Washington Black

Washington Black

by

Esi Edugyan

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Freedom vs. Captivity Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Freedom vs. Captivity Theme Icon
Racism, Humanity, and Cruelty Theme Icon
Journeying and the Past Theme Icon
Family, Love, and Pain Theme Icon
Art, Science, and Curiosity Theme Icon
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 Theme Icon

Washington Black focuses on Wash, who, at the start of the book, is an 11-year-old boy enslaved on Faith Plantation in Barbados in 1830. As a child, Wash struggles to understand the concept of freedom, which he has never known himself. Big Kit—an enslaved woman who was once free—states that freedom means going wherever you want and doing whatever you want. But even when he escapes the plantation and travels around the world with his master’s brother, Titch, Wash has a difficult time feeling truly free; he remains tethered to Titch and is afraid of leaving him, particularly because he is worried about being caught and sent back to Barbados. Titch similarly grapples with what it means to be free, as he is weighed down by his family’s expectations of him and feels encumbered by taking care of Wash. In showing how Wash, Titch, and other characters are able to travel the globe and yet feel tied down or trapped by emotional burdens, the novel suggests that being captive to an idea, responsibility, or fear can be just as restrictive and emotionally damaging as physical captivity.

Wash’s enslavement illustrates how difficult physical captivity is—to the point where many enslaved people prefer to take their own lives rather than remain in captivity. When Big Kit explains what freedom means, Wash is amazed at the idea because he has never felt free. Instead, he feels constantly fearful, particularly when the cruel Erasmus Wilde takes over the plantation. He describes how he lives in constant fear around Erasmus because the master owns “not only [their] lives but also [their] deaths.” Wash’s suffering derives from the idea that he has absolutely no control over his life; he is physically captive to Erasmus. In order to escape this captivity, Big Kit considers killing Wash and herself. She emphasizes to Wash that “death [is] a door,” and that it provides them an opportunity to be reborn again in their homeland—the African kingdom of Dahomey. Though Big Kit and Wash never go through with this plan, several other enslaved people do kill themselves for the same reason. In this way, the book demonstrates that their captivity is so physically and mentally debilitating that they end their lives in order to seek out the possibility of freedom.

Outside the institution of slavery, Wash still doesn’t feel free because of the fear of being caught or the fear of losing Titch’s protection, demonstrating that being captive to fear can be just as harmful as physical captivity. When Wash first learns that John Willard, a bounty hunter, is searching for him, he feels “fierce nausea.” He realizes in that moment that he thought he might have been able to leave his miserable past behind, but he thinks that he has “no future before [him].” Thus, despite his newfound freedom, the fear of being caught feels just as burdensome as being physically captive. Wash is also captive in another way, as he doesn’t feel that he can separate from Titch without opening himself up to danger. When Titch considers parting ways with Wash in Virginia, and then again in the Arctic, Wash thinks, “How terrifying, to think of having to make my way alone in the world.” Thus, even though he is free, Wash’s fear still tethers him to Titch in a way that leaves him with almost no self-determination, because he is bound to Titch’s decisions about where they go and what they do. Ultimately, however, Titch does abandon Wash, and Wash travels alone to Nova Scotia. Once again, he feels constantly afraid of Mr. Willard finding him, always looking over his shoulder to see if Willard is there. Once, when a gentleman who fits Willard’s description comes to his rooming house, Wash spends days holed up in his building and even fasts for two days when he runs out of food. His fear thus becomes just as treacherous and even physically restrictive as his enslavement.

The novel also illustrates how Titch’s responsibility makes him feel trapped to the point where he, too, feels he has to escape aspects of his life despite his seeming ability to do anything he wants. When Titch learns that his father, Mr. Wilde, has died, Titch is devastated by the idea that he might have to remain on Faith Plantation while Erasmus returns to London to run their family estate. Unable to bear the thought of giving up his scientific career, Titch decides to escape with Wash in his Cloud-cutter, saying, “I will not stay in this awful place. This is not a life for me.” Titch feels restricted and emotionally distressed by his family duty, to the point where he feels he has to escape in an air balloon under cover of night like a runaway. Titch also begins to feel burdened by taking care of Wash, as they first travel to Virginia and then to the Arctic to find out what happened to Titch’s father. When Titch realizes that his father is alive but has no desire to correct the rumors that he is dead (preferring to continue his research undisturbed), Titch realizes that he has to make a new home for himself away from his family. When Wash offers to go with him, Titch says, “Your life is not my own […] I did not ask you to accompany me here.” Titch implies that he feels weighed down by taking care of Wash and the expectation that he will continue to do so. His deep distress becomes apparent when he walks into a snowstorm alone and without any supplies. He, too, would escape his burdens, even if it means sacrificing other aspects of his well-being or seemingly even his life, showing how detrimental his captivity to Wash feels. While the novel highlights the horrors of physical enslavement, Titch and Wash’s predicaments even as they roam the globe show that emotional captivity can be painful, too.

