When an 11-year-old enslaved boy named Washington Black meets Titch, his master’s brother, Titch introduces him to the world of art and science. Titch shows Wash various plant and animal life on Faith Plantation, while Wash teaches himself how to sketch these creatures after seeing Titch’s sketches. Both of these disciplines spark Wash’s immense curiosity, and the book weaves in passages of Wash’s observations of the natural world around him and his attempts to depict the beauty of what he finds there. Though science and art are often viewed as opposing disciplines, the book demonstrates how both are ways of capturing and understanding the world’s natural mysteries.
Titch, Wash, and the Goffs all use science to improve human understanding of the world—whether it be in exploring the past or making discoveries that could change the future. From Titch and Wash’s first interaction, Titch demonstrates how science can be used to alter a person’s fundamental understanding of even mundane things. When Wash arrives at his door, Titch asks Wash to look through a reflector scope at the moon. When Wash sees the moon, he sighs in amazement. He realizes that the moon has craters and ridges, understanding it as “a land without tree or shrub or lake, a land without people. An earth before the good Lord began to fill it.” This amazement illustrates how science illuminates and demystifies even things people see every day. The Cloud-cutter is another scientific advancement that allows for new ways to understand the world. Even though Titch and Wash use it to escape Faith Plantation, its initial purpose is to enable people to view the world from “spectacular” heights (particularly before the airplane was invented in the late 1800s). Though Wash is terrified as they soar the skies in the storm, he sobs as they rise and he stares out into “the boundlessness of the world.” This newfound freedom is particularly meaningful for someone escaping slavery, but the Cloud-cutter provides an opportunity for newfound freedom and discovery to all people. Wash continues his work in science even after he and Titch part ways. Goff, a marine zoologist whom Wash meets in Nova Scotia, explains that he is finding specimens that will help him explore “the discrepancy between the factual age of the earth and so-called evidence of His creation.” Thus, he is using scientific examination of marine life to understand the earth’s history and whether it aligns with a Biblical understanding of how old the earth is. He, too, is using science to explore nature’s deepest mysteries.
Just as science helps Wash and others to better understand the world around them, Wash uses sketching to more fully illuminate the world’s mystery and beauty. Wash first becomes interested in drawing when he sees Titch quickly sketch the Cloud-cutter. He describes how amazed he is at seeing Titch’s artistry. He thinks, “suddenly I knew that I wanted—desperately wanted—to do it too: I wanted to create a world with my hands.” In this way, art stokes Wash’s curiosity about the world and makes him yearn to understand it and capture it more fully. When Wash and Titch travel to the Arctic, Wash remarks, “I had not ever seen ice before, not in its immensities: I stared into the refracted light like a creature entranced. How beautiful it was, how sad, how sacred! I attempted to express the awe of it in my drawings.” The ice’s natural beauty astounds Wash, and it ties his desire to explore that beauty with his drawing. After Titch abandons Wash in the Arctic, Wash travels to Nova Scotia and gives up drawing for some years. However, when he sees jellyfish with “bodies all afire” in a dock one day, he digs out his papers and paints, sketching for the first time in months. He describes how he “attempted to capture what [he’d] seen in the waters. [He] could not. It had been a burst of incandescence, fleeting, radiant, every punch of light like a note of music.” In this way, the book again connects Wash’s curiosity about the world to his desire to draw, demonstrating how it is an attempt to appreciate the beauty around him—even if that attempt is sometimes futile.
Ultimately, Wash and several other characters recognize that not all mysteries in the world can be explained. Wash himself states that he “had seen enough strangeness to understand the world was unfathomable,” even though he recognizes that this is an unscientific way of looking at the world. But despite this idea, the characters continue to try and explore those mysteries through art and science. The book ultimately suggests that even if some things cannot be understood, curiosity is a virtue, and yearning to understand the world is important in and of itself, regardless of whether one can come to definite conclusions about it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Art, Science, and Curiosity ThemeTracker
Art, Science, and Curiosity Quotes in Washington Black
And as I began to draw what I saw with a clean accuracy, I realized I was troubled by the enormous beauty of that place, of the jewel-like fields below us, littered as I knew them to be with broken teeth. The hot wind snapped at my papers, and in a kind of ghostly sound beneath this I thought I heard the cry of a baby. For the few women who gave birth here were turned immediately back into the fields, and they would set their tender-skinned newborns down in the furrows to wail against the hot sun. I craned out at the fields; I could see nothing. Far out at sea, a great flock of seagulls rose and turned, the late afternoon light flaring on the undersides of their wings.
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.
The air clenched to ice, stinging our cheeks. It began to pinch. Sailing, we glimpsed in the passing black waters eerie, exquisite cathedrals of ice. I had not ever seen ice before, not in its immensities: I stared into the refracted light like a creature entranced. How beautiful it was, how sad, how sacred! I attempted to express the awe of it in my drawings. For it felt very much as though we were leaving the world of the living and entering a world of spirits and the dead. I felt free, invincible, beyond Mister Willard’s reach.
“It was I who had failed in my understanding, you see. Life holds a sanctity for them we can scarcely begin to imagine; it therefore struck them as absurd that someone would choose to end it. A great ludicrous act. In any case, it was then I recognized that my own values—the tenets I hold dear as an Englishman—they are not the only, nor the best, values in existence. I understood there were many ways of being in the world, that to privilege one rigid set of beliefs over another was to lose something. Everything is bizarre, and everything has value. Or if not value, at least merits investigation.”
I thought it wonderful for a man of science to speak so. Staring at his bright chewing face, I realized how profoundly I liked him.
I felt, in those moments of looking around, ferociously proud—of this strange, exquisite place where people could come to view creatures they believed nightmarish, to understand these animals were in fact beautiful and nothing to fear. But a part of me felt also somehow anguished, ravaged, torn at. For I glimpsed, in each and every display, all my elaborate calculations, my late nights of feverish labour. I saw my hand in everything—in the size and material of the tanks, in the choice of animal specimens, even in the arrangement of the aquatic plants. I had sweated and made gut-wrenching mistakes, and in the end my name would be nowhere. Did it matter? I did not know if it mattered. I understood only that I would have to find a way to make peace with the loss, or I would have to leave the whole enterprise behind and everyone connected with it.
