The Underground Railroad

I know I am late to the party in reading The Underground Railroad! I wanted to let some of the hype fade in the hope of not being overly influenced and then disappointed. I think my scheme worked - I certainly did enjoy the novel.

I hadn't previously realised the nuances of various American states attitudes and laws concerning slavery and black people's place in society. Whitehead's device of Cora journeying to a number of different states allowed me to see far more than the South=slavery, North=freedom divide that I had imagined from previous Civil War novels I have read. I was impressed by his research and the authenticity of the locations and scenes described. As historifical fiction, The Underground Railroad does a fantastic job of bringing this era of American history to life.

I wasn't convinced at first by the imagining of the Railroad itself as a real railway network. However as the novel progressed I could appreciate the idea more and felt that it did fit well within the story. My only lasting gripe is that I didn't think Cora was a real a person as she needed to be. Surrounding characters were more strongly defined and, for me, Cora often felt like a shadow or a space than a genuine woman living through these experiences. We are told a lot about her thoughts and aspirations, but I thought the woman herself was kept too distant and aloof.

Overall though, The Underground Railroad was an interesting and very readable novel. It depicts a place and time I thought I knew, but in such a new way that I realised there is still a lot more to learn. Well derserving of its hype!

The Underground Railroad is an allegorical story that mixes the surreal with the real to create a powerful novel that highlights the struggles of the black people against slavery, against fear, against dehumanization.

Cora is a determined enslaved young woman on a plantation in Georgia, in the 1880s. She attempts to escape slavery using the underground railroad that transports fugitive slaves to freedom. Cora, as all fugitives before and after her, is transported in the darkness of the underground railroad, and from one station to the next. There is no final destination, no certainty, no safety, no promise to freedom.

As Cora travels through tunnels from place to place, we travel with her. We see all the horrible things, the grotesque brutality, and the atrocities committed against black slaves. The commodification of human beings, the effort to control the black population growth with forced sterilization of females and infection of males with syphilis – a reference to North Carolina’s eugenics program and the notorious Tuskegee experiments, almost a century later.

“Every state is different …… Each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things. Moving through them, you’ll see the breadth of the country before you reach your final stop.”

Cora finally arrives in the black community in Valentine’s farm, a place of refuge, a safe “pocket of blackness” in a hostile white world. But safety is an illusion. The farm is a utopia, a delusion. It does not last. It’s only a brief distraction from ruthless mechanisms of the world. At the end, each person is “on their own, as they ever had been.”

This is a book that makes you think about what humans being are capable of. It is not just a book about slavery, but about all kinds of oppression. It is a book about American history and about race. It is upsetting and intense, full of a mixture of despair and hope.

“Every state is different. Each one a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things. Moving through them, you’ll see the breadth of your country before your final stop.”

So says Lumbley, a station agent, to Cora and Caesar just before they board their first train on the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad, in Colson Whitehead’s vividly imagined world, is real. There are tracks, trains and hidden stations in underground tunnels.

Strangely, not much attention is paid to the underground railroad itself. It’s tunnels remain a mystery, dark and unseen, their construction an enigma. They are largely a way to convey Cora from one state to the next. Lumbley remains true to his word: each state is a possibility. Each state represents a different answer to the questions that slavery posed (and still poses) for the American people.

As Cora explores each of these states, she moves step by step away from the slavery into which she was born, facing disillusionment and hope, encountering enemies and friends and getting more of a sense of herself and the country in which she lives. In one sense, Cora could be seen as an actor in a “living museum” (and this is actually one of the jobs she takes on during her journeys), stage managed by Coulson. While Coulson cheekily admits to this, he also invests Cora with enough character and sense of herself to make genuinely compelling.

Other characters in the book would be little more than actors in a living museum if it were not for the interstitial chapters that explore these characters’ history and motivations. These chapters flesh out the characters and involve the reader in more than just an exploration of ideas and ideologies. The Underground Railroad the book is much more human than other books that set out to explore a set of ideas. It places those ideas firmly in the context of what it means to be human; what it means to be an individual with hopes and dreams.

Nevertheless, the ideas represented here have never been more important. The Underground Railroad is a Gulliver’s Travels not only of the antebellum American South but also for our times. The ideas explored in many of the states that Cora visits unfortunately still have currency with the rise of the alt-right in the United States. This is a book that should be widely read and discussed in order to counter not only ideologies of hate, but also to counter the way those ideologies can easily become the norm: the way they can become a part of our everyday, supported without question or reinforced by fear. It is also an exploration of what can happen if we manage to resist those ideologies, and exactly what resistance entails: perseverance, sacrifice and a firm belief in our shared humanity. I would personally love to see this book taught in every high school in America.