Esi Edugyan says Disney Plus’s take on her acclaimed historical novel Washington Black will surprise anyone familiar with the sprawling coming-of-age tale.
There are significant changes to the hero and his relationships, wholly invented scenes and entirely new characters inserted by showrunners and executive producers Selwyn Seyfu Hinds and Kimberly Ann Harrison.
Edugyan says she accepted early on that transforming her Giller Prize-winning saga into an eight-part streaming show would mean surrendering her hold on the story, noting she “very much took a back seat” in the process.
“It’s probably never a favourable thing to have the writer of the book kind of lurking in the background, looking over your shoulder, saying, ‘Why have you done this and not that?'” Edugyan says in a recent video call from her home office in Victoria.
“I just kind of understood that this was somebody else’s art.”
Like the book, which was championed by Olympic swimmer Mark Tewksbury on Canada Reads 2022, the TV series recounts the fantastical life of a boy born into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation in the 19th century. Actor Eddie Karanja plays the young hero and Ernest Kingsley Jr. portrays the older Washington Black.
At age 11, Wash is taken under the wing of his master’s younger abolitionist brother Titch, played by Tom Ellis, who uses the boy as ballast for an experimental flying machine but soon recognizes his aptitude for art and science. Amid this burgeoning friendship, Wash is disfigured in a trial run and then implicated in a crime, forcing him and Titch to flee the plantation.
Edugyan’s tale is a first-person account by an 18-year-old Wash who looks back on a lifelong search for freedom and meaning that sends him to extreme corners of the world.
The Disney version is narrated by Sterling K. Brown’s Medwin, a mere side character in the book who runs Wash’s boarding house in Halifax.
Onscreen, Medwin is a mentor to Wash and gets his own backstory and love interest, all part of what Hinds explains as “the journey of adaptation.”
As such, Halifax features more prominently in the Disney story, which filmed in and around the Atlantic capital, as well as in Mexico and Iceland to capture scenes set in Virginia, the Arctic, London and Morocco.
Hinds says Nova Scotia was home for about six months, with shooting locations including Peggy’s Cove, Lunenburg, Uniacke Estate Museum Park in Mount Uniacke and the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site in Cape Breton.
He says Halifax in particular “really adopted us as a crew” as they learned the local history of Black settlements in Canada.
“There was a young man who used to cut my hair in Halifax and one day we were talking — he told me his family had been there, I think, 400 years. Which for an American immigrant like myself, who’s first-generation American, this was just completely mind-blowing,” he says in joint a video call from Los Angeles with Harrison.
“A big part of what we’re doing is trying to bake ourselves in the nooks and crannies and the history of the place. And I did as best as I could to let that infuse the actual storytelling itself.”
Among the biggest changes is the removal of Wash’s facial scars, notes Edugyan, who became the first Black woman to win the Giller in 2011 for Half-Blood Blues and only the third author to win twice when Washington Black claimed the title in 2018.
In the Disney version, the scar is on Wash’s chest, where it’s hidden from view.
“That is quite a departure from the novel,” says Edugyan.
“That was a very deliberate choice on my part to have that be part of how Washington confronts the world — that he’s not only an enslaved person but that he also carries with him this disfigurement, which gives him this sort of double estrangement.”
Edugyan describes the series as “a kind of translation or interpretation of the novel” to satisfy a visual medium and the demands of episodic storytelling. Her jazz-infused Half-Blood Blues was also optioned for the screen, by Toronto’s Clement Virgo, which Edugyan says is still in the works.
Hinds says he regards the screen version of Washington Black as “the same house” but bigger, with an expanded world that adds a romantic rival for Wash and a deeper backstory for the white-passing love interest Tanna, born to a Black mother in the Solomon Islands.
“Because the TV medium just gives you room to explore things that Esi kind of laid out that were really great opportunities — really delving into Tanna’s background or really seeing what the Solomon Islands meant (to Tanna),” he says.
“With any adaptation, or at least the ones that I’ve written, the first thing is to find the emotional DNA of the story, right? And once I realized that the story that Esi was telling about finding hope and finding agency and finding freedom, once you sort of lock into the emotional core of what the characters’ journey is, everything else makes sense. Both in terms of what you keep in and what you leave out.”
Edugyan says she’s slowly making her way through the series, deeming it “really lush and gorgeous. And the acting is quite wonderful.”
“It’s quite different from the novel,” Edugyan adds.
“Anybody who’s familiar with the source work will be surprised. But I think it’s its own piece of art and I’m looking forward to having people watch it and to hearing reactions.”
Washington Black premieres all eight episodes Wednesday on Disney Plus.
With files from CBC Books
