“Not Unmindful of the Sick and Wretched”

The inscription “Not Unmindful of the Sick and Wretched” appears above the entrance to the hothouse at Faith Plantation, where Washington Black had lived as a child after Big Kit broke his ribs. Its significance lies in the distance between its professed concern for suffering and the plantation’s documented treatment of the people forced to work there.

The inscription at Faith Plantation

Washington recalls the Latin words while drawing the estate in detail after leaving it. The hothouse is one part of a remembered landscape that includes workers’ huts, the sugar boiler, paths leading to Wilde Hall, and the fields. The motto therefore belongs to a specific place within the plantation, rather than to an abstract discussion of charity.

A promise set against the plantation

In the same remembered drawing, the words above the hothouse sit among images of the mantrap used to catch runaways, the place where men had been whipped to death, and a tree associated with executions. The hothouse itself recalls Washington’s childhood confinement there after Big Kit injured him. These details make the inscription’s language of concern sharply discordant with the violence surrounding it.

The plantation’s history extends beyond Washington’s private recollection. After Erasmus Wilde took control, he replaced the overseers, and brutal treatment and killings followed. Later, Washington learns that Faith’s enslaved population had been described as apprentices and workers after emancipation, even as plantation records continued to list their names and death dates. The motto’s claim to remember the sick and suffering is thus measured against both physical cruelty and the administrative language that could reduce human lives to entries in a ledger.

Memory, drawing, and testimony

The inscription reappears as Washington tries to recover Faith through drawing. His remembered picture does not preserve the estate as an undifferentiated plantation landscape: it places the words of apparent benevolence alongside structures and sites of punishment. The contrast turns drawing into a form of witness, making the plantation’s violence visible within the very setting that carried a charitable-sounding motto.

That tension also echoes the written records Washington later encounters. Titch’s catalogue of abuses seeks to document cruelty for abolitionist purposes, while plantation registers and advertisements classify people through ownership, labor, and capture. The motto cannot resolve these opposing uses of written language. Instead, its remembered presence sharpens the question of whether recording suffering truly honors those who endured it, or merely makes their lives another institutional record.