Nova Scotia is a destination Washington Black chooses in search of safety among the Loyalists, but it offers no simple passage from enslavement to security. Its promise of freedom is constrained by poverty, racial discrimination, kidnapping, and the return of John Francis Willard, making the province both a place of refuge and a landscape where the past catches up with him.

Arrival and the Promise of Freedom

After spending several weeks at a northern outpost, Washington arranges passage to the Maritime islands and travels to Shelburne, Nova Scotia. He has chosen a life among the Loyalists because he believes he will be safest there. The crossing is marked by fear: he stays out of the captain’s way in case he might be sold to a ship bound for the Slave States, and he worries that Willard or his agents will find him.

The refuge he imagines does not match the place he reaches. Shelburne is wet and impoverished, with muddy streets and displaced people from the previous century’s American war. There is little land and fewer supplies, and Black residents receive the worst opportunities when they receive any at all. Washington works in a small fishery, but the province’s legal distance from plantation slavery does not erase the insecurity attached to his skin and history.

Freedom Under Threat

The novel sets Nova Scotia’s promise against the conditions Washington encounters there. Earlier, he had heard that enslaved people reaching Upper Canada would be freed on arrival; that specific protection belongs to Upper Canada, not to Nova Scotia. In the latter province, freedom remains vulnerable in practice: kidnappers roam the coast, and freed Black people may be stunned in the street and carried onto ships bound for the Southern states to be enslaved again.

Washington’s fear is therefore not merely the lingering memory of Faith Plantation or of his fugitive status. He sees that the possibility of recapture persists beyond the plantation, while white residents sometimes resent Black workers as competitors willing to labour for lower wages. His experience makes Nova Scotia a sharp counterpoint to the idea that crossing a border, by itself, guarantees safety or equality.

Violence and the Return of the Pursuer

Washington’s unease deepens after a stranger attacks him from behind outside a tavern. He fights back, escapes, and later learns that the assailant was a local troublemaker, a former Anglican priest known for brawling. Yet he cannot shake the feeling that he escaped Willard. The uncertainty matters: even when the attacker is not the pursuer, Washington’s history makes the threat of pursuit present in the encounter.

That fear becomes concrete when Willard later tells Washington that he was shocked to find him in Nova Scotia after years of searching. Willard says Washington’s facial scar betrayed him and describes his own pursuit as a failed business venture: after losing Washington and Titch, he lost standing and work. The encounter reveals that Nova Scotia did not place Washington beyond the reach of the man who had hunted him.

A Temporary Refuge in the Wider Journey

Washington describes himself in Nova Scotia as becoming flint-like, bitter, and unable to sleep; seeing his reflection in a discarded piece of tin, he recognizes a readiness for violence and concludes that he must move on. The province thus marks not a settled homecoming but a turning point in his search for a place where he can live without constant fear.

When Willard later appears, Washington recognizes him as the figure whose pursuit drove him across heat, wind, and snow and compelled him to try to build a life in a country that did not want him. Nova Scotia’s significance lies in this contradiction: it gives Washington a destination beyond the plantation, yet its precarious freedoms cannot protect him from racialized danger or erase the pursuit that shapes his movements.