Ernest Kingsley Jr. as George Washington “Wash” Black and Iola Evans as Tanna Goff in Washington Black, a television miniseries based on Esi Edugyan’s 2018 bestselling novel.Chris Reardon/Disney +
It’s not every day that a major American TV miniseries opens with a sweeping shot of tall ships sailing into the historic Halifax Harbour.
But for Washington Black creator Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, there was no other place to begin his adaptation of Canadian writer Esi Edugyan’s 2018 period picaresque novel, which follows its 19th-century protagonist Wash from Barbados to Virginia, the Arctic, England and Morocco, as well as Nova Scotia.
“Welcome to Halifax – last stop on the Underground Railroad,” three-time Emmy Award-winning actor Sterling K. Brown intones as Wash’s mentor, Medwin, in the voiceover that sets the stage for the new series; its full eight episodes drop on Disney+ on July 23 in Canada.
“Everybody step off with they own story,” Medwin says. “Boy, do I got one for you.”
Unlike the show, Edugyan begins the narrative of her novel with George Washington (Wash) Black at 10 or 11 (heartbreakingly, he’s unsure of his age), enslaved on a fictional sugar plantation in the Caribbean called Faith.
Washington Black creator Selwyn Seyfu Hinds.Selwyn Seyfu Hinds/Supplied
But Hinds, who branched out into screenwriting (Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone) and comic books after a career as a well-known journalist and hip hop critic, didn’t want television viewers to wait three or four episodes to meet the older version of the character.
Wash’s adult years in Nova Scotia before Confederation are what Hinds calls the book’s “narrative pinch point.”
It’s where the scientifically gifted and artistically apt Wash (played in grown-up form by Ernest Kingsley Jr.) is part of a free Black community that includes his memorable mentor Medwin – but is still threatened by racist violence. It’s also where he first encounters a young, white-passing British woman named Tanna Goff (Iola Evans), whose father (Rupert Graves) wishes she would keep quiet about her late Black mother from the Solomon Islands.
“Everything happens in Nova Scotia and after that – so that’s where you want to begin,” Hinds says, in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles.
Soon enough, the series starts to flash back to the young Wash (played by Eddie Karanja) and dramatizes the story of how his technological curiosity helps him escape slavery. Aiming to build a flying machine, the plantation owner’s inventor brother, Titch (Tom Ellis), takes on Wash as an assistant.
In Hinds’s adaptation, the timeline flows back and forth between the older Wash and the younger, whereas the novel takes a more linear approach to the tale.
Tom Ellis as Titch, an inventor, and Eddie Karanja as the young Wash.Lilja Jonsdottir/Disney +
Washington Black, which won Edugyan her second Giller Prize in 2018, was the subject of what Variety called “an intense bidding war” for the rights to the screen. They were ultimately won by 20th Television, in conjunction with Sterling K. Brown’s Indian Meadows Productions, Anthony Hemingway Productions and the Gotham Group.
Hinds, Brown (This is Us, Paradise) and one of the executive producers, Anthony Hemingway, were the core team that convinced Edugyan in 2019. “We were fortunate in that we had a director, an actor and a writer, so I was able to pitch her a creative vision for the series,” Hinds recalls.
But before she signed on the line, Edugyan – a producer on the TV adaptation streaming on Hulu in the U.S. – flew down from B.C. to L.A. for dinner with the men courting her story.
It was then that Hinds got a chance to bond with the author in person and share his connection to where Wash’s story begins in the book.
“The history that she was talking about was a lived history within my family,” says Hinds, who moved from Guyana to New York with his family when he was teenager, and has ancestry in Barbados.
In developing Washington Black as a TV series, Hinds went through more of a learning curve to understand the rich and complex Black history of Nova Scotia, from slavery through the arrival of the Black Loyalists, up to the pivotal year in proto-Canadian history of 1837, in which his series begins.
Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Miss Angie and Sterling K. Brown as Medwin Harris, Wash’s mentor.Chris Reardon/Disney +
Beyond doing his research, Hinds made sure to have Canadians involved in the process. That included hiring Shernold Edwards, whose credits include Anne with an E, to be part of the writer’s room. “I wanted to make sure that we had some Canadian community as well – not just a bunch of Americans assuming things,” he says.
The series production offices of Washington Black were set up in Halifax and much of the series was shot in the surrounding area. Hinds found shooting in Nova Scotia an “incredible” experience both creatively and emotionally.
“Getting there on the ground and going to the Loyalist museum, and meeting people whose families have been there for hundreds of hundreds of years, really understanding how that community was built, and what a special place it has in the diaspora, was all incredibly revealing,” says Hinds.
Praising the local cast and crew, Hinds says Nova Scotia is a place full of extraordinary people and scenery that he hasn’t yet been able to shake out of his system. He wants to return to work there again soon. “Louisbourg is probably one of my favourite places in the world right now – gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous,” he says.
