Washington Black

Once in a great while I start a book and within the first few pages know I'm in great hands. This is true with Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan. It's a bildungsroman about the peripatetic journey of a young man, George Washington Black, who is a slave in Barbados but ends up visiting three continents and becomes an expert on marine life. It is not only beautifully written, but fascinating and enlightening.

Black is a boy of eleven in 1830, a field hand on a sugar plantation in Barbados. He is fiercely protected by an older woman, Kit. After the death of one master, he sees his new one: "A man who has belonged to another learns very early to observe a master’s eyes; what I saw in this man’s terrified me. He owned me, as he owned all those I lived among, not only our lives but also our deaths, and that pleased him too much. His name was Erasmus Wilde."

Wilde has a brother, nicknamed Titch, who is interested in science, and is building a hot-air balloon that he hopes to cross the Atlantic in. He calls it the "Cloud-cutter," and convinces his brother to let him use Black as an assistant, as he is about the right weight for ballast. But he discovers that Black has an innate intelligence for the work, as well as a gift for drawing, and the two become close.

They have to escape one night, and end up crashing into a ship, that takes them to Norfolk, Virginia. From there Black will visit the Arctic, live in Nova Scotia, go to England and become part of the first aquarium, and end up in Morocco, wondering about the homeland of his mother.

Edugyan is a gifted wordsmith, as some of the passages are breathtaking in their beauty. I could almost randomly pick one, but this is just one example, describing a storm: "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." Or describing the octopus: "An animal that can change itself to match its surroundings, just by contracting its skin? That can weigh as many stone as a man and stretch the length of a carriage, and yet fold its body through a crevice? Whose brain is wrapped about its throat—a brain no larger than a pea—but who is clever enough to play actual games? An animal with this much ingenuity, this much intelligence, who will sadly die within five years? I would not call that strange, but magisterial. Your nudibranch is nothing, dear George Washington Black. Octopodes are the gods of the sea.”

Black meets a young woman whose father is a great marine biologist, which admittedly is a major coincidence, considering he does so while he is in hiding in Nova Scotia (a slave hunter, named John Willard, haunts Black even in his subconscious) and they have a romance, but he is always aware of his lower station. In addition to being black, he is horribly scarred from an accident that happened with the balloon emitting flames from a gas explosion. "I became a boy without identity, a walking shadow, and with each new month I fell deeper into strangeness. For there could be no belonging for a creature such as myself, anywhere: a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind and a talent on canvas, running, always running, from the dimmest of shadows."

Washington Black is likely to be the best book I'll read this year, a stunning masterpiece.