Barry Jenkins: ‘Maybe America has never been great’
Barry Jenkins first heard the history of the Underground Railroad from a teacher when he was six or seven years old. The school lesson described the loose network of safe houses and abolitionists that helped enslaved people in the American south escape to free states in the north in the 19th century. Jenkins as a wide-eyed kid imagined an actual railroad, though, secret steam trains thundering under America, built by black superheroes in the dead of night. It was an image, he recalls, that made “anything feel possible”. “My grandfather was a longshoreman,” he says. “He came home every day, in his hard hat and his tool belt, and his thick boots. And I thought, ‘Oh, yes, people like my granddad, they built this underground railroad!’”
That childhood image returned to Jenkins, now 41, when he read an advance copy of Colson Whitehead’s novel about that history, which builds on that same seductive idea. That was in 2016. Both Jenkins and Whitehead were on the edge of career-defining breakthroughs: Jenkins’s film Moonlight was about to be released (and would go on to win the Oscar for best picture) and Whitehead’s book The Underground Railroad was about to be published (going on to receive the National Book Award and the Pulitzer prize). All this was to come, though, when the pair met. “I was familiar with Colson as an author,” Jenkins told me last week on a screen from his home in Los Angeles. “And once I read his book, I knew for sure I absolutely want this. And I’m not that guy. Usually I’ll read something and I go, well, that might make a great film, and then I’ll just leave it. But this one, it’s all hands on deck, we have to get this.”
Five years on, the 10 parts of Jenkins’s harrowing and luminous adaptation of Whitehead’s book, a masterpiece of storytelling, are about to be streamed on Amazon. One of the first things Jenkins shot in the series was a steam train in an underground tunnel (built at a train museum in Savannah, Georgia). Jenkins has Cora, the young woman escaping a plantation, climb through a trapdoor and down to the tracks, as in Whitehead’s novel. He then allows the viewer to see that scene through his six-year-old eyes. Cora crouches down to touch the steel rail just to make sure it’s for real. “Because as a kid,” Jenkins says, “I know that’s what I would have done.”
The closer he got to this project after the success of Moonlight, and his adaptation of the James Baldwin novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, the more Jenkins says he got frightened of the trauma embedded in the material, of doing it justice. “There’s always fear,” he says, “but with this one in particular, this is the most triggering material I’ve ever had to wrestle with. There’s a great responsibility that comes with that. I hope it can recontextualise rather than reinforce stereotypes about my ancestors, that have been allowed to persist over the decades.”
In 2017, when he had just beaten La La Land to the Oscar, friends questioned whether he still needed to make this series, when so many less complex opportunities had opened up for him. He was adamant about it, though, not least because of the political moment. At the time he was optioning the rights to Whitehead’s book, Donald Trump’s racially divisive election campaign was in full swing. “This phrase, ‘Make America Great Again’, just kept getting repeated and repeated,” Jenkins says. “And the thing I always heard in that was this cavity, this vacuum [in knowledge]. Because maybe America has never been great. There’s been great progress at certain times in American history. But there’s always been this dark side. And so I thought, okay, yes, [The Underground Railroad] is absolutely the right thing to do. Because clearly, if this slogan is powerful enough to elect a man to the highest office in the land, then there’s still this huge vacuum…”
The chapters of Whitehead’s book, its structure as a semi-mythic American odyssey, made it perfect for the “box set” medium. As Cora – played with extraordinary empathic presence by the young South African actor Thuso Mbedu – makes her way through various stations and states and shifting historical territory, pursued by the bounty hunter Ridgeway, she can sometimes seem 16 and sometimes 60. Each staging post of her journey – Georgia, South and North Carolina, Tennessee – becomes like a feature film in its own right. They shot the 450 pages of Jenkins’s script in 116 days, “kind of a breakneck pace”, he says. They were fortunate to be just about done when lockdown was first imposed last March.
That propitious timing looked like further proof that the director is a living example of that old maxim “the harder I work, the luckier I get”. Looking back at his career it is tempting to reach for ideas of fate to describe its arc. After film school at Florida State University his low-budget first feature Medicine for Melancholy received good notices but proved hard to follow. He was thinking of ways of writing about his own damaged childhood when a friend sent him the script of an autobiographical play by Tarell Alvin McCraney, written a decade earlier. McCraney had been at the same junior school as Jenkins, in Liberty City, a tough suburb of Miami, one year below him. The pair had never met, though the details of their upbringing were uncannily similar: both had mothers whose lives were destroyed by the crack cocaine epidemic that hollowed out Liberty City. Like McCraney, Jenkins
was raised in precarious and surrogate households, in his case mostly by an older woman he called his grandmother. When Moonlight came out he told the Guardian: “There were seven or eight of us in a two-bed apartment. There was usually food but sometimes not. The lights usually worked, but sometimes not.”
If Jenkins was unsure how to confront these issues on film, McCraney’s play provided him with the answer, a story close to his own, but not his own. There was a further twist to the tale when the director, struggling to raise finance, was invited at the last minute to chair a Q&A after a screening of 12 Years a Slave with its director, Steve McQueen, and co-producer, Brad Pitt. When afterwards Pitt asked in passing what Jenkins was working on, he seized the moment to sell the idea of Moonlight to Pitt’s production company, Plan B.
Jenkins’s initial route out of his damaged childhood in Liberty City had been as an American footballer – playing on an unbeatable high school team alongside seven future NFL players. This helped him to an academic scholarship at Florida State University, where he eventually found a home at the film school. He plays down his