Colson Whitehead: “The Underground Railroad”

 

The Underground Railroad, published 2016.

Imagining what it would be like to be a slave in the Old South is so painful that mostly, we don’t exert ourselves and do it. Colson Whitehead’s imagination in The Underground Railroad is so powerful that reading this narrative of slavery and dispossession of one’s own self forces me to imagine the horrors of being owned and having no agency to do anything but suicide or infinitely risky flight from home. He conveys with feeling the existential dread of how you and your parents or you and your children could be sold separately and never be reunited. 

Whitehead’s narrative creates such a vivid picture of both the mental and the physical torments suffered by American slaves before the Civil War that it’s almost unbearable to read. Despite the pain, it’s worth reading not only because it’s history but also because he’s a great writer. The plot is suspenseful and absorbing, the characters are likable or despicable, and the details are vivid. The facts about atrocities like the Fugitive Slave Laws and the resulting vicious Slave Catchers are compelling, moreso than in normal history books. A poignant device Whitehead uses is quoting of advertisements for runaway slaves at the start of each chapter: these contemporary descriptions of human chattel have always been an object lesson on the terrors of the institution of enslavement. Above all, what I found important in this book is that it's written entirely from the point of view of kidnapped Africans and their descendants.

The title of the book, The Underground Railroad, evokes a historic image, but in the novel, one does not find the famous Underground Railroad that existed before the Civil War which was a network of safe houses and secret routes known to “conductors” like Harriet Tubman and other infinitely brave heroes of American history. Whitehead’s novel creates a metaphoric version that paradoxically, is a literal railroad, with engines and freight cars that runs through underground tunnels to take escapees away from their enslavers. This concrete visualization of surreal underground tunnels and frightening engines contributes to the unreality of the whole historic nightmare. The Guardian review explained it this way: "Whitehead has taken that historical metaphor – the network of abolitionists who helped ferry slaves out of the south – and made it into a glistening, steampunk reality."

The New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani describes the book as “a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery.” The following quote from this review provides an insight about the variety and depth of the writing:

“One of the remarkable things about this novel is how Mr. Whitehead found an elastic voice that accommodates both brute realism and fablelike allegory, the plain-spoken and the poetic — a voice that enables him to convey the historical horrors of slavery with raw, shocking power. He conveys its emotional fallout: the fear, the humiliation, the loss of dignity and control. And he conveys the daily brutality of life on the plantation, where Cora is gang-raped, and where whippings (accompanied by scrubbings in pepper water to intensify the pain) are routine.” 

Whitehead also plays with history in various other ways, especially the way he portrays and exaggerates the extreme anti-black laws of North Carolina. The result of his counter-historical choices is to highlight the attitudes and evils of the enslavers; for example in his version of the town where the character Cora is hiding, a lynching occurs almost every day. 

Museums and historic houses that one visits may present the history (including slave cabins) of the Africans who did the work in the Old South, made their enslavers rich, and never received the profits, even for their distant descendants, even to this day. In the novel, a "museum" in the North Carolina town forced the hiding fugitives, including Cora, to play a role in very falsified narratives about the transport of Africans to the US and about their lives on the plantations. Cora was forced to enact a false image of slavery in this museum. Her thoughts as she looked out of the exhibit where she and other fugitives played the role of a boy on a slave ship or a woman servant:

"The stuffed coyotes on their stands did not lie, Cora supposed. And the anthills and the rocks told the truth of themselves. But the white exhibits contained as many inaccuracies and contradictions as Cora’s three habitats. There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers. The enterprising African boy whose fine leather boots she wore would have been chained belowdecks, swabbing his body in his own filth. Slave work was sometimes spinning thread, yes; most times it was not. No slave had ever keeled over dead at a spinning wheel or been butchered for a tangle. But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the white monsters on the other side of the exhibit at that very moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting. Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach." (p. 116). 

Compared to the imaginary museum where Cora is on display, the African American History Museum in Washington, which I visited last week seems to me to be sincerely honest and accurate, as well as historically broad and detailed. However real and accurate it is in conveying the injustices done to African Americans for 400 years, though, this museum  didn’t work on my emotional imagination the way that Whitehead’s narrative does. He forces me to perceive enslavement in its true raw and poisonous viciousness, and to portray those who owned other humans as something below humanity themselves.

Note: This is the first time I have read this prize-winning novel, and I have not seen the TV miniseries based on the book. I've read a couple of other books by Colson Whitehead and I'm looking forward to the upcoming publication of his new novel Crook Manifesto next July.

Review © 2023 mae sander