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Washington Black
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Part I Faith Plantation, Barbados 1830   1 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 flat 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. His nephew arrived one morning eighteen weeks later at the head of a trail of dust-covered carriages driven directly from the harbour at Bridge Town. That the estate had not been sold off was, we thought at the time, a mercy. The carriages creaked their slow way up the soft embankment, shaded by palm trees. On a flatbed wagon at the rear of the caravan sat a strange object, draped in canvas, as large as the whipping boulder in the small field. I could not imagine its purpose. All this I remember well, for I was again with Big Kit at the edge of the cane--I rarely left her side in those days--and I saw Gaius and Immanuel stiffly open the carriage door and extend the step. I could see, at the Great House, pretty Émilie, who was my age, and whom I would glimpse some evenings dumping the pans of wash water into the long grass outside the scullery. She descended the first two steps of the verandah and, smoothing out her apron, fell still. The first man to emerge, carrying his hat in his hands, had black hair and a long, horselike jaw, his eyes darkened by heavy brows. He raised his face as he descended and peered around at the estate and the men and women gathered there. Then I saw him stride back to the curious object and walk around it, inspecting the ropes and canvas. Cradling a hand to his eyes, he turned, and for a frightening moment I felt his gaze on me. He was chewing some soft-textured thing, his jaw working a little. He did not look away. But it was the second man, the sinister man in white, who seized my attention. This was our new master--we all could see it at once. He was tall, impatient, sickly, his legs bending away from each other like calipers. Under his three-cornered white hat a shock of white hair burst forth. I had a sense of pale eyelashes, an uncooked pallor to his skin. 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. I felt a shudder go through Big Kit. I understood. His slick white face gleamed, the clean white folds of his clothes shone impossibly bright, like a duppy, a ghost. I feared he could vanish and reappear at will; I feared he must feed on blood to keep himself warm; I feared he could be anywhere and not visible to us, and so I went about my work in silence. I had already seen many deaths: I knew the nature of evil. It was white like a duppy, it drifted down out of a carriage one morning and into the heat of a frightened plantation with nothing in its eyes. It was then, I believe now, that Big Kit determined, calmly and with love, to kill herself and me.   2 All my childhood I'd had no one; only Big Kit, as she was known in the cane. I loved her and I feared her. I was around five years old when I angered the quarters-woman and was sent to live in the brutal hut below the dead palm tree, Kit's hut. On my first evening there, my supper was stolen and my wooden bowl cracked; I was struck hard on the side of my head by a man I did not know, so that I staggered and could not hear. Two little girls spat on me. Their ancient grandmother held me down with her talons biting into my arms and cut my handmade sandals from my feet for the leather. That was when I first heard Big Kit's voice. "Not this one," she said softly. That was all. But then some monstrous charge of dark energy, huge, inexorable as a breaker, poured towards us and picked the old woman up by the hair as though she were a boneless scrap of rag, toss­ing her aside. I stared, terrified. Big Kit just glared down at me with her orange eyes, as if disgusted, and then returned to her stool in the dark corner. But in the morning I found her squatting beside me in the pale light. She offered her bowl of mash, traced the lines in my palm. "You will have great big life, child," she murmured. "Life of many rivers." And then she spat in my hand and closed my fist so that the spit ran between my knuckles. "That is first river, right there," she said, start­ing to laugh. I adored her. She towered over everyone, huge, fierce. Because of her size and because she was a Saltwater, a witch in old Dahomey before being taken, she was feared. She would sow curses into the dirt beds under the huts. Rooks would be found eviscerated, hang­ing in doorways. For three weeks she forcibly took food from a strong smith's apprentice each morning and night and ate it in front of him, scooping with her fingers from his bowl, until some understanding was reached between them. In the smouldering fields she would glis­ten as if oiled, tearing up the wretched earth, humming strange songs under her breath, her flesh rippling. Some nights in the huts she would murmur in her sleep, in the low, thick language of her kingdom, and cry out. No one ever spoke of that, and in the fields the next day she would be all scorched fury, like a blunt axe, wrecking as much as she reaped. Her true name, she once told me, whispering, was Nawi. She had had three sons. She had had one son. She had had no sons, not even a daughter. Her stories changed with the moon. I remember how, some days, at sunrise, she would sprinkle a handful of dirt over her blade and murmur some incantation, her voice husky, as though overcome with emotion. I loved that voice, its rough music. She would suck air through her teeth and squint up her eyes and begin, "When I was royal guard at Dahomey," or "After I crush the antelope with my hands, like this," and I would stop whatever task was at hand, and stand listening in wonder. For she was a marvel, witness to a world I could not imagine, beyond the reach of the huts and the vicious fields of Faith. Faith itself