by Esi Edugyan
I was not yet sixteen years of age then. I had run through the coin Peter House had given me long before. And so I gathered my belongings and moved on. In those drifting days I often gave my name as Joseph Crawford, as if I might hide inside the spectre of another man. But finding myself never able to answer to it, and uneasy in my skin besides, I dropped the ruse and became again Washington Black. I settled on the edge of the Bedford Basin, in a sleepy township on a quieter shore, finding, in due time, work as a dishwasher and a laundry boy. I still struggled to continue to sketch, though my interest in it had waned; it did not afford me the solace it had once done, making me feel instead sad and drained. After a time I found work as a prep cook, and discovered I had a gift for it. By the end of 1834 I was working as a chef in a dining hall popular with disbanded soldiers and out-of-work fishermen flooding in from Newfoundland. 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.
* * *
—
MISTER WILDE HAD TOLD ME I was born with a ring of luck at my neck. Luck is its own kind of manacle, perhaps. I do not know when it happened, only that it gradually crept over me until one day I woke to a burning certainty: I needed to better my circumstances, or I would die.
I was a child no more; I was already a young man of sixteen. And so I found intermittent work at the docks. This work was a choice made in strength—for I governed how much I worked, and spent the rest of my days as I wished. I recalled what Big Kit had once said about freedom—that if he did not feel like working, the free man tossed down his shovel. If he did not like a question, he made no answer. And I was trying my best to live up to that ideal, to be my own free man. But it was quite an awakening, to leave behind Titch’s coddled world and meet again with the brutality of white men. To be called nigger and kicked at in disgust like a wharf rat. My colour was already one burden; my burns made life unconscionable. One night I was held down in the alleyway behind a drinking establishment and beaten and urinated on by my laughing white colleagues, men with whom I daily worked.
Rarely, by then, did I think of Titch. But sometimes at night I would remember his face, or his voice; and I would wonder at his possible survival in all that snow, though I knew it a hopeless thought. Given his empty beliefs about the afterlife, his confusion over his cousin’s choice, it surprised me that he too would end things so. It made me feel that perhaps I had never understood him.
It was in my lowest of days that the miraculous occurred. For I was hired on to unload a sailing vessel in the dead of night, and while rowing a crate ashore I noticed shapes in the black waters. I caught sight of a sudden current, a sudden flash. Then from farther off came another flash, and then another, tight explosions of green and yellow, as if comets were being detonated there.
I leaned over, staring. The sea was smooth as a wooden table, and yet I could see upon its surface an odd translucency. The ship’s light caught it, and oh, oh, what a sight drifted there, what alien and wondrous beings! For I observed now a wide, transparent green orb, pulsing, and beside it a yellow one, and then another and another, dozens of glistening suns flaring all about in the dark waters.
I had seen jellyfish before, in visits with Titch to the beaches near Faith. But never in such numbers, and never so vibrant, so glasslike. The black of the sea was far-reaching, as though no light could penetrate it. And yet here these creatures floated, fragile as a woman’s stocking, their bodies all afire. My breath left me. I leaned over the edge of the little rowboat and watched the sea pulse in a furnace of colour.
The dock master was shouting at me, cursing my laziness. I came to; I started to row again, the oars turning and scattering the light.
Later, back at my boarding house, I dug out my papers and paint, and I sketched for the first time in months. I sat in the fragrant glow of a tallow candle and attempted to capture what I’d seen in the waters. I could not. It had been a burst of incandescence, fleeting, radiant, every punch of light like a note of music.
3
AND SO I AWOKE to myself, my boyhood long behind me. Somehow I had become a stranger in my own skin. How was it I had let all wonder, all curiosity, seep from me? I was amazed. I sought out and found permanent employment as a delivery man for Fummerton’s Dry Goods. I worked only from mid-morning to late afternoon, which afforded me time again for sketching in the fine salt air.
How surprised I was to see how poor my drawing had gotten after years of rest. It struck me how grand my talent had once been, how innate and eerie. At just eleven years old—untrained, a slave—I’d been able to sketch the most luminous tree frogs and wind-blown palms and human feet, feet that frightened with the brutality of their hair and bones and speckled flesh. I would now have to practise what had once come so naturally to me; I would have to retrain my hand. But the prospect did not trouble me. Rather, I felt grateful for the return of the simple urge to draw, at the feelings of calm and peace it brought.
And it was perhaps these feelings of renewal that allowed me to open myself to a kind of friendship. His name was Medwin Harris, and he had care of the rooming house I moved to in December of 1834. He was a long-time resident of Nova Scotia, his family having arrived as refugees at the Melville Island prison—once used for American prisoners of war—back in 1815. He had tried for a time to live away, working as a waiter in a moss-strewn, picturesque hotel edging Niagara Falls. Amazingly, his wages and conditions there had been equal to those of his white colleagues, but still he had abandoned his post, and come back to these soils of his boyhood. He became caretaker of the shabby, rundown rooming house I lodged in, and he was proud of the appointment, speaking of it like a triumph of the will.
