Excerpt from Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

James's was the first of the new killings; other killings followed. Sick men were whipped to shreds or hanged above the fields or shot. I was still a boy, and cried at night. But with each new death Big Kit only grunted in grim satisfaction, her orange eyes narrowed and fierce.

Death was a door. I think that is what she wished me to under­stand. She did not fear it. She was of an ancient faith rooted in the high river lands of Africa, and in that faith the dead were reborn, whole, back in their homelands, to walk again free. That was the idea that had come to her with the man in white, like a thread of poison poured into a well.

One night she told me of her intention. She said we would do it quickly. It would not hurt.

"Do it frighten you?" she whispered, where we lay in the hut. "To be dying?"

"Not if it don't frighten you," I said bravely. I could feel her arm draped protectively over me in the dark.

She grunted, a long, dark rumble in her chest. "If you dead, you wake up again in your homeland. You wake up free." I made a little shrug of one shoulder at that, and she felt it, and turned my chin with her fingers. "What is it, now?" she asked. "You don't believe?"

I did not want to tell her; I feared she would be angry. But then I whispered, "I don't have a homeland, Kit. My homeland here. So I wake up here, again, a slave? Except you won't be here?"

"You come with me to Dahomey," she murmured firmly. "That how it works."

"Did you ever see them? The dead, waked up? When you in Dahomey?"

"I saw them," she whispered. "We all saw them. We knew what they were."

"And they were happy?"

"They were free."

I could feel the day's exhaustion descending on me. "What it like, Kit? Free?"

I felt her shift in the dirt, and then she was gathering me in close, her hot breath at my ear. "Oh, child, it like nothing in this world. When you free, you can do anything."

"You go wherever it is you wanting?"

"You go wherever it is you wanting. You wake up any time you wanting. When you free," she whispered, "someone ask you a ques­tion, you ain't got to answer. You ain't got to finish no job you don't want to finish. You just leave it."

I closed my heavy eyes, wondering. "Is really so?"

She kissed my hair just behind my ear. "Mm hm. You just set down the shovel, and you go." 

***

Why, then, did she delay? The days passed; Faith grew harsher, more brutal; still she did not kill us. Some presentiment, some warn­ing perhaps, stayed her hand.

One evening she led me out into her little vegetable garden, where we were alone. I saw the sharp, rusted blade of a hoe in her hands, and started to tremble. But she only wished to show me the little carrots beginning to sprout. Another night, she woke me and led me silently out into the darkness, through the long grasses to the dead palm tree, but this too was only to instruct me not to speak of our intentions. "If any hear it, child, we be separated true," she hissed. I did not understand why we waited. I wanted to see her homeland, I told her. I wanted to walk in Dahomey with her, free.

"But it must be done right, child," she whispered to me. "Under a right moon. With right words. The gods cannot be summoned otherwise."

But then the other suicides began. Cosimo cut his own throat with an axe, Adam punctured his wrists using a nail stolen from the smithy. Both were found bled out in the grass behind the huts, one after the other, in the mornings. They were old Saltwaters, like Kit, believers that they would be reincarnated in their ancestral lands. But when young William, who had been born on the plantation, hanged himself in the laundry, Erasmus Wilde himself came out among us.

He walked slowly over the lawns in his dazzling white clothes, an overseer trailing a few steps behind. The overseer wore a tattered straw hat and was pushing a wheelbarrow. The cradle of the barrow held a wooden post, a tangle of grey sacking. They crossed the grass in the harsh sun, pausing just at the edge of the cane, where we had been assembled. In the hot, bright air, the new master studied us.

Excerpted from Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. Copyright © 2018 by Esi Edugyan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.