Deutsche Welle (English edition)
'The Underground Railroad': Slavery saga hits screens
Two influential Black creators combine as "Moonlight" director Barry Jenkins transforms Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a powerful TV series.
The 19th-century network of secret routes and safe houses that was developed in the US to help enslaved African Americans escape to free states or Canada was referred to as the Underground Railroad.
Those who guided the enslaved people were known as "conductors," while hiding places such as private homes, churches and schoolhouses were "stations," "safe houses" or "depots." The people organizing these locations were "stationmasters."
In his 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead transforms the secret network into an actual railway that runs through tunnels.
The novel won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, with the committee praising its "smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America."
Upon reading Whitehead's book, Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins immediately knew he wanted to adapt it — not as a feature film, but rather as a TV series, which was for him the best way to convey the scope of the work.
All 10 episodes of the limited series have now been released worldwide on Amazon Prime as of May 14.
Shattering the American myth
As a child, Jenkins imagined the Underground Railroad to be something like that described in Whitehead's book, with tracks and tunnels allowing escaping Black people to ride trains under the earth.
When he eventually realized that it was only a metaphor, it felt like finding out "that Santa Claus and the tooth fairy aren't real," the filmmaker told Sight & Sound magazine. But the realization was accompanied with a new understanding of a horrifying system of slavery.
Far from trivializing the horrors of history, the magical realism of the novel — and now the series — rather emphasizes the nightmare experienced by the slaves whose labor built the wealth of those living "the American dream."
Even if there's an actual train, escaping from the living hell of a Georgia cotton plantation is not a simple ride to freedom. After they manage to escape, the story's protagonist Cora (portrayed by Thuso Mbedu) and her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre) quickly realize that the threat remains, even in states with apparently progressive policies toward slaves.
And slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) is never too far behind, accompanied by his loyal 10-year-old Black sidekick, Homer (Chase W. Dillon). The man is obsessed with hunting down Cora since her mother was the only slave who managed to escape from him. A personal story
Barry Jenkins also felt a strong connection with the novel's main character. The pain Cora feels from being abandoned by her mother — who left the plantation without her — is one of the girl's main motivations to escape slavery.
"I felt the same thing with my mother," the filmmaker told public broadcaster NPR, "because for the first 25 years of my life, I didn't understand why she didn't take care of me. I didn't understand why I was estranged from her."
As Jenkins revealed after winning the best picture Oscar for Moonlightin 2017, like the boy portrayed in that film, his own