Colson Whitehead. The Underground Railroad. Fleet, 2017.
The Underground Railroad novel won a number of prizes when it came out. I had an opportunity to read it to see what it was all about.
The Underground Railroad starkly tells a story of slaves in the ante-bellum South. It focuses on Cora, a field worker on a Georgia cotton plantation who manages to escape her bonds. But even after she escapes there is a question if she is really free. It is profound on the symbolic level.
Cora lives on the cotton plantation where she was born. She lived with her mother Mabel who told her stories about her own life and the life of Cora’s grandmother who was sold into slavery from Africa. When Cora is eleven, Mabel escapes, leaving Cora behind. Few slaves make it to freedom in this novel. The patrollers and slave hunters almost seem to have a sixth sense, yet they will find it harder to make a living as time goes on.
Of Mabel there was no sign. No one had escaped the Randall plantation before. The fugitives were always clawed back, betrayed by friends, they misinterpreted the stars and ran deeper into the labyrinth of bondage. On their return they were abused mightily before being permitted to die and those they left behind were forced to observe the grisly increments of their demise. (48)
With her mother gone, Cora is now a “stray,” a black slave with no attachments. She lives in a barracks type cabin they call the Hob with other stray women slaves. She makes few friends. She is beaten badly when she tries to intercede for a boy who is being beaten by the master. When even the boy has nothing to do with her afterwards, she decides it is hard to trust anyone. After all, her own mother left her.
Still, one slave convinces her to come with him to flee north. Caesar is different from the other slaves. His parents were the only slaves owned by a Virginia widow. He was taught to read and write, and he learned a trade. He and his parents thought that eventually they would be freed, but the widow died without a will and he was sold to traders who in turn sold him to the plantation in Georgia.
One night they escape through the nearby swamp and manage to find a station on the Underground Railroad. Here the magical realism kicks in. Readers of Going After Cacciatto might recall the underground tunnels dug by the Viet Cong that go all the way to Paris. Similarly, the Underground Railroad in this story is a literal railroad dug under the earth and maintained by abolitionist stationmasters. No one is in charge, no one knows who dug the tunnels or provided the trains. In other words, its conception is a lot like the actual Underground Railroad. It worked because no one knew anything more than they had to.
The adventures in various ways reflect the black experience in the United States. Even when free, there are obstacles to overcome. The railroad drops Caesar and Cora off in an “enlightened” city in South Carolina where blacks live in dormitories, receive an education, and have decent paying jobs. They are also encouraged to be sterilized so that they can have more opportunities in the future. “This is just a chance for you to take control of your own destiny” (135).
The language they use is precisely that of today’s feminists and others who promote abortion—but, after all, Planned Parenthood began as a movement to keep undesirables and “racial defectives” from having children. So Cora realizes this “liberation” was simply a way of keeping blacks down:
“Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better” (139).
She also learns that some of the people the doctors are interviewing and studying are being infected with venereal disease—echoes of various experiments done selectively on blacks. When the railroad takes her to another spot, there are hangings and fear-mongering about Negroes. She manages to find freedom of sorts when she makes it North, but even there, in spite of private support and legal land ownership, things are stacked against her.
At one point we meet some black activists in a northern state who present different approaches to how free blacks should integrate or relate to the American culture at large. They in very general terms represent the positions of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois in the early Twentieth Century. Such positions change over time. When I was in college in the sixties and seventies, we all read Martin Luther King, Jr. A college student in the eighties told me that King was out—now everyone read Malcolm X. That was thirty years ago. But the King-X difference is not unlike that between Washington and DuBois. I wonder who they read in colleges now…
Going into more detail would give too much of the story away. We meet a few stationmasters—abolitionists in the South who do their best to help—but it is a struggle for them, too. We also meet some slave hunters, one in particular who at first is quite effective but gets caught up in his own evil. Sadly, no one repents. Starkly realistic, but there is a magical quality as well. There may be some hope at the end.
Because of the element of magical realism in the novel, the reader is tempted to compare The Underground Railroad to other books by African American authors, especially those using magical realism. It did not have the impact on this reader as Song of Solomon did. It does not have the beauty of The Known World. That perhaps is unfair because those two books are true gems. Song of Solomon led to Morrison’s Nobel Prize, after all.
The book I thought of was an earlier classic, namely, James Baldwin’s Another Country. The chief protagonist has spent a number of years in France and returns to America. The title is thematic. If a black man wants freedom, he must go to another country (as DuBois did). Cora is still searching.
While in no way pornographic, there are some sexual incidents and language that may not be everyone’s cup of tea.