THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD (2016)
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday, 320 pages
★★★★
The Underground
Railroad is an inventive work of fiction that blends elements of science
fiction, horror, fantasy, and appropriated history. Please note the words
"inventive" and "fiction." No one should read (or assign)
this novel as if Colson Whitehead has written historical fiction, that strange
hybrid genre that blends facts with invented dialogue and/or characters. His
intent, in fact, is often quite the opposite; he wants to de-romanticize the
way we think of the Underground Railroad by placing it outside of customary
historical interpretation.
Many Northerners in the post-slavery era wish to assuage
their consciences with the belief that their ancestors helped escaped slaves
make their way to freedom. Hundreds of strange niches in old houses have been
ahistorically labeled as hiding spots, though few of them actually were. Nor do
they wish to ask the question of why escaped slaves would need hide in a cubby in, say, Amherst, Massachusetts. Sure–various
fugitive slave laws meant there were slave catchers trying to reclaim human
property, but their very ability to do so in the "free" North
presupposes a social milieu in which many Northerners were in complicit in
turning in runaways and comfortable in their racist skins. Racism was the norm
in both North and South, and even many abolitionists assumed white
superiority.
Whitehead tells the story of Cora, a slave to a cruel
Georgia master. She's headstrong and a bit damaged from the fact that she was
left behind as a toddler when her own her mother ran away. Cesar, another
slave, eventually convinces her to seek out the Underground Railroad. Up to
this point, you could find parallels to Cora and Cesar in a history text, but it's
also here that Colson veers us towards metaphor and imagination. He depicts the
Underground Railroad as if it were a physical network of rails, steam
locomotives, conductors, stations, and transport cars–something akin to an
elaborate subway system crisscrossing the Deep South. It was no such thing. The
actual Underground Railroad operated almost entirely in North and not at all in
the Deep South–a runaway usually had to get north of the Mason-Dixon Line
before having a prayer of linking with it.
Whitehead asserts that Gulliver's
Travels was among his inspirations; he wanted to place Cora in different
places to emphasize to "reboot" (his word) the story upon each border
crossing. This makes things very interesting indeed. As a black writer, Whitehead's
avenue toward appropriating (re-appropriating?) history is to collapse time. It
is important that we see Cora's plight as a metaphor for a broader racist past
and present. Hers is not a personal story; Cora merely floats on a surging
river of cruelty, injustice, and inhumanity. Old Man River, if you will, keeps
rolling along, so why be constrained by chronological time when Truth is
unbound by clock or calendar?
The railroad first takes Cora and Cesar to South Carolina,
depicted as semi-enlightened on the surface. They live in a biracial, if not
entirely equal, community where they are surrounded by wonders and oddities: a
skyscraper, a living history museum and, ultimately, a nefarious eugenics
experiment. There were no skyscrapers until the 1880s–roughly 50 years after
the novel's setting. (Whitehead never pins down the date. Why would he?) But to
get back to the rivers of time notion, if Cora's job of play-acting a professional
black person in the Museum of Wonder's "Scenes from Darkest Africa"
and "Life on a Slave Ship" strikes you as implausible, check out depictions
of African Americans at the 1893 World's Fair, the real-life saga of Ota Benga, or mock slave sales at Colonial Williamsburg from the 1990s into this century.
Eugenics also developed later, but Whitehead sounds a futuristic bell to alert us
to horrors such as the 20th century Tuskegee syphilis
experiments.
Whitehead also messes with time when Cora reaches North Carolina–with
backward-looking echoes of white retribution after Nat Turner's Rebellion
(which was actually in Virginia) and nods to the future when lynching was
commonplace. North Carolina never outlawed black people as depicted in the
book, but Whitehead suggests dreams of doing occupied many white minds, hence
an avenue of butchered black corpses ironically labeled the "Freedom
Trial." (Is this also a subtle dig at self-righteous Boston?)
Similar weird twists occur as Cora makes her way to
Tennessee and then Indiana, all the way being pursued by Ridgeway, a relentless
slave catcher straight out The Fugitive.
Some of the things you read happened; others are metaphors. (The runaway slave
advertisements are real.) Like the role of Mann in the John Singleton film Rosewood, Whitehead mixes history and
fantasy because he wants to make a bigger point. Point made and taken, Mr.
Whitehead. I won't condescend and declare this book a masterpiece–anyone taking
as many chances as Whitehead is prone to a few head-scratching leaps of logic
(and tonal changes). So, not a perfect book, but an important one, and quite
possibly a work of genius.
Rob Weir
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