Dreams turned to dust
The underground railroad that ushered slaves to safety is reimagined in this important new novel, says Steve Walker.
The metaphorical ‘‘underground railroad’’ spirited slaves away from the United States’ southern states to relative safety in the north. It was a loosely connected web of passageways and safe houses.
Colson Whitehead’s central idea in this bold new take on the atrocities of American slavery is that the railroad is not metaphorical but real. In tunnels buried deep underground, mystery trains whisk runaways stage by stage to the big cities of the north.
As a conceit, it focuses on the stages of the journey, not the journey itself. We follow Cora, fleeing the terrors of brutal owners on a Georgia plantation.
Approached by Caesar, another brutalised slave, after she has been beaten, ostracised and raped by her masters, she flees. First to the relatively tolerant South Carolina, then via Tennessee and Indiana, she makes her episodic way north.
At each stage of her journey, Cora encounters new horrors. A hospital whose real mission is cruel eugenics, swathes of lynched corpses, a museum which specialises in fictive depictions of debased slaves – each stage is a further Dantesque circle of hell.
The abuses of the plantation are multiplied across the States. ‘‘The true horror lay in their universality’’, as Cora finds out.
Chased by a slave-hunter, Ridgeway, Cora and Caesar are attacked en route. A boy is killed in one struggle so the pair are no longer just fugitives; they are murderers. Both have a price on their heads – now no longer human, even in a society which values its slaves purely in financial terms.
Whitehead’s extraordinary achievement is his depiction of primal cruelty. Extremely graphic, these scenes are never gratuitous.
The attempted runaway who is beaten, castrated and roasted alive is meant as both a warning to other slaves and a measure of the depravity of the slave-owning class. The images catalogue society’s inhumanity to others, the depths to which we sink merely for monetary gain.
Whitehead’s use of a metaphor turned real, however, poses a problem. If our understanding of the railroad is undermined, to what extent can we trust his descriptions of abuse? To what extent does he hyperbolise actuality?
The cruelty Whitehead depicts poses questions for today. Americans trumpet their dream, based on equality and opportunity. Whitehead manages to suggest that America’s dream is really its past.
Founded on a delusion, ‘‘the true face of America’’ is a construct built on land stolen from Indians, the genocide of native Americans, war and enslavement.
As Whitehead says, ‘‘black hands built the White House’’.
At the end of her journey, Cora meets pioneers heading west to California. It is a point where the reality, in the form of an abused and enslaved black woman who now has absolutely nothing, meets the dream, of pioneering spirit and unbounded optimism.
It is a sobering and deeply thought-provoking moment, for reader and America.