Wash: a Novel

“. . . a lovely and thought provoking debut novel.”

When the topic of slavery in America is raised, the expectation is that war will be mentioned. What is unexpected in the novel Wash is that the war in question is not the Civil War, but the Revolutionary War.

Set in the early 1800s, Wash is the story of two men caught up in the slave trade in post-revolutionary America, more particularly in the process of slave breeding. Richardson is an embattled and embittered veteran of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The son of an indentured servant who clawed his way to prosperity in the American Colonies, Richardson is ambivalent about slavery, as indeed were many of the Founding Fathers.

In an attempt to escape that peculiar institution, he strikes out for Tennessee to make his fortune. The realities of the need for backbreaking labor in clearing and creating his new city of Memphis in an area where laborers are few and money is tight soon challenges his ideals, and he becomes a slave owner. One of his purchases, Mena, a “saltwater negro” (recently imported), comes to him with a very firm idea of who she is and where she comes from, ideas that she passes on to the son she is carrying, Wash.

When Richardson returns to Tennessee from his second war, it is to find a plantation in shambles. In desperation he turns to slave breeding, using techniques similar to horse breeding to choose his best slave to rent out for stud: Wash.

The story then becomes that of the two men struggling with their own natures and the positions in which they find themselves, each searching for something to hold on to in a time of crisis.

In Wash, Margaret Wrinkle has set herself the task of recreating a world with which many readers are not familiar.

Slavery in the U.S. was faltering until the mid-1800s; near the end of the novel Ms. Wrinkle notes of Richardson’s son: “The young slaveholders do not remember the window that opened during and after the Revolution . . . nothing about some of the Founding Fathers’ ill-fated attempts to stamp out the trade . . .”

This territory was explored previously by Valerie Martin in Property and Dolen Perkins-Valdez in Wench; however, both of those novels were written largely from a female perspective.

Ms. Wrinkle’s story gives a picture of the particular institution through male eyes and there are interesting differences to be noted. Most striking is the inner struggle Richardson has over what he’s been forced by economics and choice to become: he is a pimp. Rather than deal with the horror this engenders, he chooses to view his actions in the same light as he does horse breeding, even to keeping what must be a very secret journal of breeding lines.

As time goes on, though, his justifications begin to dissolve and he finds himself spending more and more time hiding in the barn with Wash, telling his stories to a man who despises him and what he stands for.

The jacket blurb of this novel is full of lofty statements and grandiose pronouncements, perhaps too large for this debut novel. Ms. Wrinkle is surely a talented writer, creating some lovely prose, gems worth savoring: “He’s handing me pieces of his story like food and I’m holding each one real careful, memorizing the way it looks before I tuck it in my mouth.” and “Seems strange for a grown man to keep so many bits and pieces from being small, but it’s a house I’m building for myself with a roof of remembering to put over my head.”

Some of this good will is squandered later the novel, however, when Ms. Wrinkle slips into general and well-worn moral pronouncements. It has been clear for centuries that slavery was wrong; where this novel is strong is in its sympathetic depiction of Richardson and his tale of how a budding abolitionist becomes a slaver.

That was unique, and it was a shame to see it watered down by platitudes.

Ms. Wrinkle’s writing first person point of view interspersed with third person narrative was unusual but not particularly effective; it led to unnecessary repetition of events that in sections slowed down the story.

Ms. Wrinkle’s characters are interesting, and for the most part well fleshed out. Though Wash is the titular character, the most compelling character is Richardson. His struggles with himself and his world were astoundingly well-written and well thought out; particularly striking was his scathing statement of the realities of his situation, delivered to a visiting northern journalist.

Wash himself is not as well drawn. Female characters in the novel tend to be stock, but not so much as to be annoying.

While Wash might not be the final statement on post-revolutionary slave culture the publisher envisions, it is a lovely and thought provoking debut novel.

Ms. Wrinkle has spotlighted a crucial era in the American experience, writing with grace and intelligence.