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Part 3, Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Washington Black, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Freedom vs. Captivity
Racism, Humanity, and Cruelty
Journeying and the Past
Family, Love, and Pain
Art, Science, and Curiosity
Summary
Analysis
Wash realizes how much he has let curiosity and wonder out of his life. He finds a new job as a delivery man, which allows him to begin drawing again. He realizes how poor his sketching has become and is excited at the idea of rekindling his passion for drawing.
Wash again connects his curiosity with his sketching, illustrating how art provides an avenue for him to understand the world around him.
Themes
This same feeling of renewal allows him to make a friend, Medwin Harris, who takes care of the rooming house that Wash lives in. Medwin’s family arrived in Nova Scotia as refugees in 1815, and he worked for a while at a hotel near Niagara Falls—amazingly, earning the same as his white colleagues—until he decided to return to Nova Scotia. He and Wash drink together and joke together. He is a very tall man and five years older than Wash. Wash suspects that even though Medwin is not a bad man, he is not a good one either—they are all quite hardened in that house.
Like Wash, Medwin is another Black man who is struggling to fit into life in Nova Scotia after having been enslaved. As Wash notes, many of the men are hardened due to the racism and subsequent violence that they face in a place where they can’t achieve a true sense of belonging. Wash is the same, as his past experiences have made him an outcast in society.
Themes
When Wash hears news of the English establishing an apprenticeship system in the Indies (thus ending slavery), Medwin and Wash go out to celebrate. Wash wonders about Big Kit, and where she would go. Wash also realizes that she might be dead, and his hands start to shake. Just then, two Black men approach Wash and Medwin, spitting racial slurs and threatening to beat them. Medwin stands, smashes his glass on the table, and drives the edge into the two men’s faces.
Slavery ends in the British colonies with the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. But the book emphasizes that racism neither begins nor ends with slavery’s cruelty. The threat that Medwin and Wash face—at the hands of other Black men, no less—illustrates how racism can manifest in belittling or discriminatory language from any source, not just explicit cruelty and enslavement on the plantations.
Themes
