At age twelve, Washington Black escapes the Barbados sugar plantation where he is enslaved in a hot air balloon, in the care of the plantation master's younger brother Titch. This is a great premise for a novel, and along with the premise this unusual work has many great features. The sugar plantation itself is wonderfully rendered as a hideous hell-on-earth, complete with tropical breezes. And Edugyan masterfully and subtly depicts the interior landscape of an enslaved child, one who is at once astute, creative and intelligent but who has lived an entire existence without experiencing a single moment of personal agency. Most of us have read accounts of the violence, terror and excruciating labor of slavery, but I have never quite had a writer show me the stark powerlessness of the enslaved before.
Wash and Titch travel to the Arctic Circle in search of Titch's father, another eccentric scientist. Their eventual parting, and Wash's journey to becoming a free man in his own right, were less interesting to me as reading experiences. Edugyan wisely leaves the reader to decide what constitutes a 'free man.'
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