The Underground Railroad
Some of America’s most difficult issues today stem from the generational traumas of slavery. The racism that fueled the centuries of this country’s slave-based economy continues to wreak havoc on our national unity. We are, in 2021, still very much haunted by the horrors of slavery as we grapple with the challenges of becoming a truly inclusive society. Thus, works that illustrate experiences of historical enslavement and the Underground Railroad, like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2017), provide modern Americans with ample food-for-thought when considering race relations, questions of reparations, and more.
Whitehead’s novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and the National Book Award, provides an alternate history of slavery in the American South, not in terms of downplaying its brutality, but by exploring various means of dealing with its consequence. The Underground Railroad responds, in part, to the crisis the South faced as its enslaved populations grew exponentially and quickly came to outnumber everyone else. (Want to dive down that research rabbit hole? Check out the White, Free Nonwhite, and Slave population numbers by state from 1750-1860.)The Underground Railroad presents a provocative alternate history of flight and survival in which the reader braces herself amidst suffering, devastation, and loss.
The novel opens with Cora, born enslaved—the third female of her family in as many generations—on a cotton plantation in Georgia. She comes-of-age as an outcast, “a stray” (17), after her mother runs north alone. Cora’s own journey of fleeing her enslaved life begins with the novel’s first line, even if she declines Caesar’s initial offer to join him in running away: “The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no” (3). The Underground Railroad, as its title suggests, then, becomes the story—at times outrageous and fantastic, brutal and disturbing, touching and hopeful—of Cora’s experience with the Underground Railroad as she, in time, resolves to make her way across the American South to escape a life of bondage. In simple, cutting prose Whitehead’s novel presents a fictional South, which Cora (and the reader) comes to know each state for all the various cruelties meted out to its enslaved and those who seek to the assist their flight.
Caesar and Cora’s escape leads them to their first Underground Railroad depot. While works like (previously reviewed) Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer portray the Underground Railroad as more metaphor and mystery, Whitehead’s novel takes a literal approach describing engines on tracks winding through slave-dug tunnels. After leaving the brutal plantation life of Georgia, Cora’s journey leads on to the self-proclaimed progressive and nominally tolerant South Carolina where she learns that things are not always as ideal as advertised. Next, she finds herself in brutally violent, intolerant North Carolina. Whitehead’s fictionalization of each of these states highlights serious, historic trends from forced sterilizations to lynchings on the town green. Before the novel’s end, Cora winds through Tennessee and Indiana as well. In each state, Cora learns new life lessons, often the result of trauma and heartache. Yet amidst Cora’s mountainous grief she clings to survival and self-improvement along the way.
On the road, Cora’s life entwines with the lives of others from Underground Railroad conductors to the ruthless slave-catcher who pursues her. Chapter titles, alternating between state and character names, acknowledge that the Underground Railroad was at once geographic and human. Each chapter also includes an epigraph in the form of an advertised reward for the return of a slave; thus, The Underground Railroad’s form as well as its subject remind the reader that this fiction is firmly rooted in fact. Both the people and the places leave their imprint on Cora as she witnesses and survives one atrocity after the next. The Underground Railroad is by no means an easy read, but its brutality is both intentional and productive as it forces all of us to sit with our collective history. The facts of slavery are simple and deserve zero romanticization: it was a socially-acceptable horror and a crime against hundreds of thousands of enslaved people, a history that continues to haunt their descendants.
The Underground Railroad demonstrates the vicious and inhumane experiences and conditions of nineteenth-century enslaved people and the outrageous feats of physical and emotional endurance those bold enough to run endured on their journeys North to freedom. This novel reminds its reader too, through Cora’s mother’s story in particular, that histories aren’t always as clear-cut as they may appear to be; the stories we tell may not have been the way things really went down. Whitehead leaves his reader contemplating many themes, asking myriad questions, and wrestling with the tragedy that all American’s inherit as we continue to become a more equal union. By not giving up, not letting adversity cripple or paralyze her, Cora shows her readers that the journey to freedom and away from the atrocities of slavery with its institutional and societal racism is a long road. When we all read more books like this one, we continue to do the vital work of the Underground Railroad, even one-hundred and fifty-six years after (almost to the day) Congress passed the 13th Amendment,* and we will no doubt discover that there is indeed light at the end of the tunnel.
* Congress passed the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865 and ratified on December 6 of the same year. It states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”
A Few Great Passages:
“Cora’s attention detached itself. It floated someplace past the burning slave and great house and the lines that defined the Randall domain. She tried to fill in its details from stories, through the accounts of slaves who had seen it. Each time she caught hold of something—buildings of polished white stone, an ocean so vast there wasn’t a tree in sight, the shop of a colored blacksmith who served no master but himself—it wriggled free like a fish and raced away. She would have to see it for herself if she were to keep it” (36-37).
“America has imported and bred so many Africans that in many states the white are outnumbered. For that reason alone, emancipation is impossible. With strategic sterilization—first the women but both sexes in time—we could free them from bondage without fear that they’re butcher us in our sleep” (146).
“Whether in a field or underground or in an attic room American remained her warden” (207).
“Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. She could not see it but she felt it, moved through its heart” (363).
Bibliography:
“13th Amendment to the Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865).” www.ourdocuments.gov
Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. Fleet: 2017.
