Wash and Tanna’s journey to find Titch

Washington Black and Tanna Goff’s journey to find Titch turns the search for a missing companion into a confrontation with the costs of their past. The evidence frames the journey through Washington’s account of meeting Titch again: Tanna explains how they found him, while Titch’s startled reaction and Washington’s first question reveal that arrival is not the same as reconciliation.

Background and Stakes

The journey carries the weight of Washington’s earlier life as an enslaved boy and fugitive. At Faith Plantation, he had seen Émilie, only eleven, pregnant; the sight made the violence and vulnerability of life on the plantation painfully immediate. Years later, he recalls walking through the brush with Esther, whose intelligence and suppressed will were constrained by enslavement even in the more tolerant household around Titch. These memories establish the danger and coercion from which Washington’s later life has been shaped, without reducing his search for Titch to a simple return to the past.

Tanna enters Washington’s life as a perceptive, self-directed young woman. He first misreads her from a distance, then recognizes both her intelligence and strength. Her father, G. M. Goff, describes her early-morning attempts to paint tide pools, her fractured wrist, and her resistance to having her freedom curtailed by his insistence on accompanying her. Their journey therefore joins two people whose experiences of constraint differ, but for whom agency and the right to choose matter deeply.

A Shared Life and Unequal Recognition

Washington and Tanna’s partnership is also shaped by work they have built together. In London, G. M. Goff secures approval from the Zoological Committee for their plan for Ocean House, a permanent public exhibition of aquatic life. The city provides land and an old timber building in its gardens, with the hope of opening the following year. Washington regards the project as his own invention, a mark made against the life of toil and obliteration assigned to him from birth.

That achievement carries a sharp inequality. Washington expects Goff, not a young Black man with facial disfigurement and no formal scientific training, to receive public recognition as Ocean House’s founder. He understands both Goff’s late-life ambition and the barriers that would prevent Washington from approaching the committee as an equal. The couple’s journey to find Titch thus takes place against a broader question of who is permitted to act, to be seen, and to have authorship acknowledged.

What the Search Recovers

The search also leads Washington back toward the records of Faith Plantation. In an apprenticeship log listing the names and death dates of men who remained at work after Emancipation, he finds the recorded death of Big Kit, whose name and life had long been bound to his own understanding of the past. The orderly register makes a person appear like an item in an inventory; Washington imagines Kit’s body removed from the fields without ceremony and feels anger at the life the plantation had imposed on her. The discovery shows that seeking Titch cannot be separated from the losses and histories Washington carries with him.

When the travelers reach Titch, Tanna explains how they came to find him. Titch laughs at the improbability of their having crossed so much distance and looks directly at Washington for the first time since their arrival. In the candlelight, Washington thinks he sees uneasiness approaching fear in Titch’s eyes. The recognition is significant, but its emotional balance remains unsettled: Titch is surprised that Washington has come, while Washington is still waiting for an account of what happened between them.

The Reunion Without Resolution

Washington breaks his silence by asking Titch what he meant when he said he had dreamed of him. The question redirects the reunion from travel and logistics to the unresolved meaning of their bond. Titch’s immediate response—asking what Washington means by “dreamed”—does not clarify the claim or answer the deeper question Washington has brought with him.

The journey therefore ends, in the available account, not with a settled reconciliation but with renewed confrontation. Tanna’s explanation gets them to Titch; Washington’s question forces the past into the room. The search has succeeded in bringing the three together, yet Titch’s fear and the unanswered question preserve the uncertainty at its heart: finding the person who left is not the same as understanding why he did.