Wash by Margaret Wrinkle

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on February 5, 2013 

Wash is an examination of slavery -- more specifically, the breeding of slaves as if they were horses -- from a variety of perspectives. Although some of the novel is narrated in the third person, the text is frequently divided into sections that tell the story from an individual character's point of view. Wash (more formally known as Washington) is a slave whose service as a stud is made available to other slave owners. James Richardson owns Wash, having purchased his mother, Mena, when she was pregnant. Mena's story is told by Wash and by Thompson, who leased her from Richardson. Thompson's son, Eli, fleshes out the story of Wash's youth. Pallas, a midwife who works on a neighboring farm, is Wash's lover of choice.

Wash is both a riveting portrait of inhumanity and a life-affirming story about healing. From its vivid description of manacled captives aboard ships to the art of branding the face of a runaway slave, from Pallas' administration of herbs to cure Wash's fever to the mixture of love and spiritualism that restores Pallas after three years of sexual abuse, the novel captures all points along the spectrum of good and evil. The nature of freedom -- freedom of the mind versus freedom of the body -- is one of the book's driving themes. Another is the difficulty of understanding, and the risk of error in judging, a person whose life you have not lived. For Pallas and Wash, and even for Richardson, the novel is a story of survival and growth.

The novel begins near Nashille in 1823, moves back in time to North Carolina, then returns to Tennessee and again moves forward. Richardson, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and a failed general in the War of 1812, is now a farmer, a land developer (he's building a new town called Memphis), and a breeder of slaves. Although he has doubts about the morality of the latter business, Richardson's business partner, Quinn, has convinced him that breeding slaves is a surer way to eliminate his debt than hoping for profitable cotton harvests. Quinn, however, disagrees with Richardson's strategy to breed for intelligence. Quinn thinks slaves should have strong backs and weak minds, the better to foster obedience and discourage insurrection.

Richardson is a multi-dimensional character, a product of his time and upbringing who, nagged by self-doubt, broken by the war, torn by his dependence on slavery, and detached from his family, confides only in Wash. In his senior years, he comes to question all the assumptions upon which he has built his life. Wash is also a deep-grained character, a man locked in a constant struggle to suppress his rage. Pallas comes into focus in the novel's second half. She provides the novel with its moral center. She is both forgiving and understanding: "people didn't mean half the things they did and sometimes, slack was all we had to give each other."

The story is dramatic but the drama is never overdone. Margaret Wrinkle's sentences are like velvet ribbons uncoiling and connecting, textured and luxurious. If her prose has a flaw it is that the voices of her characters are equally eloquent and, for that reason, not particularly distinctive. Wrinkle draws wonderful parallels between horses and slaves: the fierce ones need to be broken, the strongest serve as profitable studs, and some, especially the ones who have been abused, will never be tamed. The horse imagery, Wash's connection and identification with horses, gives the novel some of its best moments, including a memorable ending.

The downside to telling a story from different perspectives is the redundancy it creates. Seeing the same scene from different pairs of eyes gives the reader fresh insights, but a few of the scenes don't alter the perspective enough to warrant the repetition. That's a minor quibble and certainly not one that diminishes my enthusiasm for this fine novel.

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