Wash

"Margaret Wrinkle’sWashis a marvelous window into the world of nineteenth century American slavery--a powerful fusion of knowledge and imagination.” --Madison Smartt Bell, author ofAll Souls' Rising

Margaret Wrinkle’s stunning debut novel is the story of two men and a woman joined together by slave breeding in early nineteenth century Tennessee. Written as an accusation, a revelation, and a prayer,Washconfounds our contemporary assumptions and stereotypes about this long-buried and explosive shard of our national history.

Richardson, a troubled Revolutionary War veteran, responds to the pressures of debt and westward expansion by forcing Washington, a young man he owns, to work as a stud. As Wash gets drawn into a power struggle with Richardson, he fights to hold onto his West African spiritual traditions inherited from his shamanic mother. Despair and disease soon lead him to a potent enslaved healer named Pallas. She inspires Wash to forge a new understanding of his heritage and his predicament while their delicate love story unfolds against this tumultuous backdrop. As the lives of these three people intertwine in unexpected ways, the stories they tell allow them to find solace and even mastery.

By turns haunting, harrowing, and redemptive, this boundary-crossing novel of American slavery carries the reader from the heart of whiteness into the center of traditional African spirituality and back again until these two contrasting cultures shimmer together. Questioning all differences of blood and tradition, erasing even the line between the living and the dead,Washoffers new insights into our continuing racial dilemmas.