A white rewrite on black struggle
‘Powerful, uncomfortable’ novel probes complex moral questions
Underground Airlines Ben Winters Mulholland Books
Welcome to the United States, as envisioned by Ben H. Winters in his new novel Underground Airlines.
It’s a familiar world, but utterly alien, a nation where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in early 1861 before his inauguration, “the martyrdom that saved the union.”
Lincoln’s murder, and the speech he was set to give the day he was killed, galvanized and united the nation’s white leaders, with even the members “who had stomped off to form the Confederacy” returning to Congress and hammering out a series of agreements that would stave off what had seemed an inevitable civil war.
All it took to save the country was a murder, and a “complicated compromise” that would preserve slavery where it existed while preventing its expansion.
Set about a century and a half after that compromise, the novel follows Victor, a young, free black man who lives and works in the north. Or so it appears. In fact, Victor grew up in bondage in the Hard Four (the states where slavery is still practised, including the united Carolinas), becoming a “runner” at age 14 and working his way into the north and a life in hiding.
But when caught, Victor wasn’t returned to the industrial abattoir he had escaped. Instead, he accepted an offer from the Marshals Service to work as a bounty hunter, returning those who “escape from service” to the Hard Four under the auspices of the Fugitive Persons Law. With his own experience in evasion, Victor becomes a highly successful hunter, fulfilling his end of the bargain he struck with his supervisor, the mysterious Mr. Bridge.
It’s the very definition of a devil’s bargain.
Underground Airlines begins with Victor in Indianapolis, attempting to infiltrate a cell of abolitionists suspected of helping runners escape the Hard Four to Canada. Victor is in pursuit of Jackdaw, who has escaped his service on a textile plantation, Garments of the Greater South. Inconsistencies with the case, however, begin to trouble him, and as he gets closer to the truth, Victor is drawn into a wider world of conspiracies with the potential to shatter the long-held compromise and bring the entire system down.
It was inevitable that a book about slavery and race in the United States, written by a white man, would draw significant attention. A recent New York Times profile depicts Winters as both brave and somehow oblivious.
Both of these characterizations are significantly flawed.
Readers may rightly have reservations about a white writer taking on the story and voice of not only a black character, but of an entire, imagined black culture.
But at the core of the book is a growing humanity and the birth of agency in a character who has been dehumanized at every turn.
Victor is a potently enigmatic character, dense with contradictions and opposing values. He is well aware of, and justly resentful of, his continued bondage, with a tracking chip in the back of his neck preventing him from escaping the marshals. But he still takes pride in his work, a sense of achievement threaded with an awareness of his own culpability within the system, and his helplessness to change that complicity.
Underground Airlines is a powerful, uncomfortable read. Ultimately, its surface trappings — as an alternate-history detective story — take a back seat to its complex moral questions, and the wheels of the plot begin to squeak as it nears its conclusion.
But Victor’s journey toward his own humanity is the engine that powers the novel, one that explores the nature of freedom and complicity, of the true nature of the self.
Underground Airlines isn’t just a good book, it’s an important contribution to the literature reckoning with these questions, to which Winters — and we readers — owe a significant debt.