George Washington “Wash” Black, who is 11 at the beginning of the book, grows up enslaved on a plantation in Barbados, never knowing his family. The closest he ever gains to a family is an enslaved woman, Big Kit, who is like a mother to him; Titch, Wash’s master’s brother, who is like a father to him; and lastly, a young woman named Tanna, who becomes his lover. Ultimately, Wash discovers that Big Kit was his biological mother; that Titch—who abandons him in the Arctic—actually faked his death simply to unburden himself from Wash; and that he and Tanna struggle to communicate about his feelings. All of these developments devastate Wash, as he feels betrayed and hurt by his closest companions—Big Kit for not telling him the truth, Titch for abandoning him, and Tanna for criticizing him. These events demonstrate how emotionally complicated families can be: while family members’ love can foster the greatest growth, families are also able to cause the deepest pain and trauma.
Wash’s relationship with Big Kit helps him survive life on the plantation, but discovering his biological relationship with her only after her death makes him feel betrayed and unmoored. On the plantation, Wash describes how important Big Kit is to his survival. When he was young, she protected him from other enslaved people who live in the huts near the cane fields. She also tells him that he is going to have a “great big life” and provides him with a glimpse into what freedom is like—something that Wash has never experienced. Thus, Big Kit essentially becomes a mother to him, and her love helps him survive the plantation’s cruelty. Later in Wash’s life, after escaping slavery with Titch, Wash examines the plantation’s records. He discovers that Big Kit has died, and that she was actually his biological mother. He realizes that she fiercely loved him, but always with the terror of knowing that they would likely someday be separated. Wash is grateful for her love, but he is also devastated as a result. He knows both that she betrayed him by not telling him the truth, and he also feels terrible for abandoning her to travel with Titch. In this way, Wash sees how both of them caused each other deep pain, while also still providing formative and vital love.
Titch, too, mentors Wash, saves him from slavery, and treats him like family. But Wash has a difficult time reconciling this history with the fact that Titch callously tossed Wash aside, becoming another figure who shapes his life positively but also causes him a great deal of trauma. When Titch first enlists Wash as his young manservant, he treats Wash more kindly than any other white person ever has, teaching him to read, write, and record calculations. When Titch notes that Wash has some drawing ability, he also credits Wash’s illustrations in his scientific papers. Wash recognizes that Titch’s mentorship is invaluable, and he becomes fiercely loyal—to the point that when Titch offers to let Wash go to Canada to be free, Wash instead opts to travel with Titch to the Arctic as “an act of fidelity, gratitude, a return of the kindness [he] had been shown and never grown used to.” In this way, the book shows how important this kind of found family is to Wash—because Titch provides him with the opportunity to escape the plantation and make something better of himself. Yet ultimately, Titch abandons Wash in the Arctic. Still shattered by this, Wash later spends several years looking for Titch to find out why Titch abandoned him, desperately seeking some kind of resolution or reasoning for what happened. Yet he never receives any—indeed, when he confronts Titch in Morocco, Titch claims that he never meant to mistreat Wash, and that he “treated [Wash] as family.” Hearing this, Wash realizes that Titch’s “harm […] was in not understanding that he still had the ability to cause it.” Wash is family to Titch, but Titch doesn’t fully realize how this fact means that his betrayal has caused Wash deep pain precisely because of the familial bonds that they built.
Lastly, Tanna’s relationship with Wash teaches him another love—romantic and sexual love—but she also causes him pain in not fully being able to understand him. Wash first meets Tanna when they both start sketching at the same beach in Canada, and she asks him to teach her how to improve her sketching. Gradually they get to know one another, until one day Tanna puts her hand in his. He feels immediate desire for her, and as he notes that she clearly wants him, too, he feels “a sense of wholeness,” like he is being “pieced together, suddenly, a man intact.” As they become lovers, Tanna gives him a deep love that he hasn’t yet experienced before, and this makes him a more complete person, as he notes. And yet, as Tanna gets to know Wash better, she also misunderstands and criticizes him. When Wash tells her about Titch’s betrayal and continues to dwell on it, she often questions his motivations for seeking Titch out. He eventually comes to fear her criticism, so much so that he begins to hide his thoughts and feelings from her. He feels that she is “disgusted” that he is expending energy on Titch, who is not worthy of him. But Wash can’t help his feelings, and so in reality her criticism only makes him feel misunderstood and pained when she is not on his side because of how much she usually loves him and makes him feel whole.
