​Out Of Bounds

Award-winning author Esi Edugyan reimagines the slave narrative

- Donna Bailey Nurse

AS LONG AS Washington Black can remember, the eleven-year-old has cut cane with Big Kit, his guardian, in the sweltering fields of a Barbadian sugar plantation called Faith. It’s 1830, and Faith’s new master, recently arrived from England, is inflicting horrific punishments to enforce loyalty. One slave has his tongue cut out. Another is set on fire after trying to flee. One by one, the slaves begin to kill themselves, believing their souls will return to Africa when they die.

Washington and Big Kit consider suicide too. But Washington’s life suddenly changes when the master’s brother, Christopher Wilde (also known as Titch), borrows the young man as his assistant. A naturalist, inventor, and abolitionist, Titch teaches Wash to calculate, read, and conduct scientific experiments. He also encourages the boy’s newly discovered passion for illustration, which, for Wash, is “a wonder, less an act of the fingers than of the eyes.”

Based on traditional slave narratives, Esi Edugyan’s new novel, Washington Black, reimagines the first-person account of bondage and escape as a Bildungsroman — an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual journey. Some of Wash’s duties involve assisting Titch with construction of his Cloud-cutter, a hot-air balloon — Wash happens to be the perfect weight to serve as ballast. Looking down from the peak from which they plan a test flight, Wash acquires a dazzling new perspective of his world. “Never had I seen the roads, with their tiny men and tiny horses, the roof of Wilde Hall winking in the light,” he says. “The island fell away on all sides, green, glittering.” Wash soon comes to see himself as more than a field slave — as an intelligent young man with a rare artistic talent.