Sterling K. Brown’s Upstanding Archetype

There’s a certain face that only Sterling K. Brown can make. It is yoked to no particular emotional state, and emerges just as often when the actor is conveying deep glee or charming irony as when his character is lost in sorrow. Brown’s jaw gently churns, his eyes go glassy, and the muscles around his mouth slacken a bit. He’s lost in a reverie of intensity, absorbing life’s shocks and cruelties or its absurd beauties, processing it all by opening some spirit portal via his face. He’s not necessarily about to cry, but the look is an assertion that high emotion is almost always an appropriate response to life’s fluctuations.

Brown’s most memorable characters—Randall Pearson, the principled father and adopted son from NBC’s tear-jerking drama “This Is Us”; the grieving Secret Service officer Xavier Collins, on the recent eco-dystopian thriller “Paradise”—are strong guys with vulnerable cores. They exist at an elevated altitude of emotion and lead plot-heavy lives whose stakes are written as much in Brown’s expressions as in the words that he speaks.

Because of his obvious intelligence, classic handsomeness, and natural respectability, Brown reminds me of Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington—great movie actors who in their prime mostly played versions of themselves, and also, role by role, implicitly represented society’s rapid revisions of the Black male archetype. Poitier slapped white men onscreen and fell defiantly in love with their daughters, illustrating how his kind of masculine dignity had to be won in a series of direct clashes with white power. Washington’s reign, from the nineties through the turn of the century, was, on some level, a confirmation of the victories of Poitier’s generation. Now Black cool could be a personal tool, not just a weapon in a wider racial conflagration. Washington’s charisma and omnipresent equipoise were agents of a kind of stylized self-care, allowing his characters to walk a tightrope over so many complexities. Even when he played Malcolm X, the ultimate Black artist of public confrontation, he saved his most affecting acting for the film’s more private moments, when it was essential for Malcolm to keep calm.

Brown—whose greatest exploits, unlike those of Poitier and Washington, have been on television rather than on the silver screen—is back on TV at a more muddled juncture in the American racial story. Just as the United States seems to be sliding into a self-fuelled decline in global esteem and symbolic power, the Black man has receded somewhat as a sign of its internal divisions. Black women are more likely to go to college, and they seem to be weathering the contemporary storm of loneliness and atomization with an equanimity that eludes their male counterparts. If last year’s Presidential election is any indication, they have better politics, too. And other archetypes are rightly rising: the undocumented worker, for instance, takes up more space in the national imagination these days than does the righteous Black man negotiating the shocks of the post-civil-rights-era struggle. The imperative for a figure like Brown is to portray a good man in a crumbling world, to maintain a polished, upstanding character against the backdrop of a rusting empire.

So it’s interesting to see Brown, now forty-nine, taking on the role of the elder mentor in the new Hulu show “Washington Black,” about a precocious Barbadian escaped slave and his risky adventures in remaining free. In the first scene, the young man, whose mordantly resonant name is George Washington Black, or Wash (Ernest Kingsley Junior), is showing a father figure named Medwin, played by Brown, one of his latest inventions, a small prototype for a blimp. Brown has a look of proud, slightly baffled love in his eye. He can’t understand the science unfolding in the kid’s brain, and implores him to speak “English,” but in truth delights in his obvious intelligence.

They’re in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the early nineteenth century. At the time of this conversation, Medwin doesn’t know Washington’s real name. Everybody in their community of tenuously free Black people calls him Jack Crawford. Soon the reasoning for that bit of concealment becomes clear: a team of bounty hunters has alighted on the town, looking for someone named Washington Black. The show occurs on two time lines. There’s an ongoing flashback—alternately heartwarming and bloodcurdling—that portrays the young Wash’s life in and escape from Barbados (Eddie Karanja plays the child counterpart to Kingsley Junior), to Virginia, then to farther north. He’s brilliant from the beginning—a curious kid, with no family, given to poetic phrasings and musings on nature. Anyone can see how smart he is—anyone, that is, but Erasmus Wilde (Julian Rhind-Tutt), the bigoted Englishman who runs the plantation on which he lives, and who makes cruel sport of slapping Wash’s guardian over trifling domestic disturbances. It takes a different kind of white man to notice Wash’s gifts; Erasmus’s brother Christopher, or Titch (Tom Ellis), an abolitionist inventor, makes Wash his apprentice, and eventually facilitates his escape.

In the story’s present tense, Wash is, yes, trying to avoid the bounty hunters, but he still has time and brain space to cultivate a sappy romance with Tanna Goff (Iola Evans), the daughter of yet another scientist. The Goffs have recently arrived in Halifax from London, and we soon discover that their hasty trip across the Atlantic was a result of a secret: Tanna’s mother was Black. Now Tanna is passing as white in colonial society. In London, she’d been too free with her identity. We don’t know exactly how, but some Negrophile hint slipped loose, endangering the family. In Halifax, repeating patterns, she’s crazy about Jack Crawford even though she’s engaged to a wealthy white man.

Brown, as Medwin, proceeds over all this trouble—so many secrets, so much inevitable violence—with a wise gravity. He handles the role of elder statesman much as he’s handled other roles throughout his career: heart first, with an emphasis on personal moral rectitude and interpersonal warmth, circumstances be damned. Medwin is an eminence in Black Halifax, welcoming strangers and hiding fugitives, “watchin’ out for folk.” The show is a soap opera in texture and plotting; its points of highest drama often make you roll your eyes. Tanna, talking in terms that only a contemporary lover of woo-woo self-help could hope to approximate, effuses about “living in [her] own skin.” Anachronisms like that are everywhere. It’s a festival of tropes: the racially shrouded mixed-race woman straddling her loyalties to the Black and white worlds; the dastardly slave master and his benevolent opposite; the turncoat Black man who sells out his co-racialists; and on and on. Brown is working far above the level of the material—he’s one of the show’s executive producers—but there’s only so much that his sad eyes and occasional tears can do to redeem “Washington Black.”

That’s a shame, because the vast, cosmopolitan ambit of the show, which is based on a novel of the same name by Esi Edugyan, might have taken off on a much needed new trajectory. By focussing on the transnational character of the slave trade, especially as it was practiced in the West Indies, the show brings the Old and New Worlds into suggestive and potentially revealing proximity. The Regency costuming of the English characters is enough to make audiences think of the refinements of Jane Austen’s novels—at least as they have been adapted on TV and in film—and to darken their view of the much sentimentalized landed gentry.

“Washington Black” takes place about a century before the United States announced, and then went on to achieve, its imperial ambitions. The internationalism of its story echoes the unsettled world out of which a boy like Wash might have sprung. Today, as the U.S. wills its own isolated decline, we’re on the cusp of a multipolar world, all the more dangerous because of the spasms of a behemoth on the wane. What kind of Black man does this world need, onscreen or in living color? Maybe just a guy who can think, and feel, and remain human among the ruins. Look closely enough at Sterling K. Brown and you can see him trying, glassy-eyed, to meet the moment. ♦