mister Peter and the Esquimaux gathered up Mister Wilde from where he’d lain and carried him away. The hours passed; in the warm, dim glow of the igloo I sat staring at the thumbs of my torn mittens.

  I did not want to stay in that place. All my life I had known only the warmth of the Indies, the fresh salt of the sea air. I felt shuttered up, boxed in, shuddering with a cold no blanket or animal hide or fire could keep out. Mister Peter and the Esquimaux would, I knew, do their best to keep me safe, but with both Titch and his father gone, I did not know for how long. And so, as the hours passed, I began to collect up my belongings, and in the evening, when Mister Peter returned, I told him of my intention to leave.

  He had lost his dearest friend, the companion of his life—and yet that man was as stoic and as kind as when I had first laid eyes on him. He bid me take whichever of the Wildes’ possessions I most desired, and to the leather-bound treatise on marine life I selected he added several hand lenses of Mister Wilde’s. He also gave me the skin full of money Titch had left for me, and much good food and provisions. When finally I was ready to go, he gathered me up in his arms and crushed the breath from me. Then he and Hesiod propped me aboard a sled, and whipping at the dogs, they led me off into the cold white wastes.

  At the outpost Mister Peter slapped my pack on my shoulder and gave me a stern look. I was turning from him when he gestured for me to wait and pulled suddenly from the folds of his clothes several small scopes. They were Titch’s self-made models, compact, with odd dark gears for knobs. Mister Peter placed them in my open mittens; then he gave me a strange clap on the side of my head, not hard, and was gone.

  2

  TITCH HAD SPOKEN much of the Loyalists; it was to them I resolved to go. I believed I would be safest among them. And so, after several weeks at that northern outpost, cowering away from the drunken traders, I finally managed to arrange passage on a vessel sailing for the Maritime isles. How frightened I was, how terrified to be a small black boy alone at sea. I stayed out of the captain’s path, fearing he might sell me to a passing ship bound for the Slave States. I was terrified also of meeting John Willard or his agents, convinced they would discover and kill me. One evening, as I sat eating a greening rind of cheese, a wrinkled-faced sailor approached. I stared in dread, awaiting a fatal blow. Instead, he hefted me up with his thick, bread-like hands and tied me with an end of spun rope to the rigging. There he danced, taunting me, until I agreed to stand treat a quart of rum. After that I spent little time on deck and spoke to no one. I hid in my quarters, feeling beneath me the slow heave of the boat, and paging through the one book I’d carried away—Titch’s fine leather-bound tract on sea creatures.

  The sailors talked of many islands, of free ports. But it was a life among the Loyalists, in Nova Scotia, that I most desired. I travelled south, then east, crossing the dark waters, journeying overland by cart and carriage; and I arrived finally at Shelburne, with high expectations. But I found that
the free, golden existence once described to me had been used up, crushed, drained to the skin by all who’d come before. Shelburne was wet and dreadful, its mud streets teeming with the tattered and the grey-faced, displaced roamers from last century’s American war. There was little land and fewer supplies, and the black-skinned were given the worst of it when they were given any at all. I worked for a time in a small-scale fishery. But my years on the plantation, and my memory of John Willard’s agent on the docks, had twisted something in me—I was everywhere uneasy in my skin, and this made me irritable and nervous and desperately melancholy, though I could not then have expressed it so. The fear, the fear was always with me. And not just of Willard’s agents—kidnappers generally roamed the coast, and in the rainy, grey dusk they would stun a freed man in the street and drag him half-conscious onto a ship bound for the Southern states, to make of him a slave again.

  This was not the only hazard, though it was the worst of them. White men were everywhere aggrieved, and they would sometimes rise up against us black devils, the miserable black scourge who would destroy their livelihood by labouring at cheaper rates. One night I stood on the edge of an overcast tavern, drinking some fermented brew from a dirty tin cup, when someone crept up unseen behind me, like a piece of broken-off shadow, and closed his hands about my throat. We tussled and fumbled in the street, debris flying, when finally I managed to grab a fistful of pebbles and pressed them into his eyes. He cried out and I ran off, and though bystanders later told me he was only a local tough, an old defrocked Anglican priest known to many as a brawler, I could not shake the feeling of having escaped John Willard himself, and I grew even more watchful, and solitary.

  Such were the times. I saw myself grow flint-like, and bitter, and fill with a restlessness beyond all sleep. Out walking one afternoon, I picked up a discarded piece of tin in the street, and peering at my reflection there, I saw in my eyes a lightlessness, a methodical will for violence. I knew I must move on, or kill, or be killed.