Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan

A couple weeks ago, my dad and I took a little day trip to Yonkers and the Bronx and as our last stop on our way back to Brooklyn, we dropped into The Lit. Bar. The bookstore had been on my radar for a while (it opened in April 2019), but I virtually never find myself in the Bronx. It's a fantastic little shop (and bar!) with a fun, creative organization to its fiction selection. It does have a kind of general literature section, but much of the fiction is divided into small sub-categories. (In fact, their Bookshop page gives a hint of the store's organizational methods.) This kind of organization often irks me -- if I'm looking for something specific, I want to be able to find it easily.* But on this occasion, I wasn't looking for anything specific and I realized that the organization was particularly conducive to browsing. It served as a sort of recommendation system: if you like this book, maybe you'll also like the thematically similar book sitting next to it. So anyway, while I was browsing, the spine of Washington Black caught my eye. I thought I remembered that a friend had suggested it as a future book for our book club, so I texted her, received immediate confirmation, and I bought it (along with another book -- Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcón, an author I read about in How To Travel without Seeing).

I've missed my last few book club meetings. I kept finding myself reading the wrong thing at the wrong time. I determined to get back on track, and with my lately slow reading pace, I gave myself a little more than a week to read the next book. I finished it in two days. It's a nineteenth-century (set in, that is) coming of age story about an enslaved boy (the titular Washington Black) from a plantation in Barbados who is forced to escape and ends up on a series of adventures that take him halfway around the world, to the Arctic and the Sahara. Washington Black has the sort of high adventure quality I associate with nineteenth-century literature -- a young protagonist, caught up in events beyond his control and exposed to a world beyond his imagination. It was fully absorbing; exactly the kind of book I can sit down on the coach with and read cover to cover. It had been a while since I've done that.

*Years ago, I remember visiting the Borders (this alone dates this memory) on Broadway off Wall Street and thinking they carried no James Baldwin because he was nowhere to be found in their Fiction/Literature section. Eventually I discovered they had a separate African American Literature section, and there was the Baldwin. I was left feeling ambivalent about this organizational decision. Giving whoever made this decision at Borders the benefit of the doubt, I imagine the decision to have a separate section was to celebrate not segregate, but I couldn't help feeling the writers had been ghettoized. Didn't Baldwin belong with the capital L Literature? At the very least they could have put some shelf markers explaining where to look for Baldwin.