Washington Black: A Novel Read online

  That man crouched over the body with a large curved skinner’s knife. He reached around and cupped his callused palm under William’s chin and began to saw. We heard the terrible wet flesh tearing, the crunch of the bones, saw the weird, lifeless sag of William’s body as the head came away.

  The overseer stood and raised the severed head in both hands. Then he walked back to the barrow and took out the long wooden post. Hammering it into the dry earth, he drove William’s head onto the sharp end.

  “No man can be reborn without his head,” the master called out. “I will do this to each and every new suicide. Mark me. None of you will ever see your countries again if you continue to kill yourselves. Let your deaths come naturally.”

  I stared up at Kit. She was peering at William’s head on its spike, the bulge of its softening flesh in the sun, and there was something in her face I had not seen in her before.

  Despair.

  3

  BUT THAT IS no beginning. Allow me to begin again, for the record.

  I have walked this earth for eighteen years. I am a Freeman now in possession of my own person.

  I was born in the year 1818 on that sun-scorched estate in Barbados. So I was told. I had also heard it said I was born in a shackled cargo hold during a frenzied crossing of the Atlantic, aboard an illicit Dutch vessel. That would have been the autumn of 1817. In the latter account my mother died in the difficult birth. For years I did not privilege one origin over the other, but in my first years free I came to suffer strange dreams, flashes of images: Tall, staked wooden palisades, walls of black jungle beyond. Naked men yoked together and stumbling up rotted planks into a dark brig. Was it Gold Coast I dreamed of, the slave fort at Annamaboe? How could that be so, you ask? Ask yourself what you know of your own beginnings, and if your life is so very different. We must all take on faith the stories of our birth, for though we are in them, we are not yet present.

  I was a field nigger. I cleared the cane, only my sweat was of value. I was wielding a hoe at the age of two, and weeding, and collecting fodder for the cows, and scooping manure into cane holes with my hands. In my ninth year I was gifted a straw hat and a shovel that I could scarcely lift, and I had felt proud to be counted a man.

  My father?

  I did not know my father.

  My first master named me, as he named us all. I was christened George Washington Black—Wash, as I came to be known. With great ridicule, he’d said he glimpsed in me the birth of a nation and a warrior-president and a land of sweetness and freedom. All this was before my face was burnt, of course. Before I sailed a vessel into the night skies, fleeing Barbados, before I knew what it meant to be stalked for the bounty on one’s scalp.

  Before the white man died at my feet.

  Before I met Titch.

  4

  TITCH.

  I met him for the first time that very night, the night of William’s desecration, when Big Kit and I were summoned to the Great House to wait at the master’s table.

  The strangeness of this request was alarming: a field slave was a black-skinned brute born for hard toil, certainly not a being to be brought inside. We did not know why the master should request us. What were we to him? Kit’s despair had over the hours grown into a silent fury at what she could no longer do to herself and to me. She now began to fear the master had discovered her intent, and that he meant us some cruel and grievous punishment.

  Immanuel and young Émilie waded down the soft slope and into the sprawl of huts in their clean white-and-grey house clothes to summon us. Kit rose up from where she sat on a stone in front of our hut, shaking her head in anger.

  “Don’t you send Wash up there,” she said. “I go. But you leave the boy.”

  “The master he clear,” Immanuel said. “Both you.”

  “Hello, Wash,” Émilie said shyly.

  “Hello,” I said, my face growing warm.

  “They eat before it get dark,” Immanuel said. “You be up right quick. Don’t make neither them wait.”

  I had never, in all my childhood, passed through the shaded grove of frangipani and approached the master’s verandah. At dusk I followed Kit up the slope, feeling the pebbles, the cool grass on my feet for the first time. Kit stared stonily up at the house.

  The doors stood open. A muscle in my throat fluttered, as if I’d swallowed a moth. I had once crawled under the great chimney in the laundry, twisting my neck to peer up its chute at the square of sky beyond and the clouds scuttling by. But the height of that seemed nothing in comparison with the ceiling here; and at the top, a large glass dome of a window, the faint evening light dropping in a long rope to the floor. Dust was adrift in the air. I saw carved scrollwork over the doors and heavy burgundy drapery, padded green chairs crouching on elegant curved legs. It struck me as impossibly beautiful.

  “A fine, fine quiet,” Big Kit whispered, nodding. “Listen.”

  We did not dare enter, not with our filthy feet and clothes, stinking—I think now—of sweat and dirt, insects in our hair. We stood uncertain, unhappy. As we had been summoned, we could not go back to the huts, but nor could we bang on the door to announce ourselves. We stared at each other.

  At last Gaius, the house porter, came round the corner. I’d come to know him better in the weeks since Erasmus Wilde’s arrival, as he was sent out to the overseers more often with the master’s instructions. Gaius was tall, thin, old as driftwood. His gestures were deliberate and slow, and there was a grace to him we all of us in the huts admired and mocked because of our admiration. He had been handsome once, and in the strong cheekbones and clear forehead one could glimpse a kind of regal deportment, a man elevated beyond the ordinary. To my eyes, he was a kind of surrogate master, a man with the speech and breeding of a white man. I feared him.

  He was stiff, unfriendly. But not unkind. “Good evening, Catherine. Young Washington.”

  “Gaius,” Big Kit said warily. “Émilie and Immanuel come down to fetch us.” She faltered. “What do he want us for?”

  “The master?”

  “He the one.”

  “Did Immanuel not tell you?”

  Big Kit set a huge hand on the top of my skull. I could feel her tense; I knew she feared the master’s wrath. “He say we is to wait his table.”

  Frowning, Gaius glanced past us at the twilight as though there might be someone else waiting there. “Then that is what you are to do,” he said. “I am sure he has his reasons. You will wait in the kitchens until you’re called.”

  Neither of us moved.

  At last Kit said, “Our feet.”

  Gaius stared down at the filth caking our bare feet. Then, quite slowly, he opened his jacket and withdrew from the inner pocket of his waistcoat a huge white handkerchief, handing it to Big Kit. “Clean your feet,” he said. “Both of you. Either of you leave footprints on his marble, you’ll be sorry.”

  We wiped off our feet, and then he turned and led us through the grand hall. On the far side, we stepped from the cold marble onto parquet flooring; I had never in my life seen such a thing, angles of wood braided to make a miraculous pattern. The air was cool, scented with mint. I felt my fears diminish a little. Big Kit, true, was not at ease. But I wanted to see everything, remember everything, to carry these wonders back with me when I returned to the huts. White lace, silver candlesticks, wood polished to so lustrous a sheen it looked like fresh bread. We moved past rooms filled with ancient rugs and tall old clocks and strange frozen creatures with tawny claws and outraged eyes. I stared and stared, hardly daring to blink.

  “Is real, Gaius?” I whispered. “Them animals?”

  Gaius stopped to glance at a huge white owl on a perch in an alcove. Its yellow eyes stared unseeing. It did not move. “They were once alive,” he murmured, almost inaudible. “Now they are dead and stuffed. The master is the same.”

  “He o
nce alive?” I whispered.

  Gaius paused and studied me with his inscrutable expression. Just when I thought he would look away, he gave the faintest of smiles. “So it is said, young Washington.”

  I had known Kit to be fierce, an explosive force. But here, walking the halls of Wilde Hall, she too seemed diminished, cowed, anxious. The change in her frightened me more than the frozen beasts in the hall, more than the strange, gleaming luxury surrounding us. I hurried to keep up as Gaius led us deeper into the house.

  At last we entered the kitchen. It was a vast room with silver vats at a boil, a wall of heat shimmering in the air. The cook, Maria, turned startled to us, her face dusted in flour, her sleeves rolled up. There were two serving maids in the back, wrestling with an enormous canister. I searched for Émilie, but did not see her among the gusts of flour and stacks of gravy-stained dishes and large wooden blocks with cubes of peppers and yams. An enormous fire blazed in the great open fireplace, a glistening bird turning slowly on its chain as it cooked. I stared in amazement at the bounty, and felt something I had not known before wash over me—desire.

  “Don’t you even do it, nigger,” Maria said sharply, as my eye caught a plate of pastries near the door.

  I looked at her in fear, caught out. Something shifted in her face, softened.

  “The time for that is later,” she said in a gentler voice. “When you is cleaning up, you can lick at what’s left over.”

  “Is so?” I said.

  “But only from the touched food, only when you are scraping their plates,” Gaius added. “It won’t do for you to eat up the fresh food.”

  “We get to lick the plates, Kit,” I said, smiling up at her in wonder.

  * * *

  —

  THE TWO OF THEM were speaking as we shuffled in, Big Kit and I carrying trays of rolls and hot dishes of steaming vegetables. On a low buffet at the back wall were the dishes set out for serving that Gaius had described to us. He had warned us to be prompt, attentive, silent. That our hands, in their strange white gloves, should be always present, and our bodies always absent.

  I could see how uneasy Big Kit was; she stood quietly furious, as if damning the obviousness of her body, clasping and unclasping her hands. The punishment for our plan to murder ourselves, she knew, would not be gentle. She tried to quiet her face, her gaze slow and inward.

  I was terrified too, but I also could not prevent myself from glancing at the master’s plate as he ate, thinking of the sauces there, the hot yellow crusts he dropped in boredom.

  I had not ever been so physically near to the master. Under the burnished candlelight he looked as he had in the field—waxy and ill, the same colour as the rind of hard cheese that lay on the table before them. His flesh was slack, tired. As I leaned in to pour the water, my hands shaking, a smell of wet paper seemed to come off his body. I noticed dried blood under his fingernails.

  And yet it was to the second man that my eyes kept drifting. I had imagined he would be dark, frightening. He was not. His hair was at his shoulders; he wore a dark-blue frock coat. His fingers were long and thin, a jewelled ring on the index finger of each hand. His feet were planted wide and firmly under him where he sat, as though he might at any moment stand from his seat. And yet he sat very still as I poured the tepid water into his glass, and paused in his speech to give me a fragile smile. He ran a spidery finger down the bridge of his nose, large, arched, the nostrils slight as buttonholes, and continued in his low voice. “I have tried passing sulphuric acid over iron filings. I have tried animal bladders, silk stockings. Paper sacks. Even some of the more preposterous ones, to see if some merit was missed in them. But they were all abandoned quite rightfully, Erasmus. I think nothing works so well as hydrogen, simple hydrogen, and canvas. You should see the heights one can reach—why, ten, twenty thousand feet. It is truly spectacular. The world from up there is, well—it is God’s earth, man.”

  The master was chewing and did not glance up from his meat. “But you have not been up.”

  “Ah, no. Not myself. Not yet.”

  “So you do not know.”

  “I have read about it. Others’ reports.”

  “And you imagine you will actually make it across the Atlantic in that thing.”

  “I will have to undertake some test flights first, but yes.”

  The master grunted. “Corvus Peak is a miserable climb. You will not like it in the heat of day.”

  The second man, his eyes a stark green, made no answer.

  Now the master raised his face. “You will be wanting for me to spare some slaves to carry your apparatus, I expect. What?”

  The dark-haired man furrowed his brow.

  “What? Speak up, man.”

  The man paused, his knife and fork held above his plate. He met the master’s eye. “These potatoes,” he said instead, “they are most unusual, do you not find? The flavour is passable, but I do prefer our white varietal in Hampshire.”

  “Well, I am pleased you consent to break with convention and dine at this lesser table.” The master wiped at his mouth with the edge of the tablecloth.

  “You are too easily offended, Erasmus. It is potatoes.”

  “My potatoes,” the master scowled. “Potatoes selected by me. It always was your passion to thumb your nose at all of my preferences. You and Father were always alike in this way. Damned judgmental.”

