The Cloud-cutter has two layers of symbolic significance. For both Wash and Titch, the Cloud-cutter represents freedom, but it represents an inability to escape from the past. Initially, Titch builds the Cloud-cutter to make his father proud, because his father, a fellow scientist, was never able to make the machine work. Even from the beginning of the book, then, Titch shows how he is burdened by his father’s past failures, and/or by the fact that his father isn’t proud of him. Thus, the Cloud-cutter becomes both a link to and a way to escape from that past disappointment.
Then, when Titch and Wash set out on the Cloud-cutter, it represents for each of them a way of finding freedom. For Wash, he is able to escape literal enslavement in Barbados, while for Titch, it means escaping the burden of family expectations, as he is supposed to take over Faith Plantation while his brother Erasmus returns to Granbourne. However, the fact that the Cloud-cutter crashes soon after Titch and Wash take off suggests that even though they have a newfound freedom, they can’t escape the expectations of the world for long. They crash into a ship where the men immediately suspect that Wash is a runaway and Titch is aiding him. Thus, while the Cloud-cutter provides a kind of freedom, it doesn’t allow them to fully avoid their past burdens.
This idea is further reinforced at the end of the book, when Wash finds Titch trying to rebuild the Cloud-cutter in Morocco. Wash notes that Titch is simply “re-enacting his past,” haunted by the Cloud-cutter’s previous failure. Thus, what is meant to be a vessel for mobility actually becomes a symbolic anchor, tying Titch to his inescapable past.
The Cloud-cutter Quotes in Washington Black
What did I feel? What would anyone feel, in such a place? My chest ached with anguish and wonder, an astonishment that went on and on, and I could not catch my breath. The Cloud-cutter spun, turned gradually faster, rising ever higher. I began to cry—deep, silent, racking sobs, my face turned away from Titch, staring out onto the boundlessness of the world. The air grew colder, crept in webs across my skin. All was shadow, red light, storm-fire and frenzy. And up we went into the eye of it, untouched, miraculous.
So this was him: my ghost. This man small and calm and emboldened by outlandish morality tales and borrowed quotations. This was he, the one from whom I had been running these three years, the creature of nightmare who had driven me through landscapes of heat and wind and snow, whose shadow had forced me aboard boats and carriages and even a shuddering Cloud-cutter by night, whose face I’d pictured so many waking days and imagined so many sleepless nights, the man who’d forced me away from all I had known, so that I was obliged to claw out a life for myself in a country that did not want me, a country vast and ferocious and crusted in hard snow, with little space, little peace for me.
How astonishing to have discovered Titch here, among these meagre possessions, his only companion the boy. His guilt was nothing to do with me—all these years I had lain easy on his conscience. But what did it matter anymore. He had suffered other sorrows. And these wounds had arrested him in boyhood, in a single draining urge to re-create our years at Faith, despite their brutality. Someone else might have looked upon his life here and seen only how different it was from all that had come before. I saw only what remained the same: the scattered furniture, as if no real home could ever be made here; the mess of instruments that would only measure and never draw a single conclusion; the friendship with a boy who, in days, months, years, would find himself abandoned in a place so far from where he had begun that he’d hardly recognize himself, would struggle to build a second life. I imagined the boy nameless and afraid, clawing his way through a world of ice.
The Cloud-cutter Symbol Timeline in Washington Black