darkened under our new master. In the second week, he dismissed the old overseers. In their place arrived rough men from the docks, tattooed, red-faced, grimacing at the heat. These were ex-soldiers or old slavers or just island poor, with their papers crushed into a pocket and the sunken eyes of devils. Then the maim­ings began. What use could we be, injured so? I saw men limp into the fields, blood streaming down their legs; I saw women with blood-soaked bandages over their ears. Edward had his tongue cut out for backtalk; Elizabeth was forced to eat from a full chamber pot for not cleaning the previous day's thoroughly. James tried to run away, and to make an example of him, the master had an overseer burn him alive as we watched. Afterwards, in the embers of his pyre, an iron was heated and we filed past the charred horror of him, one by one, and were branded a second time. James's was the first of the new killings; other killings followed. Sick men were whipped to shreds or hanged above the fields or shot. I was still a boy, and cried at night. But with each new death Big Kit only grunted in grim satisfaction, her orange eyes narrowed and fierce. Death was a door. I think that is what she wished me to under­stand. She did not fear it. She was of an ancient faith rooted in the high river lands of Africa, and in that faith the dead were reborn, whole, back in their homelands, to walk again free. That was the idea that had come to her with the man in white, like a thread of poison poured into a well. One night she told me of her intention. She said we would do it quickly. It would not hurt. "Do it frighten you?" she whispered, where we lay in the hut. "To be dying?" "Not if it don't frighten you," I said bravely. I could feel her arm draped protectively over me in the dark. She grunted, a long, dark rumble in her chest. "If you dead, you wake up again in your homeland. You wake up free." I made a little shrug of one shoulder at that, and she felt it, and turned my chin with her fingers. "What is it, now?" she asked. "You don't believe?" I did not want to tell her; I feared she would be angry. But then I whispered, "I don't have a homeland, Kit. My homeland here. So I wake up here, again, a slave? Except you won't be here?" "You come with me to Dahomey," she murmured firmly. "That how it works." "Did you ever see them? The dead, waked up? When you in Dahomey?" "I saw them," she whispered. "We all saw them. We knew what they were." "And they were happy?" "They were free." I could feel the day's exhaustion descending on me. "What it like, Kit? Free?" I felt her shift in the dirt, and then she was gathering me in close, her hot breath at my ear. "Oh, child, it like nothing in this world. When you free, you can do anything." "You go wherever it is you wanting?" "You go wherever it is you wanting. You wake up any time you wanting. When you free," she whispered, "someone ask you a ques­tion, you ain't got to answer. You ain't got to finish no job you don't want to finish. You just leave it." I closed my heavy eyes, wondering. "Is really so?" She kissed my hair just behind my ear. "Mm hm. You just set down the shovel, and you go."  ***   Why, then, did she delay? The days passed; Faith grew harsher, more brutal; still she did not kill us. Some presentiment, some warn­ing perhaps, stayed her hand.   One evening she led me out into her little vegetable garden, where we were alone. I saw the sharp, rusted blade of a hoe in her hands, and started to tremble. But she only wished to show me the little carrots beginning to sprout. Another night, she woke me and led me silently out into the darkness, through the long grasses to the dead palm tree, but this too was only to instruct me not to speak of our intentions. "If any hear it, child, we be separated true," she hissed. I did not understand why we waited. I wanted to see her homeland, I told her. I wanted to walk in Dahomey with her, free. "But it must be done right, child," she whispered to me. "Under a right moon. With right words. The gods cannot be summoned otherwise." But then the other suicides began. Cosimo cut his own throat with an axe, Adam punctured his wrists using a nail stolen from the smithy. Both were found bled out in the grass behind the huts, one after the other, in the mornings. They were old Saltwaters, like Kit, believers that they would be reincarnated in their ancestral lands. But when young William, who had been born on the plantation, hanged himself in the laundry, Erasmus Wilde himself came out among us. He walked slowly over the lawns in his dazzling white clothes, an overseer trailing a few steps behind. The overseer wore a tattered straw hat and was pushing a wheelbarrow. The cradle of the barrow held a wooden post, a tangle of grey sacking. They crossed the grass in the harsh sun, pausing just at the edge of the cane, where we had been assembled. In the hot, bright air, the new master studied us. I could see the flesh on his face and hands, waxen and bloodless. His lips were pink, his eyes a very piercing blue. Slowly he walked the line of our bodies, staring at each of us in turn. I could hear Big Kit breathing roughly above me and I understood she too was fright­ened. When the master looked at me, I felt the scorch of his gaze and lowered my eyes at once, shivering. The air was stagnant, redolent of sweat. Then the man in white gestured behind him, to the overseer. That man twisted the handles of the barrow, dumping its load in the dirt. A murmur passed through us, like a wind. Sprawled there in the dirt, in a heap of grey clothes, was Wil­liam's corpse. His face was a rictus of pain, his eyes bulging, his tongue black and protruding. Some days had passed since his death, and strange things were happening already to his body. He looked corpu­lent, bloated; his skin had become