Philip dies by suicide with a gun

Philip’s suicide with a gun is the culmination of an encounter in which he relates a disturbing story about a grave bearing his likeness, then dies in Washington Black’s presence. The event leaves Washington with the burden of witnessing a white man’s death and later becomes entangled with his reckoning over John Francis Willard, the man who had pursued him.

The story behind the grave

During their meeting, Philip notices Washington’s face and apologizes for it before turning to a memory from Vienna. He describes sitting outside a cemetery after eating bread when a riderless carriage passed, drawn by a horse whose condition seemed strange to him. A short, poorly dressed man then approached, chewing a carrot, and told Philip that he had passed Philip’s grave and monument.

Philip followed the stranger into a cedar grove in the cemetery. There, he says, he found a stone likeness with his own hair, eyes, mouth, and chin. The inscription, as he recalls it, marked the death of a man who had died fifty years earlier, on the exact day Philip was born. Philip asks what the truth is and who, in the story, is the ghost. The grave tale gives their conversation an air of uncertainty about identity and origins, but the account does not establish what the likeness means or whether the story explains Philip’s actions.

The death in Washington’s presence

After the story, Washington notices a change in Philip and sees him rise with the gun. Washington raises his hands to his face, anticipating violence, but cannot call out. The blast follows; in its aftermath, he understands that Philip has died and that he alone was present. Washington leaves the scene.

The event is not simply a death reported at a distance: the narrative makes Washington its surviving witness. The encounter’s personal, unresolved question about who Philip was gives way to the immediate fact of his death, which Washington must carry forward without an explanation of Philip’s final decision.

The witness’s later reckoning

Years later in London, Washington chooses to attend the hanging at Newgate because he cannot accept John Francis Willard’s death without seeing it for himself. He and Tanna Goff approach the prison through a crowd of roughly four hundred people. Willard is to be executed alongside Louis Hazzard, a Black man convicted of theft and arson; Willard has been convicted of murdering a Freeman.

Seeing Willard alive on the scaffold, Washington questions the moral meaning he had attached to not killing him in Nova Scotia. He recognizes that he had not spared Willard through the principled mercy he had imagined, but because he was afraid. This later reflection makes Philip’s death a point of contrast: Washington had been left alone with the death of a white man, while Willard’s death is carried out publicly as a legal sentence before a crowd.

Public punishment and private memory

At noon, the hangman prepares both prisoners and puts bags over their heads. Washington sees Willard’s terror in the moments before his face is covered. The execution ends with both men dead; the crowd then breaks into cheering, laughter, singing, and fights. Washington watches the spectacle end, but the public ritual does not resolve the earlier encounter with Philip or settle the moral questions it left behind.

The contrast is between a death witnessed privately and one staged before a mass audience. Philip’s death leaves Washington as its sole witness; at Newgate, he stands among spectators as the state puts Willard to death. Both experiences sharpen the difference between an individual’s encounter with violence and the public meanings imposed upon death, justice, and mercy.