FREEDOM ONLY
Oprah pick and MacArthur ‘genius’ Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad travels the tension between hope and reality
The Underground Railroad By Colson Whitehead Doubleday 320 pp; $34.95
When Colson Whitehead writes about railroad t unnels, t he world takes notice. In John Henry Days, his second novel, he dubs the railway “a metaphor for connectivity” between people. The tunnels precipitate the energy in that mythic, hypersonic narrative, shortlisted for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize; followed by the MacArthur Foundation awarding Whitehead their “genius” grant. In discussing his new work, The Underground Railroad, Whitehead says, “Tunnels are a doorway,” to a variety of American possibilities. An instant bestseller, The Underground Railroad is the first of Whitehead’s novels to be read by Oprah Winfrey, who selected it for her cultural force of a book club.
Traveling these tunnels — testing her fate at their doorways — is Cora, born on the gruesome Randall plantation in Georgia, where her physical suffering is rivaled only by brutal psychological scarring. Her grandmother, Ajarry, had been stolen from a village in Africa and sold and resold until landing on Randall. There she gave birth to daughter, Mabel, farmed a small but coveted plot in the slave quarters, and eventually died “in the cotton … keeled over in the rows from a knot in her brain.” Mabel, Cora’s mother, ran away from Randall while Cora was still a child, leaving her to suffer “travesties so routine and familiar that they were a kind of weather, and the ones so imaginative in their monstrousness that the mind refused to accommodate them.”
When a shift comes to the plantation’s leadership structure, Cora is stirred to finally accept another slave’s invitation to run away. Caesar, first owned by a widow in Virginia who encouraged him to learn to read and learn a skill (woodworking) and sold to Randall upon her death, believes Cora to be a good luck charm. Her mother was the only one to successfully escape Randall’s “order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries.” Caesar keeps Cora close as they tromp through backwater marshes to their first stop on the Underground Railroad, presented by the novel as a literal railway dug by slaves. “The tunnel, the tracks, the desperate souls who found salvation in the coordination of its stations and timetables — this was a marvel to be proud of. Wondered if those who had built this thing had received their proper reward.”
The railway takes its passengers, all seeking freedom, on an interstate journey aided by the likes of quiet farmers and bankers by day turned “station agents” by night. One agent explains, “Every state is different … Each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things. Moving through them, you’ll see the breadth of the country before you reach your final stop.” While hopeful expectations fueled the construction of and entrance into these tunnels, the depravity of slaveholding America often meant stepping out into despair, especially for the slaves who staked their lives on its machinery.
Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, New York, Tennessee, Indiana: any of these stations could open the door to sweeping brutality or unethical medical studies, weekly lynch mobs ( or spontaneous ones), courthouse injustices or arbitrary punishments, evil soaked into the soil everywhere.
The elements of the American slave narrative have been familiar since the days of Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 publication, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself; as well as the 18th-century manuscripts excerpted in anthologies like Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave. The Underground Railroad opens much like these historic texts, depicting tribes kidnapped from their ancestral homes in the interiors of the African continent: in To Be a Slave, tribes were cajoled into slavery, enchanted by fabrics they’d never seen before; in The Underground Railroad, Cora’s grandmother is first “passed between slavers for cowrie shells and glass beads,” and eventually sold to captors on various shores in exchange for rum, gunpowder, sugar, tobacco and dollars.
“Scenes from Darkest Africa,” “Life on The Slave Ship,” and “Typical Day on the Plantation,” could easily be the titles of chapters in those early autobiographies — the progression of horrors from one slave narrative to the next. Whitehead employs these as titles of exhibits at his fictitious Museum of Natural Wonders, a South Carolina tourist attraction where visitors stare and scrutinize, point and yell, bang on the glass to get a better glimpse of live black bodies, including Cora’s, acting out a curator’s whimsy amongst white waxed figures.
Although the terror of transatlantic slavery is centuries old, and a number of award-winning novelists have plumbed its pain and power with bestselling success, Whitehead didn’t arrive at this, his first foray into the slave narrative, lightly. He conceived the idea for The Underground Railroad 16 years ago, around the time that his debut novel, The In- tuitionist, was published in paperback. He would jot down lines about the premise here or there: “Guy looking for his daughter?” “Mother looking for her son?”
But it would take Whitehead, whose mastery of metaphor has inspired comparison to Ralph Ellison — the venerated author of Invisible Man who is widely heralded as a father of the black speculative fiction tradition — time to prepare for such a deep immersion into slavery; to grapple with the grisly terrors his ancestors experienced, the traumas passed through blood, generation to generation, to the depths an award-worthy novel requires. By the time he was ready he hadn’t written fiction in five years, his last novel being Zone One, a post-apocalyptic, zombie-riddled, literary love story. He’d done enough research over the years, however, and was ready to bring the best of his experiences writing character- driven novels ( 2009’s Sag Harbor) and plot-driven examinations of life’s undercurrents (2006’s Apex Hides the Hurt) to a work that would combine them all.
The timing couldn’t be more apt. Although anchored in a 19thcentury landscape where black bodies hang publicly from trees as warnings to any slaves considering escape, the violence of The Underground Railroad reeks with 21stcentury resonance.
To Cora and Caesar, patrollers who harassed and bullied black folk and hunted down runaways, emblematized in Whitehead’s novel by the slave catcher Ridgeway, “were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.”
In Ridgeway’s view, “A black boy has no future, free papers or no. Not in this country. Some disreputable character would snatch him and put him on the block lickety-split.” — words with reallife contemporary counterparts. In 1997, The New York Times described then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s New York as “a city where law-abiding residents, especially young blacks and Latinos, are routinely and often grotesquely harassed by the police. Obeying the law is not enough to shield New Yorkers from the abuses of lawless police officers who are increasingly willing to exhibit their contempt for the people they are sworn to serve.”
Whitehead deems it “fairly obvious” how the descriptions of police forces in slave narratives, “guys who go around rousting free blacks from their homes” ( and making them show identification), compare to presentday law enforcement practices, which social justice news sites like The Marshall Report describe as “overly aggressive” and demonstrating “deep-rooted patterns of false arrests and a history of targeting black residents.”
Like the Underground Railroad — a tunnel of beliefs, carved out of toil and frustration, and desperation to survive unspeakable violence — even today each state has its own unique racial landscape, temperament and definition of progress: from Birmingham church bombings to Charleston Bible study massacres, from abolitionists teaching slaves to read to social justice advocates fighting for the rights of indigent citizens.
Whitehead summarizes The Underground Railroad as a novel describing “the tension between hope and reality.” Cora, fulfilling the trajectory set off by her grandmother and propelled by her mother’s unimaginable self- determination, never knows what kind of place she’ll be thrown into. But unlike the beads and baubles that constitute Ajarry’s worth, or the plot of land she and Mabel viciously protect, Cora’s exchange rate? Freedom only.
ANCHORED IN A 19TH-CENTURY LANDSCAPE, THE VIOLENCE REEKS WITH 21ST-CENTURY RESONANCE