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Freedom vs. Captivity Quotes in Washington Black

Below you will find the important quotes in Washington Black related to the theme of Freedom vs. Captivity.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Quotes

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.”

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Big Kit (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde, Philip
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 4 Quotes

We had lived in blood for years, my entire life. But something about that evening—the gleaming beauty of the master’s house, the refinements, the lazy elegance—made me feel a profound, unsettling sense of despair. It was not only William’s mutilation that day, knowing his head stared out over the fields even now, in the darkness. What I felt at that moment, though I then lacked the language for it, was the raw, violent injustice of it all.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Big Kit, Erasmus Wilde, William
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 7 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 11 Quotes

“Perhaps it is easier for you,” he said again. “Everything is taken care of for you. You needn’t worry about what the coming days will hold, as every day is the same. Your only expectations are the expectations your master lays out for you. It is a simple-enough life, what.”

It was as though he had spoken the words to determine their truth. He shook his head irritably.

I stilled my face. I said nothing.

He exhaled harshly, dragging the gun up his thighs. I looked at his hands, the pallor of them on the dark metal.

“I am sorry.” His voice was so soft I barely heard him. He gestured with his chin. “Your face.”

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Philip (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde
Page Number: 108-109
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 12 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde, Erasmus Wilde
Related Symbols: The Cloud-cutter
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 2 Quotes

Titch explained we would be entering Chesapeake Bay, and would therefore soon be leaving the ship. We would also, however, find ourselves subject to the laws of American freedom. “Freedom, Wash, is a word with different meanings to different people,” he said, as though I did not know the truth of this better than he.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde (speaker)
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 4 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde, Edgar Farrow
Page Number: 167
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 5 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde, John Willard
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 7 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Big Kit (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde
Page Number: 194
Explanation and Analysis:

“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.”

Related Characters: Christopher “Titch” Wilde (speaker), George Washington “Wash” Black
Page Number: 198
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 2 Quotes

But I cooked always behind a curtain, unseen, my scarred face being, the owner feared, repugnant. The schedule was demanding, and after some months of this I gave up drawing altogether, finding no extra hours in my day. Though I did not know it then, I had begun the months of my long desolation. I became a boy without identity, a walking shadow, and with each new month I fell deeper into strangeness. For there could be no belonging for a creature such as myself, anywhere: a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind and a talent on canvas, running, always running, from the dimmest of shadows.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde, John Willard
Page Number: 211
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 11 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), John Willard
Related Symbols: The Cloud-cutter
Page Number: 267
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 4 Quotes

As I stared into the makeshift tank, watching her, a strangeness came over me: I began to feel that everything I put my hand to ended just this way, in ashes. I had been a slave, I had been a fugitive, I had been extravagantly abandoned in the Arctic as though trapped in some strange primal dream, and I had survived it only to let the best of my creations be taken from me, the gallery of aquatic life. And I felt then a sudden urge to reject it, to cast all of this away, as if the great effort it was taking, and the knowledge that it would never in the end be mine, obliterated its worth. I looked at the octopus, and I saw not the miraculous animal but my own slow, relentless extinction.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Octopus
Page Number: 310
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 17 Quotes

I looked instead to my hands, thinking of the years spent running, after Philip’s death. And I thought of what it was I had been running from, my own certain death at the hands of Erasmus. I thought of my existence before Titch’s arrival, the brutal hours in the field under the crushing sun, the screams, the casual finality edging every slave’s life, as though each day could very easily be the last. And that, it seemed to me clearly, was the more obvious anguish—that life had never belonged to any of us, even when we’d sought to reclaim it by ending it. We had been estranged from the potential of our own bodies, from the revelation of everything our bodies and minds could accomplish.

Related Characters: George Washington “Wash” Black (speaker), Christopher “Titch” Wilde, Erasmus Wilde, Philip
Page Number: 382
Explanation and Analysis: