Washington Black: A Novel by Esi Edugyan

Author:Esi Edugyan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-09-18T07:00:00+00:00

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THE DAYS PASSED. The hours were short and dark and fleeting, with nightfall coming swiftly. Titch did not mention the Cloud-cutter again, and his father did not ask after it. Instead, they spoke of their family life with a curious detached air. There was a distance, a wryness, in Titch’s manner that did not resemble the man who had grieved at the news of the death on Faith Plantation. I understood this to be his father’s doing—that Mister Wilde was a man with a broken apparatus in place of a heart. It was not, I came to believe, that he did not love; only that he loved intermittently.

They spoke for hours. I listened. I learned of a life and a world I would never have imagined for Titch. I heard stories of his mother, accounts of their travels to Paris. I heard tales of a greenhouse on their estate in England filled with poisonous flowers. And I heard, most strangely, about Erasmus Wilde as a boy, how Titch and his brother would swim naked in the lake on their property and then run through the halls of their house still without clothes, startling the servants. I heard about the night when Erasmus and Titch painted their bodies with the notion of being African priests and made a bonfire in the courtyard out of the dining room furniture, chanting and singing in the firelight until their mother threw buckets of water on both boys in horror. I heard how Mister Wilde had taken Titch to witness an aerial ascent in Norwich from Ranelagh Gardens, the balloon a perfect incandescent orb in the sky before its slow plummet into the sea. I heard how Mister Wilde stood explaining the idea of gases even as the balloonist drowned in the waters, how Titch had begun trembling at the sight of the accident and was not able to stop until halfway back to Granbourne. I heard also of Titch’s tenth year, how he had been ill and frail and lost half his body weight, of how in these bleak days his brother had nicknamed him “Titch,” on account of how tiny he had become. I heard how the doctors had insisted on bloodletting but his mother had prevented them.

“She saved your life, son,” said Mister Wilde, suddenly tender. “A brilliant woman.”

I looked at him curiously, trying to imagine this stout, unwashed, ugly man with his wife. I could not. He had begun to reminisce now of his wife, Abigail Wilde, remembering her youth in Liverpool and how, when they had first met, at a ball, they had spoken until sunrise about the complicated imprecisions in hand-copied maps and the lack of standard Continental measures. He had known from that moment that the solitude he had lived inside for his entire youth might not be his fate. Titch said nothing to this, I noticed. He said only, “Erasmus and I used to watch her as she sat for her Italian lessons in the afternoons.

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