Through the second half of the Washington Black, Wash (who used to be enslaved on a plantation in Barbados) and Titch (Wash’s former master’s brother) set out on several lengthy journeys across the globe. Yet despite the fact that these characters often set out on their journeys to make progress in their lives, the past continues to confront them. In Wash’s case, Titch deserts Wash in the Arctic, leaving Wash to search for him across London, Amsterdam, and ultimately Morocco, as Wash feels unable to find a sense of closure on his difficult childhood without understanding why Titch abandoned him. A bounty hunter named John Willard also stalks Wash to claim a reward Wash’s former master Erasmus offers—and so he becomes a constant shadow from Wash’s past enslavement. Likewise, Titch is troubled by his cousin Philip’s suicide (which he feels guilty for) and his own father’s death, eventually traveling to Morocco in order to avoid his family and make scientific progress that would have made his father proud. Ultimately, as none of the characters truly find peace and continue to wander restlessly, the book suggests that the past is inescapable, and people can waste much of their lives trying to avoid it or confront it.
Wash constantly grapples with his past enslavement and Titch’s abandonment, to the point where he feels both homeless and purposeless. After Titch abandons Wash in the Arctic by walking out alone into a snowstorm, Wash travels to Nova Scotia in order to make a life for himself there as a free man (slavery has effectively ended in Canada). However, knowing that John Willard is still searching for him, Wash feels uneasy everywhere he goes. Wash describes how this makes him “irritable and nervous and desperately melancholy.” He thinks constantly that he has to move on, so he drifts from town to town and sometimes even changes his name. This illustrates that his journeys are not motivated by a desire to move forward in his life, but instead are motivated by fear of the past confronting him. Wash travels even more when he learns that Titch is actually alive. He travels to London, Amsterdam, and eventually Morocco in order to find answers from Titch. He realizes how rootless this makes him and doesn’t fully understand why he does it, Wash thinks, “something in me would not cease—a great lunging forward, a striving rooted as deeply in me as the thirst for water.” Though he recognizes that putting in all this effort and energy to travel the globe is wasteful and futile, Wash can’t give it up, showing how the past is inherently inescapable.
Titch, meanwhile, is also haunted by his own past, leading him to cut off all connection with his family and avoid the world by moving to Morocco—but he, too, seems unable to make any true progress. At the end of the book, when Wash and his lover Tanna find Titch in Morocco, Titch reveals the major reason why he left the Arctic. Though he has a difficult time describing the connection between these two events, he recounts how, as a child, he and Erasmus used to bully Philip mercilessly, and so he always felt responsible for Philip’s melancholy nature and then for his eventual suicide. He suggests that after Philip’s suicide, he felt there was more to life than the physical properties of the world, and that his disappearance in the Arctic and his subsequent trip to Morocco were meant to explore this spiritual aspect of the world—demonstrating how so much of Titch’s present has been determined by trying to reconcile with his failures in the past. Even Wash realizes how little progress Titch has made in Morocco; he is simply trying to relive the past. As he looks around Titch’s stone house, he thinks, “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.” Titch’s attempts to make a new life for himself have only led him to repeat his past.
The book’s conclusion provides no easy answers, but it implies how easily a life can be wasted by focusing only on the past rather than striving to create a future. In the book’s final chapters, Titch shows Wash that he is rebuilding the Cloud-cutter. Wash notes that Titch is “simply re-enacting his past as a form of comfort, conveniently forgetting all that had been bad and wrong about it” and is “setting himself up for a second failure.” What was once a symbol of journey and adventure has instead become an anchor, showing how Titch has been unable to escape his past. Wash, too, doesn’t fully understand how to move on from his past. After Wash gets some answers from Titch (but little resolution), Tanna asks Wash if he’s gotten what he came for. He thinks, “She wanted to know if anything would be laid to rest, or if we'd continue to drift through the world together going from place to place until I made her like me, so lacking a foothold anywhere that nowhere felt like home.” Wash’s statement recognizes how much time and energy he has wasted in searching for Titch; his restlessness has prevented him from creating a truly settled life.
In the book’s final passage, Wash walks out into a sandstorm, mirroring how Titch walked out into the snowstorm in the Arctic. Though deliberately ambiguous, this ending suggests that both of the book’s main characters continue to be restless and unable to fully reconcile with the past—fated to spend their lives avoiding it or repeating it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Journeying and the Past ThemeTracker
Journeying and the Past Quotes in Washington Black
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.
It had happened so gradually, but these months with Titch had schooled me to believe I could leave all misery behind, I could cast off all violence, outrun a vicious death. I had even begun thinking I’d been born for a higher purpose, to draw the earth’s bounty, and to invent; I had imagined my existence a true and rightful part of the natural order. How wrong-headed it had all been. I was a black boy, only—I had no future before me, and little grace or mercy behind me. I was nothing, I would die nothing, hunted hastily down and slaughtered.
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.
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.
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.
The octopus arranged itself in a smatter of algae, its body hanging blackly before me. When I came forward to touch it, it sent out a surge of dark ink. We paused, watching each other, the grey rag of ink hanging between us. Then it shot off through the water, stopping short to radiate like a cloth set afire, its arms unfurling and vibrating. There was something playful in the pause, as if it expected me to ink it back. I held my hands out towards it, gently; the creature hovered in the dark waters, almost totally still. Then, shyly, it began to pulse towards me, stopping just inches away, its small, gelatinous eyes taking me in. Then it swam directly into my hands.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I stepped out onto the threshold, the sand stinging me, blinding my eyes. Behind me I thought I heard Tanna call my name, but I did not turn, could not take my gaze from the orange blur of the horizon. I gripped my arms about myself, went a few steps forward. The wind across my forehead was like a living thing.
