Wash searches for Titch in Granbourne

Washington Black’s search for Titch in Granbourne turns an absence that has shaped Washington’s adult life into a concrete pursuit. He travels to the Wilde family estate hoping to find the man who once drew him into a life of discovery and then vanished from it. Titch is not there, but the visit establishes that he survived, points Washington toward a possible trail, and brings him into contact with the records through which the history of Faith Plantation—and Washington’s own—can be recovered.

The decision to search

Washington’s determination begins with an admission to himself: despite his apprehension, he wants to know whether Titch is alive and to confront him. Before Titch took him up, Washington’s life had followed one course; afterward it became a source of wonder, but also loneliness and destitution. He understands that the life he has built is organized around Titch’s absence, leaving him with a persistent sense that its foundations might give way. The journey is therefore not simply an effort to locate an old companion. Washington wants to understand the rupture that has continued to shape his sense of security and direction.

Granbourne seems the likeliest place to find Titch. Washington knows that Titch had hated the house and complained about it, yet imagines it as his only sanctuary from a world that misunderstood him: the center of his wealth and privilege, and a place to which he might still be drawn. Washington writes to him there, but the answer comes from Titch’s mother, who invites Washington to afternoon tea. Her reply unsettles him because Titch himself has not written; Washington wonders whether Tanna’s earlier fears that Titch might be dead were correct.

Arrival at Granbourne

Washington and Tanna prepare for the visit over several days. They postpone a trip to Wolcott and Sons, while Goff is left to source eelgrass. On the journey, they speak little. Tanna appears confused about why they must go, while Washington is too tired to explain or defend his decision. They lean against one another as the city recedes, their shared physical closeness contrasting with their difference in how they understand the journey.

The estate presents itself as both richly overgrown and emptied out. Its approach passes through silver maples to deteriorating buildings, thatched cottages, and a gardener’s shack seemingly held together by vines. Broken axles stand by a rain-soaked carriage house. Washington feels that the grounds have been abandoned not only by their inhabitants but by progress itself, as though he has entered an aftermath. The manor, once the home from which the Wilde men fled, is grand but forbidding: its wings are unlit, its facade bears the marks of age, its pillars and pediments crumble, and moss chokes the pavilion. The physical decline makes the family’s former authority visible as something weathered rather than secure.

An elderly manservant receives the visitors and leads them through dark corridors to a terrace. Washington imagines that the servant, who seems to have been part of the house for decades, may have witnessed Titch’s earliest days there. When Tanna asks whether Mister Wilde is in residence, the servant slowly shakes his head; his answer does not clarify which of the family’s men is away. Soon Mrs. Wilde appears. Washington notices her jade rings and recalls the emerald rings associated with Titch, a small visual echo linking son and mother before the conversation turns to his whereabouts.

News of Titch

Tanna asks directly whether Christopher Wilde is at Granbourne. Mrs. Wilde answers that she has not seen her son for three years. The news changes Washington’s understanding of the search: Titch is not present, but the report confirms that he survived. Washington thinks of him as having walked through a pane of snow into an open, free life, yet the confirmation does not bring relief enough to feel real. His survival sharpens the question of why he has remained absent.

When Tanna asks how long Titch stayed and where he went, Mrs. Wilde says the family no longer owns the plantation; it has been sold. Later, pressed on whether her son is definitely alive, she qualifies her knowledge: the last time she saw him, he was alive, but years have passed, and no one has written to tell her otherwise. She offers to pass along Washington’s message if Titch contacts her. She then suggests that Washington try Grosvenor, where Titch’s cousin Philip’s mother still lives alone. Washington understands that Mrs. Wilde knows he witnessed Philip’s death and may have had a hand in it. Tanna grips his fist beneath the table, while Washington remains silent.

After Mrs. Wilde leaves, the manservant supplies a more recent account. Titch visited Granbourne about two years earlier, or less, but left upset; the servant describes tension between Mrs. Wilde and her sons without claiming to know its cause. He understands that Titch meant to sail from Liverpool on behalf of the Anti-Slavery Society. Titch had been regularly at its offices, seeking to assist its work, and had deposited the Faith Plantation papers there after Erasmus’s death. The servant cannot confirm that Titch actually sailed, only that he was apprehensive about doing so and never returned to Granbourne. He advises Washington and Tanna to inquire at the Society. Washington is disturbed by the thought that Titch had arranged to preserve the plantation papers: after hearing that Titch had seemed half-mad in the street, Washington had partly believed him to be lost to reason.

The search widens into the past

The papers make Washington’s search more than a question of Titch’s whereabouts. In an earlier conversation, Titch had explained that his scientific work was not his only purpose in the West Indies. At the request of his friend Samuel in London, he had recorded the cruelties he observed on the plantation for an anti-slavery effort intended to reach an influential friend in Parliament. Titch had added Big Kit’s condition to his notes, and hoped Washington’s scientific work would also prove useful. The manservant’s account that Titch placed Faith’s papers with the Anti-Slavery Society suggests that this documentary work continued beyond the plantation and may provide a practical lead in the search.

A later visit to the records brings Washington and Tanna into a small room lit by three lanterns, with tea set beside a crate of old books. Washington handles the warped pages cautiously, conscious that the records may be the only commemoration of the people described in them. In a scrapbook of newspaper notices—among advertisements for enslaved people and announcements of neighboring plantation events—he finds the reward notice he and Titch had previously seen in Virginia. It offers one thousand pounds for the capture of George Washington Black and identifies John Francis Willard as acting agent for Erasmus Wilde. The notice recasts their former escape as a matter of organized pursuit, preserving in print the claims of ownership and violence from which they had fled.

The records also give Washington evidence of what happened to Big Kit. An apprenticeship log lists the names and death dates of people who continued working on the plantation after Emancipation. Washington searches for both the name she had been born with, Nawi, and the name imposed on her after her arrival in the Indies before finding her death date. Its placement in a plain column makes her life appear reduced to an administrative entry. Washington already knew she was dead, but seeing the record confronts him with the system that continued to extract her labor and with how little ceremony her death may have received. Tanna’s presence, intended to help him face his past, briefly becomes painful to him: he resents the attempt to open what he had tried to leave behind.

In another volume, Washington reads Richard Black’s plantation record and imaginatively follows the history of Big Kit’s capture, passage to Barbados, and life under enslavement. The account brings him to a further recognition: after leaving Kit behind in the cane fields, he had gradually forgotten the sound of her voice and the details of her face. Tanna places a warm hand on his shoulder, and Washington realizes he is crying. The search for Titch has led him not to a reunion but to an encounter with the written traces of the people and events that shaped their shared past.

Consequences and significance

The visit to Granbourne yields no direct answer from Titch and no certainty that he completed the voyage from Liverpool. Instead, Washington receives a conditional confirmation of Titch’s survival, a lead to the Anti-Slavery Society, and an account of the papers Titch entrusted there. The unresolved journey keeps the central confrontation ahead: Washington still wants to ask why Titch chose him, changed the course of his life, and then abandoned him.

Granbourne also joins private memory to public evidence. Washington’s past had already been difficult to narrate cleanly: he had once begun again to tell the story of his origins, and acknowledged that accounts of his birth conflicted. At the estate and in the records, memory meets documents that classify people as property, laborers, fugitives, or entries in a death register. Those documents preserve facts that might otherwise be lost, but they do not restore the people to themselves. Washington’s reaction to Big Kit’s recorded death makes clear that the archive can expose a history and still repeat the reduction it records. His pursuit of Titch consequently becomes entangled with another task: facing the history that Titch helped document, and the personal losses that the documents cannot repair.