Titch compiles a record of the abuse of enslaved people

Titch’s record of the abuse of enslaved people is an abolitionist document compiled during his return to Faith Plantation. It records cruelties he observed under Erasmus Wilde’s control and connects his scientific mission to a wider effort to end slavery. Its later appearance among plantation records underscores both the power and the limits of written testimony: documentation can preserve evidence of violence, but it can also reduce people to names, dates, and categories.

Compilation at Faith Plantation

Titch explains the purpose of the document to Washington after revealing that he has been taking notes on the plantation. His friend Samuel in London had urged him to make a record if he had the chance to visit his family’s estate. Titch describes a group of colleagues gathering accounts of cruelty, with the intention of passing them to an influential friend in Parliament. The catalogue is therefore not simply a private journal: it is part of an organized effort to turn observation into political evidence.

The work takes place alongside Titch’s scientific research. He draws a thick sheaf of pages from beneath their treatise, and says Washington’s scientific work may also prove useful to the cause. Titch presents the reports as evidence that the enslaved are human beings entitled to rights and freedom, and calls slavery a moral stain. His papers give practical form to that conviction: they aim to make witnessed abuses legible to people who might act against the system.

What the record witnesses

The catalogue is grounded in conditions at Faith after Erasmus takes control. New overseers arrive, and punishments escalate: enslaved people are maimed, beaten, and killed. James is killed after attempting to escape, and the plantation’s workers are forced to pass his remains and be branded again. Other deaths follow. These events supply the kind of specific, observed cruelty Titch’s record is intended to document, rather than leaving the plantation’s violence as an abstract accusation.

Titch also adds Big Kit to his notes. When he shows Washington the catalogue, he points to her condition as evidence that will move readers. For Washington, the disclosure is deeply personal: he has seen Big Kit at dinner without recognizing her, and is distressed by her condition and by his own failure to know her. The report thus joins political witness to an intimate history, though it cannot substitute for Washington’s own memory of the woman or convey the full life behind the entry.

From testimony to archive

Years later, Washington and Tanna enter a room containing Faith’s bound records. The organization holding them remains engaged in combating slavery even after emancipation in the West Indies, particularly in response to slavery in America. In the room, the books and clippings are arranged on a table under lanterns; Washington approaches them with unease, aware that the lives recorded there might be damaged or reduced by the act of handling them.

The archive’s materials make that reduction visible. A scrapbook holds notices about enslaved people who were lost or offered for sale, alongside other plantation clippings. A log lists apprentices by name and death date. Washington finds Big Kit’s death recorded in it, in a format that makes her appear like an item in an inventory or a sugar yield. The documents preserve facts that would otherwise have disappeared from his reach, but their administrative form carries forward the plantation’s habit of treating people as property and labor.

Titch’s catalogue belongs to a counter-practice within this documentary world: it records cruelty in order to challenge the order that normalizes it. Yet the contrast does not erase the limits of the archive. Washington’s response to Big Kit’s death depends on memory and grief as well as the written date; his recollection of her cannot be contained by the record. The document’s significance lies in that tension: it bears witness to abuse and can serve abolitionist action, while the people it describes remain more than the evidence assembled about them.