Richard Black’s death sets in motion the transfer of Faith Plantation to Erasmus Wilde, a change in ownership that turns Washington Black’s childhood fear of an estate sale into a harsher reality. The event is remembered not as a private family transition but through its consequences for the enslaved people: their labor remains a source of wealth, while the new regime intensifies punishment and control.

Death and succession

Richard Black is described as very old and largely distant from the people working his estate. Washington recalls seeing him asleep in a chair on the lawn, while the workers, expecting an estate sale after his death, mourned for themselves rather than for their master. Washington and Big Kit watched as overseers carried the coffin from the Great House and placed it in a wagon. In his later account, he names this moment as the beginning of a pattern in which the dead seemed to go free while the living remained bound to the plantation.

Eighteen weeks later, Richard’s nephew arrived from Bridge Town with a procession of carriages. The estate had not been sold off, a development the workers initially took as a mercy. The arrival instead marked the transfer of authority within the family. Richard’s estates, including Faith Plantation, passed to his nephew Erasmus Wilde and his brothers. Christopher Wilde later explains that Erasmus already managed family properties while their father spent long periods away on scientific research, and that Richard’s inheritance added Faith to the estates Erasmus was responsible for.

New management and plantation violence

Erasmus’s succession brought a sharp change in the people enforcing plantation discipline. In his second week, he dismissed the old overseers and replaced them with rough men drawn from the docks, including former soldiers and enslavers. Washington remembers the new regime through the punishments and killings imposed on workers. These acts were not incidental to the inheritance: they established the conditions under which the estate’s labor would be controlled and its productivity maintained.

The violence also exposed the plantation’s calculation of people as usable labor. When Christopher proposed that enslaved workers help construct his experimental craft, Erasmus objected that he could not lose fifteen workers and cited the demands of the field schedule. His response places the family’s scientific ambitions alongside the estate’s dependence on coerced labor: the work might be assigned, but only within limits set by the value of the workforce to the plantation.

Wealth and the family estate

Christopher describes the inheritance as a reversal in the family’s fortunes. The Wildes had been financially declining, in part because of their father’s costly scientific pursuits; Richard’s estate brought wealth back to the family. Erasmus was expected to spend most of his time in the West Indies, making periodic journeys to England, because Faith was the property that supplied money to the family’s other estates. The inheritance therefore made the plantation central not only to Erasmus’s responsibilities but also to the wider family economy.

That economic function persisted beyond the period of outright enslavement. When Washington later returned to ask what had happened to the people at Faith, Mrs. Wilde said the plantation had been sold and maintained that the former enslaved people had become apprentices and workers, receiving payment and lodging. Her account contrasts with Washington’s concern for people such as Big Kit and Gaius, and with the records he consults: a change in legal status does not erase the history or consequences of the inherited plantation system.

Memory, records, and aftermath

The episode reaches Washington through several forms of retrospective evidence. He begins by acknowledging uncertainty about his own origins and then restarts his narrative explicitly for the record. Later, Christopher shows him a written catalogue documenting abuses at Faith, including an account of Big Kit’s condition. The catalogue makes the plantation’s suffering legible as evidence intended to support abolition, though it cannot restore the lives it records.

Washington’s search through the plantation records gives the inheritance a personal ending. In a log of apprentices, he finds Big Kit’s death date, recorded among names and dates in a form that makes people appear like entries in an inventory. He does not find her under either the name Nawi, which she had told him was her true name, or the name assigned to her on arrival in the Caribbean; he eventually locates her entry and understands that she is dead. The succession that began with Richard’s funeral thus extends, in Washington’s account, from property passing between owners to the archival trace of those who lived and died under its authority.