Sunday Morning! The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

About a quarter-century ago, when I was an unwashed undergraduate studying history in the faux-historical town of Williamsburg, Virginia, I completed an assignment for a primary research course in which I studied runaway slave postings from colonial era newspapers. These are the sort of ads that Colson Whitehead mimics throughout his novel The Underground Railroad, the latest book I have retrieved from the Little Free Library across the street.

I remember little about the assignment, but I do recall being struck by two things: there were a great number of runaway slaves (little surprise really); and many of the slaves listed could be distinguished by disfiguring scars and wounds, or missing appendages. Mythologists have sometimes liked to imagine American slavery to be something akin to indentured servitude, or even adoption into a wealthy family. But, of course, what was much worse about slavery was how the loss of liberty and the underlying system of violence intertwined and reinforced one another. A society that condones torture, in other words, eventually becomes a society that is held together only through torture.

Even now, it’s exceedingly difficult to make art or write fiction about America’s “original sin.” If the violence is too much in the foreground, the story can become a numbing litany of brutality; and yet, play too much into the audience’s desire for payback or comic relief, and you can wind up with a glib, adolescent power fantasy à la Django Unchained. What Whitehead does in The Underground Railroad is, therefore, really quite extraordinary. He essentially remixes the story of slavery and escape through a sort of Twilight Zone parabolic logic that never diminishes the viciousness and lunacy of the institution, but brings it into starker relief in the foreground.

Cora is a young slave who is reluctant to run, but almost destined to escape. Her grandmother was the first enslaved in her family and sold and resold several times. “When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention.” She eventually died on the Randall family’s farm, clinging to a small plot of land. Cora’s mother, Mabel, fled the farm, seemingly escaping to freedom and abandoning her daughter, something for which Cora has never forgiven her. She’s since been singled out on the farm as a potential troublemaker and thinks that escape would not be worth the risk. An act of violence changes her mind, though, and she flees with a newly-brought slave named Caesar. They make their way to meet up with the underground railroad.

It is here that the story first jumps the tracks of strict realism: the “underground railroad” in the novel is a literal construction, built as sturdily as possible deep within the earth by former slaves and their guardians, it rumbles in the darkness from one hidden station to another, and travels between states. And, indeed, the states, we will find, are as distinct from one another as islands: South Carolina sees itself as enlightened towards former slaves, while employing them in World’s Fair style museum displays and using them for medical experiments; North Carolina has tried to exterminate all Black persons in its territory; Tennessee has almost burned to the ground. There’s a sense in which they’re traveling in time as well as space on this mythical railroad.

And genre, for that matter. Perhaps the first quarter of the book is strict realism, but its form soon incorporates the steampunk and classic adventure genres. Whitehead has made the comparison to Gulliver’s Travels: each state is as distinct as the islands in Swift’s classic. This experimentation seems like it shouldn’t work with a subject as grim as slavery, but it actually allows the novel to touch on the full spectrum of racial hatred and white supremacy in American history.

Why does it work so well? Maybe this is a simple interpretive question. On the other hand, as someone who loves to write, and would dream of doing it half as well as Whitehead does, it’s really a matter of checking out the engine. The first thing we notice is the actual tone doesn’t fluctuate wildly throughout the novel; it never becomes glib or funny, or slips into satire. The evils of slavery aren’t whitewashed, nor are they confined to the plantations. The slave catcher, Andrew Ridgeway, a fascinating character who peruses Cora throughout the novel, sees very well how the plantation owners have been debased by the institution. But he also believes it to be part of what he calls “the American Spirit”:

to conquer and build and civilize. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription- the American imperative.

As we witness a full range of white responses to Black existence, it becomes clear that one thing uniting them is fear, particularly that former slaves will strike them down with great vengeance. The nation is haunted by the spectre of Black rage. It becomes clear that the country cannot function in any healthy way until slavery is abolished, and likely not for a long time afterward. While the novel hints at historical parallels, Whitehead trusts the reader to pick up on those parallels ourselves.

The novel is also expert at depicting the full range of individual experience. Cora is, at points, resolute, angry, scared, confused, shrewd, loving, bitter, hateful, lustful, and hopeful. She is a fully rounded human being, something the white supremacists would deny her, but a lesser writer would fail to depict. Ridgeway is a horrific creation, but it’s because he is so conflicted about his role in the system that he can be so cruel, and so deeply in denial about his cruelty at the same time.

But every character here is complicated and three-dimensional. Whitehead has a hell of a range; this is the fifth of his books that I’ve read, and they’ve varied from the coming-of-age summer picaresque of Sag Harbor to the heist novel thrills of Harlem Shuffle to the poetic city reverie of the Colossus of New York. It is striking, in an era in which lazier writers will talk about cribbing their descriptions of places and people from AI programs, how sincerely Whitehead loves to describe people, places, things, experiences, sights, smells, and the kaleidoscopic montage of reality. It might sound funny, but as a constant reader, it really is a joy to encounter a writer who actually loves to write, and takes loving care with their sentences.

It’s not a real scoop that this highly lauded novel is a triumph. But it’s nice to see someone rewriting that other creaky old institution: the novel.

So what are YOU diving into this weekend?