  I was surprised at this mention of a father, and glanced at the second man. I had not thought he bore any sort of relation to the master, but now the resemblance rose to sight, like a watermark: the brisk, bright-coloured eyes, the oddly plump lower lips, the way each man punctuated the ends of certain phrases with a languid sweep of the hand, as if the gesture were being performed underwater.

  The master caught the second man glancing uneasily across at Big Kit, and he laughed a sharp laugh. “What? The sow? My language cannot offend her. She has no sensibilities to offend, Christopher.”

  The second man set his knife and fork quietly down.

  “No matter,” said the master, waving a slow, impatient hand. “You were speaking of your improvement on Father’s air balloons, the great heights you will reach.”

  “Well, they are not exactly air balloons. But yes—”

  “And now you want great weights.”

  The brother laughed easily, a strange sound. “I do require a second man to ride the contraption with me. For the ballast, you see. It cannot be done alone.”

  “And it is my great weight you require?” The master’s eyes had soured.

  “Erasmus, your greatness extends to all of your attributes.”

  “You are saying I am fat, then?”

  The man paused, met the master’s eyes.

  “Perhaps you require something of lesser weight.” The master turned sharply; he gestured at me where I stood. I felt the water pitcher in my hands begin to tremble. I dared not meet his eye. “Why not take a nigger calf up with you? He should be light enough.”

  “Leave it be, Erasmus.”

  “Would that be suggestion, or instruction?”

  The man took a long, slow breath. “I will never understand why you seek offence in everything I say. It is only the two of us here, and I have come for a limited stay. Would our time not be better enjoyed if we tried to understand each other?”

  “Do I lack understanding?”

  “What you lack,” the brother began, but then he broke off and did not continue his thought. Instead, he said, “I would not have this conversation now, in front of the help.”

  “They are not the help, Titch. They are the furniture.”

  The brother exhaled, rolling his eyes slightly.

  “You are too soft, little brother. How is it you expect to get through a whole year here if already you are weeping at profanities used before a nigger? Heavens. All Father’s rega
rd for you would dry up at once if he saw how soft you are become. Indeed, why did you insist on following me to this wretched place at all, given your convictions? Do you mean to steal away all my slaves while I am asleep?”

  The man smiled irritably. “I have asked you to leave it.”

  I was astonished to see the master suddenly smile also, and start to laugh. “So there is a man in you somewhere after all. More claret?”

  His laughter, I believe, was genuine. In that moment I understood I would not ever make sense of the master, for there was not sense to be made.

  As he was extending the decanter of claret, he spilled a slow red stain onto the white tablecloth. I watched it spread, like blood, seeping outwards. The colour of it, its deep redness, seemed horrifying and beautiful to me. But Big Kit shuffled silently forward, a large, dark shadow, and began dabbing at the stain at once with a white towel.

  The master took no notice.

  The brother cleared his throat. “I have gone through three shirts today so far. It is a devil’s climate.”

  The master only gave a slight puff of his cheeks. He had not finished his thought. “This is rough work. It requires veins of steel. What, was it some fourteen, fifteen years ago only, the Easter Rebellion? Niggers set the whole bloody island afire. Vigilance is paramount, Titch. Why, I went into Bridge Town this afternoon with John Willard, he and I went up to the club.”

  “The man at dinner the other night? The plump one with the red, sweating face?”

  “Nay, the shorter one, the yellow-haired one in spectacles. He was a bookkeeper at Drax but found himself frustrated there—did more hunting down of the niggers than keeping ledgers, I think. He still has strong words for the management there. Why keep feeding a man of fifty who can scarce stand, when a boy of ten can cut twice the cane? said he. Willard is a man of very economical turn, I think. It is a question of wastage, said he. Indeed. The best-respected planter can walk out amongst his slaves with a ledger under his arm and just the sight of it can make a nigger skunk his drawers. He has seen it himself. You, boy. Tell me, would you soil yourself to see my brother here with a ledger?”