“You shall find me here long after the rats have run off, boy,” he’d say to me with a grin. “Look for me in the rubble.”
And then he would spit on his boot and rub the toe to a shine with his handkerchief.
To call him a friend is perhaps inaccurate. Rather, we drank together, and occasionally got into trouble together. When the dark thoughts came on, of Big Kit, or of Titch, or of Philip, I would seek Medwin out in his rooms, and his joking would lighten my spirits. I did not ever mention John Willard, and he never offered any intimacy of his own.
Medwin was tall, much taller than myself, with thick, brutal forearms and a neck wider than his head. He was five years my senior, or so he told me, though given his history I suspected he was somewhat older than that. His gestures were quiet and even meek, and there was something so jarring in the contrast between his looks and his modesty that he seemed eerily watchful, as if he was quietly and constantly taking your measure, which perhaps he was. I will say that he often gave clever, useful advice, and that he understood my silences as even Big Kit had not. But it is also true that there was something in him I did not fully trust.
He was not a bad man, I believe. But I sensed he was not a good one either. There were few men in that place, in those years, who had not learned the hard way of living.
* * *
—
WHEN I HEARD news of the English establishing an apprenticeship system in the Indies, a measure proving that slavery truly was ended—or so I then believed—Medwin and I went out to celebrate.
We sat in a filthy establishment, drinking the dreck someone had likely brought in from an illicit distillery. It was a fine, clear evening, the reek of the sea plants so strong that it filled even the inner rooms with a rotted, blood-like stench. Medwin’s people be
ing American, it was no great occasion for him, but he could see what it meant to me, and he stood me a drink.
“Well,” he said, raising his glass.
“Well,” said I, raising mine also.
And then we sank into a kind of silence, Medwin whistling lightly under his breath, glancing all around at nothing much.
I was overwhelmed by thoughts of Faith, of Gaius, and especially of Big Kit. What would her life become, now she was well and truly free? Would she roam the world as I had roamed it, alone, with no salve for her troubles? Or would she find her way? Where would she go? Could she ever be found? Would she even want to be? And then it came to me, the idea that she had not survived, that she was dead. I do not know why I thought it, but now it had entered my head, it settled leadenly there, like an ache. When I sipped from my drink, I found my hands were shaking.
If Medwin noticed, he said nothing. Instead he stretched back in his chair and, drawing his threadbare handkerchief from his pocket, began to worry its edges with his thick fingers.
As from nowhere, our table was flanked suddenly by two dark-faced men. In the thin yellow light of the sparsely hung lanterns I could see the black gleam of their foreheads, their twisted, damp mouths. I did not know them; one man was shorn bald and bowed in one leg, the other quite short with enormous hands unfitting for so small a body. Yet for all their oddity they looked upon me like I was a creature of repulsion.
“You seen this nigger’s face?” the taller one slurred to his friend.
“Fuck,” said the friend, and I could smell the vomit on his breath. “Christ.”
“Who let this thing in here?” the first man called out, trying to focus his eyes on me. “Shit.”
“Like some shit dragged behind a cart.”
“Hell, nigger. You should have prayed they killed you.”
Across from me I could feel Medwin begin to smile.
“This comical to you?” the shorter man said.
“Look at him grinning away like that. Like a imbecile.”
“You find this amusing? Best you get the hell out this place before I break your fucking neck. Beat you shitless.”
“Why am I wasting my breath on this here filth?”
“Filth. Both of them.”
“Waste of breath just to say it. I’m done talking.”
“What?” said Medwin so suddenly that the men paused, as though momentarily sobered.
The tall man moistened his dark lips. “Said I’m done talking, nigger.”
“What?” Medwin said again.
“You got shit in your ears? I’m done talking.”
Medwin smiled across at me. “Don’t sound like he so done talking, do it?”
I closed my eyes, sensing the coming rush, like a pressure. Then I heard Medwin smash his glass on the table ledge, and I glanced up in time to watch him drive the jagged edge into one shocked face then the next.
4
SUCH WAS THE WAY of the place, at that time. There was a quiet lawlessness to it all that was often grotesque. The viciousness between the races was bracing enough, but almost as dreadful was the way blacks sometimes treated one another, as if all they had endured in cruelty would be paid back doubly on their brothers. Sometimes it felt as though I had not travelled very far from the rundown huts of Faith.
I tried to avoid all conflict. It was difficult with a friend like Medwin, who sought out fights as he sought out food, as a lifeblood. Though I still did delight in his company some days, I kept more and more to myself, and began to go out into the raw spring dawns to draw.
Each morning, I would gather my satchel of leads and paints, and a small collapsible chair with an easel attached that I myself had fashioned, and I would walk the quiet dirt road behind my rooming house towards the dark inlet. At that hour, in that place, the street belonged to me alone; there was only the scrape of cats in the side streets, the rattle of loose doors, leaves hissing in the gutters. John Willard, Philip, Titch—all of it seemed another life. I would make my way towards an inlet just beyond the headland, out of sight of the town, hearing the hush of the water’s slow creep up the seaweed-choked rocks long before I came in sight of the strand.