All three of these characters—Big Kit, Titch, and Tanna—love Wash like family. But it is precisely because of these bonds that make their betrayals even more painful and traumatic, illustrating how emotionally complex familial relationships can be.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family, Love, and Pain ThemeTracker
Family, Love, and Pain Quotes in Washington Black
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.”
Three cracked ribs. Her kick had been that harsh, that swift. I refused to tell the overseers who had done it, and in this way Kit was spared. But the pain was immense and suffocating, and I was several nights in the hothouse before returning again to our huts.
She avoided my eye as I was led in, my chest still in bandages.
That evening, as I drifted into sleep, there came a touch at my face. I heard soft weeping, and realized with alarm it was Big Kit. She was running a cold palm across my forehead, whispering.
“Oh my son,” I heard her say, over and over again. “My son.”
I understood then that she had not meant to strike me so hard, and that my days away had pained her greatly. I closed my eyes, feeling the coolness of her skin on my brow.
She was much changed, it was true, maimed terribly, grown thinner, the hair at her temples silver as flies' wings. Aged, now, as though decades had separated us. But I was the more changed; that was the uglier truth.
I gripped anxiously at my hands, staring at Kit's tall figure. How solicitous she was with the boy. I saw now how she kept a careful eye on his posture, his manners. I knew instinctively what this meant, the great angry love she held that boy inside, like a fist. I tried to imagine what he might be like. He could not have been older than six or seven years, I thought. I wondered at the sudden pain coming up in me.
I suppose I believed there to be some bravery in this choice. I suppose it struck my boyhood self as an act of fidelity, gratitude, a return of the kindness I had been shown and never grown used to. Perhaps I felt Titch to be the only sort of family I had left. Perhaps, perhaps; even now I cannot speak with any certainty. I know only that in that moment I was terrified to my very core, and that the idea of embarking on a perilous journey without Titch filled me with a panic so savage it felt as if I were being asked to perform some brutal act upon myself to sever my own throat.
But my true study remained, I understand now, the curious person of Titch. He was, I feared, becoming increasingly lost within himself. I suppose there must have been a deep love between him and his father, a love I could get no sense for because of its reticence. But as with most loves, it was shadowy, and painful, and confusing, and Titch seemed to me overly eager and too often hurt.
I could see a sadness coming over him, a kind of slow despair. I understood he was anguished over his father—over his failure to ever impress the man, over how to explain that Philip had killed himself and that we were now in hiding.
A haze of pale light was furred around Kit's head, like a halo, and I could not make out her face. She reached forward and held my hand, and her touch was terribly cold. I gave her a pair of thick fur-lined mittens. Then somehow we were standing in the snow, the world so white around us. Kit’s face looked wondrous to me, dark, sombre, beautiful. I studied it.
“You be my eyes, Wash,” she said to me.
And reaching up and with her fingers, she forcibly pressed her own eyes in. A wide blue light shone out from the sockets.
I felt—and this is the peculiar truth—a sense of peace and well-being come over me. I understood a great gift of trust was being extended to me.
When I awoke in the darkness, I was crying.
“You are like a ghost,” Titch hollered to me. “Go back.”
The roar of the wind and snow was increasing. It would be sometime past mid-afternoon by now, but the light had not dimmed, only shifted. We stood in that obliterating whiteness, as though the world had vanished.
“You will not leave me, Wash,” he shouted. “Even when I am gone. That is what breaks my heart.”
For years she had ignored me, until I had turned up suddenly in her hut, and then with a ferocity that terrified she’d fought off all who would cause me harm. She had cared for me and cursed me and cracked my ribs and clutched me so tight in her love that I thought she might break them again. She’d damned my father as cruel and my mother as foolish, and when I said she could know nothing of their natures she struck me hard in the face. […] She told me I was born of stupidity, that it must be blood-deep, and also that I was brilliant, that there would never again be a mind like mine. She loved me with a viciousness that kept me from ever feeling complacent, with the reminder that nothing was permanent, that we would one day be lost to each other, She loved me with the terror of separation, as someone who had lost all the riches of a scorched life. She loved me in spite of those past losses, as if to say, I will not surrender this time, you will not take this from me.
Even as I spoke these words, I could hear what a false picture they painted, and also how they were painfully true. […]
Again he shook his head. “I treated you as family.”
How strange, I thought, looking upon his sad, kind face, that this man had once been my entire world, and yet we could come to no final understanding of one another. He was a man who’d done far more than most to end the suffering of a people whose toil was the very source of his power; he had risked his own good comfort, the love of his family, his name. He had saved my very flesh, taken me away from certain death. His harm, I thought, was in not understanding that he still had the ability to cause it.
