Liverpool is the port city where Washington Black learns that Titch was seen after leaving Granbourne, and where the records of Faith Plantation connect his search to organized anti-slavery work. The city becomes a hinge between private recollection and documentary evidence: a report of Titch’s movements directs Washington and Tanna to an anti-slavery office, while the archive there brings the plantation’s history and Washington’s own fugitive status sharply back into view.

Titch’s reported movements

John Willard tells Washington that he saw Titch in Liverpool while inspecting a cargo of mahogany chests from the Indies. The sighting occurred in March, two years before Willard recounts it: Titch was speaking loudly to himself in the street, and Willard looked up to see whether he should avoid him. Washington did not know of this encounter; the news brings a sudden, warm rush of feeling and gives him a concrete trace of the man he has been seeking.

A servant at Granbourne supplies a second account. He says Titch left there some two years earlier, upset by matters between himself and his mother, and had been a regular presence at the Anti-Slavery Society’s offices. After Erasmus’s death, Titch had placed Faith’s papers with the Society and helped sort them. The servant cannot confirm that Titch ever sailed from Liverpool, but says he never returned to Granbourne. His uncertainty leaves the central question unresolved even as it gives Washington and Tanna a practical lead.

Records and anti-slavery work

At the Society’s office, Washington and Tanna learn that the organization is more than a repository: it remains active in opposing slavery even after emancipation in the West Indies, with America described as an ongoing site of oppression. The office directs them toward Robert Solander, a supporter of Titch who may know more about his whereabouts.

The records room makes the Society’s work tangible. Bound volumes and old newspaper clippings preserve evidence of people treated as property, including notices of enslaved people lost or offered for sale. Among them Washington finds the Virginia reward notice issued by John Willard as Erasmus Wilde’s agent. It offers one thousand pounds for George Washington Black, describes his burns and clothing, and warns that he may be travelling with a tall white abolitionist. The document confirms how far the machinery of recapture extends beyond the plantation, and how the archive can preserve both evidence of abuse and the language used to pursue its victims.

The plantation’s afterlife

The archive also contains a register of workers who remained on Faith Plantation after emancipation, listing names and death dates. Washington searches for Big Kit under both the name Nawi, which she had told him was her true name, and the name assigned to her in the Indies, then finds her death date. The orderly entry makes her life appear reduced to a line in a ledger. For Washington, the record confirms a loss he had feared and forces him to confront the plantation’s continuing hold on his memory.

Earlier, when Washington had returned to Faith with Titch, Titch showed him a separate catalogue documenting the injustices endured by enslaved people there. He explained that he had come to the family plantation partly to record what he witnessed for abolitionists in London, whose reports were intended for an influential parliamentary ally. His notes included Big Kit’s condition. In Liverpool, the preserved plantation records take on a related but distinct role: they offer evidence, yet their neat entries cannot restore the lives they describe or spare Washington the pain of reading them.

A turning point in the search

Liverpool gathers several strands of Washington’s past without resolving them. It is where Willard’s memory places Titch, where Titch’s connection to anti-slavery work becomes a possible route to him, and where the plantation’s records expose the continuing consequences of slavery after formal emancipation. The city’s importance lies not in a confirmed reunion, but in the way scattered testimony and archival traces renew Washington and Tanna’s search while reopening the history they hoped to understand.