mottled and spongy. A slow horror filled me. The master's voice, when at last he called out to us, was calm, dry, bored. "What you see here, this nigger, killed himself," Erasmus Wilde said. "He was my slave, and he has killed himself. He has therefore stolen from me. He is a thief." He paused, folded his hands at the small of his back. "I understand that some of you believe you will be reborn in your homelands when you die." He looked as though he might say more, but then he fell silent and, turning abruptly, gestured to the overseer at the barrow. That man crouched over the body with a large curved skinner's knife. He reached around and cupped his callused palm under Wil­liam's chin and began to saw. We heard the terrible wet flesh tearing, the crunch of the bones, saw the weird, lifeless sag of William's body as the head came away. The overseer stood and raised the severed head in both hands. Then he walked back to the barrow and took out the long wooden post. Hammering it into the dry earth, he drove William's head onto the sharp end. "No man can be reborn without his head," the master called out. "I will do this to each and every new suicide. Mark me. None of you will ever see your countries again if you continue to kill yourselves. Let your deaths come naturally." I stared up at Kit. She was peering at William's head on its spike, the bulge of its softening flesh in the sun, and there was something in her face I had not seen in her before. Despair. Excerpted from Washington Black: A Novel by Esi Edugyan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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  New York Times Review

In "Asymmetry," two seemingly unrelated sections are connected by a shocking coda. The first, "Folly," is the story of a love affair. It narrates the relationship between Alice, a book editor and aspiring writer in her mid-20s, and Ezra Blazer, a brilliant, geriatric novelist who is partly modeled on Philip Roth. The second section - "Madness" - belongs to Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi- American economist who is being detained at Heathrow. Halliday's prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald. This is a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years, and it manages to be, all at once, a transgressive roman à clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction. THE GREAT BELIEVERS By Rebecca Makkai Viking. $27. Set in the Chicago of the mid-80s and Paris at the time of the 2015 terrorist attacks, Makkai's deeply affecting novel uses the AIDS epidemic and a mother's search for her estranged daughter to explore the effects of senseless loss and our efforts to overcome it. Her portrait of a group of friends, most of them gay men, conveys the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic's early years and follows its repercussions over decades. Empathetic without being sentimental, her novel amply earned its place among the contenders for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. THE PERFECT NANNY By Leila Slimani Translated by Sam Taylor Penguin Books. Paper, $16. We know from the outset of this unnerving cautionary tale (winner of the Goncourt Prize) that a beloved nanny has murdered the two children in her care; but what's even more remarkable about this unconventional domestic thriller is the author's intimate analysis of the special relationship between a mother and the person she hires to care for her offspring. Slimani writes devastating character studies, and she also raises painful themes: the forbidden desires parents project onto their nannies, racial and class tensions. In this mesmerizingly twisted novel, only one thing is clear: Loneliness can drive you crazy. THERE THERE By Tommy Orange Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95. Orange's debut is an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life. Its many short chapters are told through a loosely connected group of Native Americans living in Oakland, Calif., as they travel to a powwow. They are all, as in Chaucer, pilgrims on their way to a shrine, or, as in Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," an extended family crossing the landscape. The novel is their picaresque journey, allowing for moments of pure soaring beauty to hit against the most mundane, for a sense of timelessness to be placed right beside a cleareyed version of the here and now. WASHINGTON BLACK By Esi Edugyan Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95. This transcendent work of empathy and imagination, the 2018 winner of Canada's prestigious Giller Prize, opens on a sugar plantation in British Barbados in the waning days of slavery and, against that backdrop of unconscionable brutality, quickly tips us into a new world of possibility: one in which men take to the skies in hot-air balloons, dive to mysterious ocean depths and cross the Arctic on foot. Most daringly, it is a world in which a white slave master's brother and a young black slave can forge an indelible bond. With subtlety and eloquence, Edugyan unfolds a wondrous tale of exploration and discovery. Nonfiction AMERICAN PRISON A Reporter's Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment By Shane Bauer Penguin Press. $28. Bauer moved to rural Louisiana in 2014 to work undercover as a guard at the Winn Correctional Center, a privately run prison. He lasted four months before his deception was discovered, but that turned out to be more than sufficient to write a searing exposé for Mother Jones, which earned him a National Magazine Award and an invitation to speak to officials in Washington about problems in for-profit prisons. With this book, Bauer has expanded his article into a comprehensive analysis impossible to ignore. His book is a meticulous catalog of horrors, from the historical