Washington Black

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Part 3, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “Nova Scotia, 1834”

Part 3, Chapter 4 Summary

Wash becomes more solitary once again, but he goes out each morning to draw near the ocean. He observes “how radiant the world was, empty and silent like this” (219). One morning, while he is out observing the sea creatures, he sees another person set up an easel and begin to paint at a distance. Wash is annoyed that someone else has come to intrude upon his mornings, and the person shows up day after day, interrupting his solitude.

One morning, the painter comes to introduce herself, and Wash discovers that she is a charming, pretty, biracial woman named Tanna. Tanna admires Wash’s work and asks him to teach her to paint, startling him. She reveals that she is originally from the Solomon Islands, but that her mother died in childbirth. As they learn more about one another, Wash begins to enjoy her company, and a mutual attraction begins to develop between them. As Wash is close to her on the beach, he “wanted so much to take another step forward, into her,” but that “a terror rose up” in him (225).

Part 3, Chapter 5 Summary

Upon hearing about his new love interest, Medwin warns Wash not to get further involved with Tanna, because “it’s this kind of stupidity finds you waking with your throat cut” (226). Wash is inexperienced when it comes to matters of love, having only been intimate with two other women. Medwin informs Wash that a white man has been looking for Wash, and Wash suspects that it might be Willard. Fighting back terror, Wash heads to the beach as usual but cannot find Tanna.

Wash goes to work, still apprehensive about Willard. The next morning, Tanna still isn’t at the beach, and Wash stays in bed for a week, scared and sad, “picturing her as she’d been on the shore that last morning, the play of light across her fine golden cheeks, the air smelling of rotted weeds and salt” (230). When he finally ventures out to the market to get food, he sees Tanna but is too afraid to approach her.

Part 3, Chapter 6 Summary

At work, Wash receives a package delivery order for a Mr. Goff, and realizes that Tanna must be married. Although Wash is nervous, he delivers the package to the house, and an old man greets him at the door. When the old man invites Wash into the house to set the packages down, Wash sees all kinds of sea creatures and specimens strewn about the place, “dried starfish, large crabs, other sea fauna” (233). Recognizing the books on the floor, Wash realizes that the old man is the author of some of his favorite scientific books, “a man whose books I had studied with a religiosity and fervor rarely given to anything” (234).

Mr. Goff invites Wash on a boating outing with Tanna, and realizing that Tanna is in fact his daughter, Wash accepts the invitation. That Saturday, Wash meets Mr. Goff and Tanna by the shore as they wrestle with a rowboat. Mr. Goff relates how when he realized that Tanna was out painting by herself in the mornings, he insisted on accompanying her, but Tanna refused.

Mr. Goff tells of Tanna’s origins, describing how he met her mother on the Solomon Islands, but took Tanna with him when her mother passed away during childbirth. While Tanna is unusually quiet, Wash and Mr. Goff continue to converse. Mr. Goff talks about his youngest sister committing suicide, and how the people of the Solomon Islands thought the act of suicide was absurd. When Wash goes out with them again the next Saturday, Mr. Goff and Tanna bicker and are short with one another. Wash realizes that Mr. Goff is not in favor of a possible relationship between Wash and Tanna, and that he is “not a man of prejudices generally, but rather of this one prejudice in particular, as it related to protecting his blood” (241).

Part 3, Chapters 4-6 Analysis

In reawakening his artistic practice and in his budding relationship with Tanna, Wash opens himself again to the world. Rather than shutting himself off entirely, Wash allows himself to again form relationships with others, while at the same time understanding that these relationships may be conditional and prone to loss and change. Almost without wanting to, Wash finds himself growing close to Tanna and developing an attraction toward her.

These chapters also focus more explicitly on the role race plays in Wash’s interpersonal relationships. Tanna is a light-skinned, biracial young woman who Wash recognizes is dangerously close to looking like a white woman. Nevertheless, her heritage allows Wash to feel as if a relationship with her might not be taboo. In a similar vein, Mr. Goff disapproves of his daughter’s relationship with Wash, even though he otherwise respects Wash as an illustrator and a scientist. While Mr. Goff himself is not overtly racist, he has internalized the rules and regulations of a racist society, and fears for his daughter’s future were she to engage with a man like Wash, who is black, disfigured, and a former slave.

During his time with Tanna and Mr. Goff, Wash also begins to develop his scientific interests. Wash discusses science and art at length with Mr. Goff, whose work Wash has long admired. Wash is an academic and artistic equal to Goff, as Wash’s intelligence and creativity shine through in both his art and conversation.