‘Washington Black' review: Escaping enslavement becomes a rip-roaring adventure

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

What does 'somewhere safe' mean when a bounty hunter is on your trail? In the Hulu adventure series 'Washington Black,' that location has been Halifax, Nova Scotia — at least temporarily — for the title character who, as a boy, escaped enslavement on a sugar plantation in early 19th century Barbados.
Now a young adult (Ernest Kingsley Jr.), he goes by Jack Crawford to evade detection. Wash, as he was known in a former life, has been living for an indeterminate period of time as a free man in Halifax among other free Black people, including the warmly protective Medwin (Sterling K. Brown, also a producer here), who affectionately calls Wash 'island boy' and says things like 'Are we dreamin' or are we drinkin'?' before clinking glasses, and then: 'If the white folks don't kill ya, this'll definitely do the job,' he says of whatever they're swilling. He is also not afraid to get his hands dirty.
This is good news for Wash, since that aforementioned bounty hunter means business. An accomplished artist and scientist who dreams of building a flying machine, Wash's interests and prodigious talents are conspicuous enough that his attempts to disappear haven't fully succeeded, forcing him into hiding.
There's also the beautiful young blonde woman Wash spotted days earlier at the docks. As she disembarked from a ship, he stared, both enraptured but also clocking that she's biracial, something the white population of Halifax has failed to grasp. That's how her (white) father wants it, but she has no intention of living a lie or denying the memory of her deceased mother. Her insistence is why they left London to start over in Halifax, as her father keeps reminding her: 'You are a child of England, a child of empire, and that is the skin you must inhabit for us both.' The tenuousness of her and Wash's circumstances complicates the sweetness of their tentative romance. They have both been living double lives and have a unique understanding of one another as a result.
That's the 1837 narrative.
The other begins eight years earlier in Barbados, and it is Wash's origin story told in flashback. A repellent plantation owner rides out to the sugarcane fields to ward off any thoughts of suicide as a means of escape from their living nightmare: 'Killing yourself is a crime against me as surely as if you stole my horse and slit his throat.'
This cruel man has a brother, whose arrival changes the course of Wash's life. A high-spirited inventor and abolitionist named Titch (Tom Ellis), he recognizes the child's curiosity and talent and takes the preteen (played by Eddie Karanja) under his wing. Soon enough, the pair are fleeing the sugarcane fields and Titch's nasty family dysfunction in a blimp-shaped 'cloutcutter' of the man's own devising. They don't get far before crashing into the masts of a pirate ship, and so Wash's journey — a grand, Jules Verne-esque tale both thrilling and fought with danger — begins.
Based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Esi Edugyan, the eight-episode series is adapted by show creator Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and has a throwback quality to it, with a sweeping orchestral score that sets the tone. Wash's story can be deeply harrowing in parts (Nat Turner, played by Jamie Hector, makes a brief appearance and he is deadly serious about how precarious everyone's safety is), but it is also filled with dreamy and audacious escapades that see Wash deep sea diving and becoming mesmerized by the vast unknowableness of ocean life under the water. Is a novel, which engages the imagination differently than a screen adaptation, better equipped to toggle between these competing tones? Perhaps.
More pressing, for me, was the question of who Wash is, in terms of his personality. As written and performed, we don't get much sense of what his own particular internal monologue might be, and this becomes underscored in any scene he shares with Brown's Medwin, who is such a clearly defined presence by comparison. Brown's an actor working on a different level than most, and he's very effective in his few appearances.
I wish the show had outlined a bit more about the lives of Black people in Fairfax. They are free but vulnerable, and that nuance comes through most clearly when Medwin walks into a watering hole patronized by white men. The place goes quiet and he takes a seat at the bar. The man next to him says, 'I wouldn't expect your kind to be welcome in a place like this,' to which Medwin replies evenly: 'No, not usually. But most of the boys in here still need me and mine to make life easier for 'em down on the docks, so' — he takes a short but meaningful pause — 'we agree to disagree.'
'Washington Black' — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
Where to watch: Hulu