‘Washington Black’ by Esi Edugyan
WHO: Esi Edugyan
WHAT: WASHINGTON BLACK, a novel
WHEN: Published by Knopf September 19, 2018
WHERE: The author lives in British Columbia.
WHY: “Magnificent…
Washington Black is both searing and beautiful.
“Eleven-year-old slave George Washington Black cuts sugar cane on a Barbados plantation owned by a sadistic Englishman named Erasmus Wilde until Wilde’s scientist brother, Titch, visits in 1830 to work on the experimental airship he calls Cloud-cutter. Titch makes Wash his servant because the boy’s weight makes suitable ballast for Cloud-cutter, teaches Wash to read, and nurtures his gift for scientific thought and illustration.
“As Wash is transformed—and confused—by Titch’s tutelage, Erasmus becomes increasingly punitive toward him. Titch, afraid for his protégé’s life, devises a risky nighttime escape on Cloud-cutter, which collides with the masts of a ship bound for Virginia. After arriving there, the two head northward, getting as far as the Arctic before Titch, insisting that Wash stay behind, strikes out into the snow for reasons Wash cannot understand…
“Framing the story with rich evocations of the era’s science and the world it studies, Edugyan mines the tensions between individual goodwill and systemic oppression, belonging and exclusion, wonder and terror, and human and natural order.”
–PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, a boxed and starred review
“This important novel belongs in every library.
“There is a wonderful strangeness to the story…memorable not only in its voice but also in its evocation of the horrors of slavery; and it is brilliant, too, in its construction of character. Wash and Titch are so alive as to be unforgettable, as is the story of their tangled relationship.” —Michael Cart, in a starred review for BOOKLIST
“A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter.
“High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean…One of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled.” —KIRKUS, a starred review
. . . . .
FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE BOOK:
I might have been ten, eleven years old—I cannot say for certain—when my first master died.
No one grieved him; in the fields we hung our heads, keening, grieving for ourselves and the estate sale that must follow. He died very old. I saw him only at a distance: stooped, thin, asleep in a shaded chair on the lawn, a blanket at his lap. I think now he was like a specimen preserved in a bottle. He had outlived a mad king, outlived the slave trade itself, had seen the fall of the French Empire and the rise of the British and the dawn of the industrial age, and his usefulness, surely, had passed. On that last evening I remember crouching on my bare heels in the stony dirt of Faith Plantation and pressing a palm at against Big Kit’s calf, feeling the heat of her skin baking up out of it, the strength and power of her, while the red sunlight settled in the cane all around us. Together, silent, we watched as the overseers shouldered the coffin down from the Great House. They slid it rasping into the straw of the wagon and, dropping the rail into place with a bang, rode rattling away.
That was how it began: me and Big Kit, watching the dead go free.
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Knopf. 336 pages. $26.95
ISBN 978-0-525-52142-6
To interview the author, contact:
Josie Kals | 212-572-2565 | jkals@penguinrandomhouse.com