How radiant the world was, empty and silent like this. Often, at that time of year, the tide was still receding. Carefully, I would remove my shoes and, still clutching my belongings, lurch over the cold, damp rocks, the air smelling of wet weeds. With the sun just piercing the horizon, the light was hazy and filmy, the sand seeming to stretch on into oblivion. The sea foam stirred whitely at the edge of the water. It was here that I set down my tools. I would turn up the legs of my trousers and, with a sharp intake of breath, step in.
The tide pools were most alive at first light. The hazy air seemed to gild all that lay within, the anemones glowing pink as human flesh, their tentacles open and pleading. Small soft-shelled crabs with lively little eyes, and sometimes a sea pen, its quills magisterial. Some days, if I waded farther out, I would find pansies or green sea urchins, large crabs, polyps magenta with toxins. The jellyfish were shy here, a mercy—for many carried poison in their harpoons, and at the first touch of danger they would spring-launch them, and stun a man senseless.
It was on so quiet a morning, the water bitterly cold, that my life was to take its next sudden turn. I had waded in mid-thigh—my rolled trousers drenched, stones and broken shells biting into my bare feet—when I felt something like a presence. I turned; I was quite alone, I could see no one behind me. But then the light shifted, and I caught a distant silhouette on the shore. Gradually a figure took shape. He was standing about a half mile from where I’d set down my equipment.
I must admit to feeling some alarm. But when the stranger began to set up an easel on the sand, I relaxed somewhat. I did not believe a man who had read John Willard’s poster would go to such elaborate lengths to snare me. In any case the silhouette looked rather shorter, rather more plump than I expected a bounty man to be. I watched uneasily as the man drew out his instruments and began very leisurely to paint.
These early ventures had become my one pure pleasure; the sense of freedom was intense. At the easel I was a man in full, his hours his own, his preoccupations his own. It bothered me that some stranger might show up to destroy it. All morning I did not make to approach him; nor did he walk in my direction. I scratched down my sketches in haste and left early.
But the next morning there he was again. Grumbling, casting angry looks in his direction, I gathered my tools and stamped away without any sketches at all. The inlet felt tainted; even the air seemed to stink. When the next morning I again discovered him there, I understood even this would be taken from me. I raised my hand in an exasperated gesture towards him before wading in. He paused, and put a hand to his eyes to see me, and then he raised his own hand in a friendly wave—or so I believed, he was so very far away.
I took it as a reproach. Who was I to deny a fellow artist his own pleasure at work, his own sense of freedom? I too possessed nothing of worth but these hours. We might even, in another life, have been colleagues. And so every dawn we would greet each other from across the long strand, before growing absorbed in our respective work. I began to think it strange that this person with whom I now shared my intimate hours should remain unknown to me, a stranger so absolute that I would not recognize him in the street. I began to wonder, too, what sort of work he was embarked upon. But I did not wish to complicate matters.
In the end it was not I who overturned the delicate balance. One morning, when I had pulled from the sea a hermit crab and sat sketching the silver arc of its shell, a shadow dropped across my paper and a voice, raw and soft, said, “Oh, how beautiful. What a talent you have, sir.”
I turned on my creaking wooden seat, grimacing against the early sun, and saw her face for the first time.
She had dark, foxlike features, and vaguely narrowed eyes. She smil
ed at me. She wore an oversized pair of beige trousers, rolled up to the knees. Her tanned calves were quite bare, strong and rounded. I raised my eyes: beneath her large-brimmed man’s hat her black hair was pinned harshly up at her nape, as if it were shorn. She was very short. Her left hand was cocooned in a plaster cast stained with soot, as though she had long ago broken her arm and could not be bothered to remove it. With her good hand, which was stained with paint, she gestured at the half-finished anemones I had left to dry beside my easel in the sand. “You should see my own reproductions. They look rather more like something down a man’s trousers, I fear.”
I must have looked startled, for she laughed then—an odd, whisking sound—and said, “I have shocked you. Forgive me.”
“I am not shocked,” said I.
“Taken aback, then. You really must forgive me—I am too plain-spoken.” She held out her tiny hand, and a moment passed before I thought to take it. “Tanna Goff.”
“George Washington Black.”
“Of course you are. I would have expected no less. First the Delaware, then the Labrador Sea.”
“The joke is new to me.”
“My goodness, you are polite,” she said with a dry smile. “Unfortunately, I am not. Please, George Washington Black, do forgive my forwardness. It’s just—well, have we not been sketching side by side every morning these two weeks now? I thought it only correct that we were acquainted.” She shrugged cheerfully.
I glanced down the beach—her easel stood eerie and abandoned. “I had thought you were a man all this time,” I said. I saw her expression and immediately felt foolish. “It is the distance between us,” I continued. “I do not mean to offend you. That is, I would not mistake you now—”