precursors - the practice of convict-leasing at Southern prisons after the Civil War, in which inmates were rented out to companies as a captive work force - to the rampant violence, neglect and incompetence that pervade a multibillion-dollar industry. EDUCATED A Memoir By Tara Westover Random House. $28. Westover's extraordinary memoir is an act of courage and self-invention. The youngest of seven children, she grew up in Idaho, in a survivalist family who lived so far offthe grid that she lacked even a birth certificate and did not attend school until she went to college. Getting in wasn't obvious: At home, reading meant studying the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and much of her childhood was spent helping her mother, an unlicensed midwife, and her father, a paranoid man who maintained a scrapmetal junkyard. In recounting her upbringing and her triumph over it - she would earn a Ph.D. in history at Cambridge - Westover took great risks and alienated family members. The reward is a book that testifies to an irrepressible thirst to learn. FREDERICK DOUGLASS Prophet of Freedom By David W. Blight Simon & Schuster. $37.50. A monumental work about a monumental figure. The charismatic Douglass was Abraham Lincoln's conscience, so to speak, and Blight's detailed, cinematic biography is the result of a lifetime of engagement with his subject. Douglass wrote three autobiographies himself, describing his rise from slavery to a role as one of the greatest figures of the 19th century, but Blight's work is fuller than any of those, relating both the public and private life in a way that Douglass either could not or would not undertake. The result is a portrait that is likely to stand as the definitive account for years to come. HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence By Michael Pollan Penguin Press. $28. Best known for his work on the ethics of eating, Pollan delivers his most personal book yet, one that demanded he drop acid in full view of the reader. Exploring the history and science of psychedelics, he tells of the rise and fall and rise again of our societal interest in these drugs, which are now thought to have many benefits, from helping with addiction to easing the terror of the terminally ill. The book hits its high point when he examines the mysticism and spirituality of the psychedelic experience. What can we learn about ourselves when the part of our mind controlling the ego drops away? What is this older, more primitive part of the brain, which connects us to how a child sees the world? It's a trip that leads him to wonder about how, ultimately, we can get the most out of our existences as conscious beings in the world. SMALL FRY By Lisa Brennan-Jobs Grove Press. $26. Brennan-Jobs grew up shuttling between two starkly different worlds: the bohemian, peripatetic world of her mother, an unstable and impoverished artist, and the luxurious world of her cruel and increasingly wealthy father, Steve Jobs. She provides indelible portraits of both parents, recreating the fraught landscape of her childhood in Palo Alto through the careful accretion of exquisitely granular detail. Her memoir is a work of uncanny intimacy, the debut of a singular literary sensibility. Ultimately, though, it is her portrayal of Jobs as a man prone to mind-boggling acts of emotional negligence and abuse that gives this book its overlay of devastation.

  Publishers Weekly Review

Edugyan's magnificent third novel (after Half-Blood Blues) again demonstrates her range and gifts. 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. Not knowing whether Titch is alive or dead, Wash continues his travels and scientific work. But he feels compelled to find out Titch's fate and learn why his mentor rejected him. 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. The novel's patience feels essential: the characters' many passages from painful endings to tentative rebirths are necessarily slow and searching. Crafted in supple, nuanced prose, Edugyan's novel is both searing and beautiful. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
* TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Slate <br> * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Boston Globe, NPR, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Economist, Bustle <br> * WINNER OF THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE<br> * FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE, THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE, THE ROGERS WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE<br> <br> "Enthralling" -- Boston Globe "Extraordinary" -- Seattle Times "A rip-roaring tale" -- Washington Post <br> <br> A dazzling adventure story about a boy who rises from the ashes of slavery to become a free man of the world. <br> <br> George Washington Black, or "Wash," an eleven-year-old field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is terrified to be chosen by his master's brother as his manservant. To his surprise, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning--and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash's head, Christopher and Wash must abandon everything. What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America, and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic. What brings Christopher and Wash together will tear them apart, propelling Wash even further across the globe in search of his true self. From the blistering cane fields of the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, from the earliest aquariums of London to the eerie deserts of Morocco, Washington Black tells a story of self-invention and betrayal, of love and redemption, of a world destroyed and made whole again, and asks the question, What is true freedom?
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