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
The building for Goff’s exhibition is lovely, and Wash is amazed they have been granted anything given their outlandish plans. London’s Zoological Committee offered the land, and if all goes well, they can open Ocean House the following year. Wash thinks how much this means to him—a thing of his own, the invention of a boy born for toil and death. He is amazed that he will leave this mark (even though he will likely never get credit for it).
Wash is delighted to share his scientific curiosity with the world, particularly because it is a mark of how much he has grown and how he has achieved the freedom to engineer an aquarium like this. However, noting that he won’t get credit for Ocean House illustrates that racial bias exists in London as well. Despite the fact that the aquarium is his idea, he will not be able to put his name on it because he is still not considered as equal or worthy as a white scientist like Goff.
Themes
The Goffs give Wash their small garden house behind their main house. It is cramped, but Wash adores it—he finally has a private space of his own, walled off from the world. And it allows Wash and Tanna to keep the ruse that they are not lovers, even while remaining so. Even Goff warmed to Wash during their travels as they joked and cared for the live specimens.
This is another marker of how Wash has been able to take steps toward achieving true freedom. He has a home all his own now, and he gets to determine what he does and maintain relationships according to his desire. Escaping to London also helps him avoid his burdensome fear of Willard, which had a hold on him for so long.
Themes
Goff also defended Wash on the ship to London from a lady who suggested that Wash was better kept with the animals below deck. With each new insult after that, Goff spoke roughly to the aggressor, only backing down when Tanna cautioned him.
Here, the book illustrates how Goff is trying to combat racial bias. He is actively trying to force others to see Wash as an equal instead of dehumanizing him and comparing him to an animal.
Themes
The winter ship crossing was rough, and some of the less hardy animals began to die. The octopus grew colorless and lethargic, and Goff and Wash descended to the lower hold to gather clean sea water, sometimes tasting it themselves. Occasionally a crowd gathered to watch the strange man and his burnt slave drinking from the sea.
The fact that the octopus grows sick on the ship has another parallel with Wash’s situation: after being taken from Barbados, Wash wasn’t really able to make a true home for himself and grew dejected. This foreshadows Wash’s own illness as remains restless and out of place in London.
Themes
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In the dark afternoons Tanna sat next to Wash on the deck and listened to him read. She made no corrections, and soon his reading became fluid. Weeks before they reached England, he understood the sentences in all of his cherished books, and the drawings in the books came alive for him. Those hours at sea were rich and peaceful, and Wash thought upon his earlier journey to the Arctic as something very far away, as though a crust grew over Titch’s loss.
Here, Wash and Tanna continue to deepen their bond. Wash implies that this time with Tanna becomes even richer than the time he shared with Titch because she doesn’t condescend to teach him in the way that Titch did. Even though Wash asserts that he is moving on from his experiences with Titch, his description of a crust growing over Titch’s loss suggests that he hasn’t fully let go of that loss—though it might grow further from his mind, it is a part of his past that he can’t fully escape.
Themes
