Abolitionism

Abolitionism in Washington Black appears as a political cause, a documentary project, and a relationship marked by unequal power. The novel follows efforts to record the violence of enslavement and press for its end, while Washington’s life tests the limits of those efforts: legal or personal escape does not erase racialized suspicion, exclusion, or the possibility of being treated as property again.

A life narrated against the record

Washington begins his account by restarting it, insisting that the first version was not truly a beginning. He describes himself as a free man in possession of his own person, but his origins remain uncertain: he was told he was born in Barbados in 1818, while another account placed his birth aboard an illicit Dutch vessel crossing the Atlantic in 1817. His later dreams of a slave fort and a forced passage do not resolve the uncertainty. The opening makes the limits of personal memory part of the story of enslavement: Washington must reckon with accounts of a past in which he was present but too young to know it.

That uncertainty contrasts with the bluntness of the plantation’s classifications. Washington recalls being put to field labor as a small child and, at nine, receiving a straw hat and a shovel too heavy for him to lift. Later, plantation records name the people they reduced to laborers and list their deaths. Abolitionist testimony can expose such treatment, but the record’s orderly form can also reproduce the dehumanizing habit of treating lives as entries and property.

Titch’s abolitionist project

Titch tells Washington that his work in Barbados was not simply an escape for personal freedom. Acting on the suggestion of his friend Samuel in London, he has been taking notes on what he sees, intending that reports of cruelty reach an influential friend in Parliament. Titch shows Washington a substantial manuscript, the Catalogue of the Injustices and Cruelties Borne Upon the Persons and Minds of the Enslaved Negroes on a Barbadoes Plantation in the West Indies. He has added an account of Big Kit’s condition, believing that it will help move readers. He also expects Washington’s scientific work to be useful.

The project gives observation a political purpose: particular injuries and conditions are to be gathered into evidence that can circulate beyond the plantation. Yet the arrangement is not free of tension. Titch’s cause depends partly on Washington’s presence and work, and Washington later confronts him with the possibility that he was taken on because he could help the political campaign and scientific experiments. He accuses Titch of caring more about slavery as a moral stain on white men than about the damage it inflicts on Black men. He recognizes that this charge is not wholly fair, but also that it expresses a real wound in their relationship. The novel thus distinguishes opposition to slavery from an automatic understanding of the people who endure it.

Freedom under racial control

The political promise of abolition is measured against Washington’s continuing exposure to coercion. At sea, Captain Benedikt challenges Titch’s description of Washington as a friend by calling him property. Titch answers by claiming that Washington is his property, then argues that Washington should be treated with respect because he is a skilled scientific illustrator and personal assistant whose work interests powerful men in England. The defense recognizes Washington’s ability, but it still relies on a claim of ownership and on the attention of influential white observers.

In Nova Scotia, Washington finds that the freedom he had imagined for Black Loyalists has been diminished by scarcity and exclusion. He works in a fishery, but fears that kidnappers may seize a free Black man and carry him back into slavery. He is also attacked by a local man; although bystanders identify the assailant as a local brawler, Washington cannot shake the fear that the violence is connected to John Willard and the threat of recapture. The danger makes him increasingly watchful and isolated. His experiences show that abolition and flight have not created secure freedom where kidnapping, racial hostility, and economic exclusion remain possible.

The same contradiction appears during the journey to England with Tanna and G. M. Goff. A passenger tells Goff that Washington belongs below deck with the animals. Goff is outraged and thereafter rebukes people who insult Washington, though Tanna’s intervention prevents a larger confrontation. The scene makes the limits of individual antiracist protest visible: Goff’s response matters, but the insult arises within a public order that still treats Washington’s presence as improper.

Archives, evidence, and the limits of witness

The novel places abolitionist records beside other documents that classify and pursue Washington. In the plantation scrapbook, he finds an advertisement offering one thousand pounds for the capture of George Washington Black, describing his burns and clothing and warning that he may be travelling with an abolitionist white man. Signed by John Francis Willard as Erasmus Wilde’s acting agent, the notice turns Washington into a fugitive to be located and returned. The same written culture that can preserve evidence of abuse can also serve the machinery of capture.

The apprenticeship log records names and death dates in a manner that recalls the accounting of goods or sugar yields. Washington finds Big Kit’s death date, though not her birth name, Nawi, or the later name given to her in the Indies. The entry confirms a death he had long suspected, but its impersonal form cannot convey the life behind the name. When he reads the records, he imagines the violence that shaped Big Kit’s life and the separation that followed when he left her behind. Tanna’s hand on his shoulder accompanies his grief; the archive has returned him to a history he cannot simply set aside.

Abolitionism in the novel is therefore not only a matter of condemning slavery or assembling proof. It also raises questions about who produces testimony, whose experience gives it force, and what a document cannot restore. Titch’s reports may help make cruelty legible to political readers, but Washington’s confrontation with him insists that a cause can oppose slavery while still failing to treat the Black person beside it as an equal. The tension between witness and lived experience gives the abolitionist project its urgency and its limits.