Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Washington Black, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Freedom vs. Captivity
Racism, Humanity, and Cruelty
Journeying and the Past
Family, Love, and Pain
Art, Science, and Curiosity
Summary
Analysis
A few days later, Wash gets an idea, and he goes down to the shores to dredge specimens. When he returns, he places the specimens in a cask filled with seawater by the window. After two days, they are dead, but then he tries again with an entirely clear glass receptacle. He realizes that animals absorb oxygen and exhale carbonic acid, while plants do the opposite, so they will have to be housed together with access to light. In the clear glass tank, the specimens survive a long time.
Wash again rediscovers his curiosity through scientific exploration. In trying to figure out how the aquarium might actually work, he has to understand what enables plants and animals to live together in the ocean. This also shows Wash’s brilliance in being able to come up with inventive solutions that will allow other people to appreciate science as well.
Themes
Wash travels with Medwin to Halifax, where finds an old builder to help him think through calculations for a large-scale tank. It takes Wash three days to build a two-foot tank frame made with birchwood. He then seeks out a glassblower who owes Medwin money—the glassblower cuts four pieces for him at no charge, and Wash seals them with putty. He hopes that it will all come together and that he can make something that will astonish Tanna.
Although Wash wants to create an aquarium out of his own curiosity and desire to explore nature, at the same time, part of his work comes out of a desire to impress Tanna and prove his worth to her. The book suggests that Wash has internalized some of the racist messages that he isn’t worthy enough to be with her as a formerly enslaved person without proving himself to be extraordinary.
Themes
The next evening, Wash goes to a rundown restaurant, and as he trudges to an empty stool, he feels people staring at his burns. Even though he’s used to it, he feels alien and alone. As he waits for his food, he makes calculations for his tank in a ledger, and when his stew comes, a white man settles beside him.
Wash notes here how his burns—the marks of his past—have made him feel like an outsider wherever he goes, showing how his past continues to affect his life even as he tries to avoid it.
Themes
The man comments that Wash enjoys equations, and Wash feels like he’s being slowly submerged underwater. The man has blond hair, is very short, has a soft voice. The man asks what he would recommend, but Wash cannot speak and can hardly breathe. He feels a bitter sense of inevitability—of his life being taken away.
This description exactly fits Titch’s original description of John Willard, suggesting that as much as Wash tried to escape his life on Faith Plantation through his various journeys, the past always catches up to him.
Themes
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The man makes small talk about his tailor, about his daughter, and about being raised at St. Joseph’s—he says that he knows hard work better than anyone from being raised there. Wash recalls his last moments with Philip, and his conclusion that life was simplified by slavery. Wash still says nothing. The man asks if Wash has seen the new locomotives, and after prompting, Wash says he has not. The man says he will always go by carriage, rather than steam engine or aerial contraptions.
The man’s reference to the aerial contraptions—an allusion to the Cloud-cutter—essentially confirms that the man is Willard, and that he knows who Wash is. Like Philip’s comments about slavery being somehow easier, the man suggests that he, too, was confined by the hard work he had to do at St. Joseph’s, and perhaps also by his constant chasing of slaves. Ironically, his freedom is curtailed because it is his job to follow the enslaved people.
Themes
The man tells Wash of a trip he made recently to a village in America, where he found a woman out alone at night. But when he approached, she was actually a life-sized doll. The deeper he went into the village, the more dolls he found. At a nearby inn, a man told him that the village children all grew sick, and so they were sent away. Only the old people remained, and they began to die off, so a widow in the village made a replica doll for everyone who died. The man concludes that the true and the living disappear, and in their place rise the “unnatural and the damned.”
This eerie tale reflects the man’s attitude toward Wash. His statement about the “unnatural and the damned” is a reference to Wash, whose burned skin and supposed crimes (i.e., killing Philip) make him the “damned.” The man thus suggests that Wash is rising up over white people like himself—the “true and the living.” Again, this attitude positions Wash as someone lesser than the man.
Themes
Wash looks at the exit, and John Willard addresses him for the first time: Mr. Black. He asks if it is natural to “sever low beings” from their natural purpose—as if cows don’t exist to be eaten. He quotes Aristotle, who said nothing is accidental in the works of nature. Willard assures Wash that he has not come for him—that he did not even know Wash was in the country. He says that he is in insurance now and Erasmus is dead. Wash asks how Erasmus died, and Willard says that it was some illness. Wash thinks that Erasmus was granted too merciful a death.
Although Wash usually views science as a positive way to spark curiosity and understand the natural world, he also sees how it can be used to justify racist ideology. Here, Willard uses Aristotle—an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist—to justify that some “low beings” are naturally inferior to higher beings. His implication is that Wash—whom he dehumanizes by comparing to a cow—is naturally lesser than a white person like Willard.
Themes
Willard says that he is shocked to find Wash in Nova Scotia, just after giving up on finding him. Wash caused him a lot of embarrassment—his reputation suffered from not being able to find Wash or Titch. And then he also saw Titch when he was in Liverpool last. Wash is stunned to learn that Titch is alive. A long moment passes, and Willard comments on how strange the moon looks in the northern hemisphere. He says that he’ll let Wash eat, and then he leaves.
Ironically, Willard, too, hasn’t been able to fully escape his past, despite his own journeys. Just as Wash has been haunted by the idea that Willard might find him, Willard has been plagued by the fact that he never found Wash or Titch until after he was no longer a bounty hunter. Additionally, the revelation that Titch is alive sparks Wash’s own grappling with the past, as he wrestles once more with the fallout from his relationship with Titch. This coincidental encounter again suggests that the past is truly inescapable, and Wash must at some point confront it rather than run away from it.
Themes
