THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
By Colson Whitehead
306 pages
Available at National Book Store
If you want to see what this nation is all about,” says one character in Colson Whitehead’s scathing novel of racism The Underground Railroad, “You have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” Riding the rails, of course, has a double meaning: it means taking a train, but it also means enduring the worst cruelty and ridicule at the hands of others.
Somewhere between magical realist fantasy and unblinking history, Whitehead’s novel of slaves seeking their freedom by any means possible is both audacious and multilayered.
Opening in pre-Civil War Georgia with the plight of Cora, a slave at the Randall plantation coaxed to run north by fellow slave Caesar, the novel takes big chances: first by reimagining the Underground Railroad — in truth, a network of American abolitionists who sought to free slaves by hiding them in various households as they fled to northern states — as a literal railroad, complete with conductors and railroad stations and even waiting benches underground. Yes, the Underground Railroad as subway system, but for Cora, the clear-eyed heroine in Whitehead’s novel, it’s a train with unmarked stops, and she doesn’t know where her final destination will be.
Whitehead interweaves his imaginative construct with chilling details of slavery’s past — sprinkled between chapters are notices of rewards offered by owners for recaptured slaves, noting their physical characteristics (“has a noticeable scar on her left elbow, occasioned by a burn”). We hear of the brutal, gruesome fates of runaway slaves that are brought back to plantations and publicly lynched or dismembered for other slaves to take heed. So far, so Django Unchained. But Whitehead goes deeper into his horror fantasy than Tarantino, showing the degrees of change from state to state as Cora moves along in her journey to freedom. She travels underground through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Indiana, each stop on her way a glimpse at life for slaves under a different mode of hell.
In South Carolina, she’s taken in by sympathetic whites, allowed to choose what seems like relative paradise compared with the Georgian plantation of her cruel master, Terrance Randall. But there, she finds her fate is to become a living example to whites who might be persuaded by anti-slavery arguments: she is placed behind glass in an actual museum exhibit, detailing the cruelties of plantation life, interacting with models of other slaves and whip-bearing overseers. Used for propaganda, Cora, like Goldilocks, finds this environment too cold, and she and Caesar flee north underground again.
There she encounters even worse fates, such as North Carolina’s Night Riders — the early face of the KKK, intent on showing blacks “their place” and instilling terror in those who would defy white authority.
In Indiana, she finds another path to freedom — literacy, and literature, as she encounters a free society of black who recite poetry and teach one another to read African history. But this, too, can be a dead end, thinks Cora:
Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.
Hope can be a dangerous thing, implanted in a people’s imaginations. It makes me think about the difference between US Democrats and Republicans, at times: the former would like people to focus on what could be (“poetry”), while the latter stick people’s nose in what’s often the ugly reality (“the ruthless mechanism of the world”).
Whitehead’s prose is vivid and bone-chilling at times, though the novel takes unusual liberties in combining the cold realities of slave times with freewheeling fantasy. Perhaps a straight tale of the Underground Railroad would have sufficed, though this would have simply amounted to history; clearly, Whitehead wanted something transcendent, and his prose, approaching poetry at times, often gets there.
Perhaps best read alongside Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Whitehead lays bare the economic imperatives behind slavery, and how this model dictated the most challenging period in US history — leading up to the Civil War.
Whitehead puzzles at the very existence of an experiment called America: something that promises so much, yet is riddled with lethal contradictions. “America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all,” says Lander, leader of a separate society of freed slaves. “The white race believes — believes with all its heart — that it is their right to take land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.”
One flaw of the novel is our heroine, Cora, who is more often a portrait of resilience than an actual flesh-and-blood character: through her eyes, we see the horrors of Antebellum South, but she’s usually called upon to react, without a huge amount of grounding or back story. (We do hear how her mother fled the plantation long before her.)
Another frightening portrait of terror belongs to Ridgeway, a slave catcher hired by Randall to bring back Cora. Part seducer and part face of evil, Ridgeway is perhaps the only character besides Cora given deeper shadings to understand his nature. We see how the system relies on blunt terror to achieve its ends. Cora asks him his name. “You heard my name when you were a pickaninny,” answers Ridgeway. “The name of punishment, dogging every fugitive step and every thought of running away.”
The Underground Railroad is no easy read, but in one of America’s most divided years in political history, it sheds light on the problem of race and why it continues to be an issue.