"That was you up there even when it was not."
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
Colson Whitehead
The magic of speculative fiction is to graft flesh and bone and blood onto metaphor, to have the literary device exist in its own right and yet to operate in a full, thick-bodied reality. Metaphor is made of gears and pistons, spiriting the characters of a story, and its reader, from beginning to end. And it's this power that Colson Whitehead draws upon in his many-times-garlanded latest novel.
The subject that gives the book its title is the legendary mechanism, often spoken of with Harriet Tubman as its most prominent conductor, by which slaves were rescued from plantations and spirited onto free-soil. A network of freed blacks, runaways, and sympathetic whites, each element named for its coordinate parts: conductors, station agents, et cetera. Here, the Railroad is an actual rail line with actual trains running the rails, steel contraptions and occasionally behemoths driven by actual conductors. This, in and of itself, is a simple, perhaps even simplistic, concept, but the true genius in Whitehead's telling is how the journey of Cora, the protagonist, ferries the reader through the plight of black Americans from the pre-Civil War through to the present day, without ever leaving the era in which it is set.
Cora, born a woman and a slave and thus twice stricken by misfortune, ekes out an existence on the Randall plantation, and the brutalities, monstrous and grotesque and drenched in blood and malice, are spoken of, not with nonchalance, but with the resignation that belies their normalcy. Slaves castrated and hung with their genitals in their mouths, women impaled on spiked contraptions, slaveowners descending into impromptu birthday celebrations in the slave quarters to mete out horror like an Old Testament deity, all fury and no mercy. Joys are sparse and well-guarded by the plantation slaves, and one sees that docility is not something slaves are born with but something beaten into them. A slave suddenly stricken mad in the cotton field, a formerly glee-filled child arriving one day mute, his countenance absent of all mirth. A once jocular old-hand turned vicious taskmaster when some power and oversight over others is ceded to him. The peculiar institution is made manifest in the way it warps the body and spirit, in the scar a beating leaves on a temple, in the sorrow that kills a baby before it leaves its mother's womb.
The prose here is shorn of the lyrical pyrotechnics that occasionally burdened previous work. It's spare, the "showing" often reverting back to "telling". Cutting gore and viscera to a sentence or even a clause in a sentence isn't done here to spare the reader, it's done to make room for more of it.
Cora is a slave like the others, but there's rebellion in her blood, as revealed by the fact that her mother once absconded from the plantation when Cora was a child never to return, leaving her daughter behind. A fact for which Cora never forgave her mother. A new arrival to the plantation, Caesar, tells Cora of the Underground Railroad, and before long, their harrowing journey begins.
As persistent and relentless as a natural disaster is the slave catcher Ridgeway. The one paper note in a story filled with otherwise three-dimensional characters, it was that very Biblical inevitability that made him reminiscent of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, an avatar more than a living breathing piece of the scenery here. But perhaps more subtle, though just as immediate, are the dangers that Cora and Caesar come upon in each new state and each new world they alight upon.
In one, the ostensibly beneficent whites have embarked on a project of medical racism, and the sterilization of black women and the discourse on eugenics that for so long informed American scientific academia rumbles beneath the surface of what otherwise strikes one as Eden. In another place, lightning and subsequent fire have made a post-apocalypse of what was once a thriving farm community, and one could be mistaken for thinking it was the God of the revenge fantasy visiting eschatological justice on the race of owners for what they had done and were doing to the race of the owned. In yet another place, we see what a community looks like when blacks are expelled from it completely, present only to be lynched in gleefully macabre performance. Elsewhere, a black community thrives with satellite communities powered entirely by African American industry until white resentment visits upon them a facsimile of what befell the Greenwood community in 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma and what rained upon the Rosewood community in rural Levy County, Florida, a year and a half later.
In that respect, the book, though just over 300 pages, is scopic. So much of African American history is captured here, is rendered real in the very movement or migration of Cora and those she encounters.
Slave narratives run the risk sometimes of devolving into torture porn, but The Underground Railroad is a love letter. Not to America, whose genocidal and avaricious impulses are on full display here, but to that particular genre of Americans who weathered it. Who continue to weather it. And will persist in doing so when we can no more.
Colson Whitehead
The magic of speculative fiction is to graft flesh and bone and blood onto metaphor, to have the literary device exist in its own right and yet to operate in a full, thick-bodied reality. Metaphor is made of gears and pistons, spiriting the characters of a story, and its reader, from beginning to end. And it's this power that Colson Whitehead draws upon in his many-times-garlanded latest novel.
The subject that gives the book its title is the legendary mechanism, often spoken of with Harriet Tubman as its most prominent conductor, by which slaves were rescued from plantations and spirited onto free-soil. A network of freed blacks, runaways, and sympathetic whites, each element named for its coordinate parts: conductors, station agents, et cetera. Here, the Railroad is an actual rail line with actual trains running the rails, steel contraptions and occasionally behemoths driven by actual conductors. This, in and of itself, is a simple, perhaps even simplistic, concept, but the true genius in Whitehead's telling is how the journey of Cora, the protagonist, ferries the reader through the plight of black Americans from the pre-Civil War through to the present day, without ever leaving the era in which it is set.
Cora, born a woman and a slave and thus twice stricken by misfortune, ekes out an existence on the Randall plantation, and the brutalities, monstrous and grotesque and drenched in blood and malice, are spoken of, not with nonchalance, but with the resignation that belies their normalcy. Slaves castrated and hung with their genitals in their mouths, women impaled on spiked contraptions, slaveowners descending into impromptu birthday celebrations in the slave quarters to mete out horror like an Old Testament deity, all fury and no mercy. Joys are sparse and well-guarded by the plantation slaves, and one sees that docility is not something slaves are born with but something beaten into them. A slave suddenly stricken mad in the cotton field, a formerly glee-filled child arriving one day mute, his countenance absent of all mirth. A once jocular old-hand turned vicious taskmaster when some power and oversight over others is ceded to him. The peculiar institution is made manifest in the way it warps the body and spirit, in the scar a beating leaves on a temple, in the sorrow that kills a baby before it leaves its mother's womb.
The prose here is shorn of the lyrical pyrotechnics that occasionally burdened previous work. It's spare, the "showing" often reverting back to "telling". Cutting gore and viscera to a sentence or even a clause in a sentence isn't done here to spare the reader, it's done to make room for more of it.
Cora is a slave like the others, but there's rebellion in her blood, as revealed by the fact that her mother once absconded from the plantation when Cora was a child never to return, leaving her daughter behind. A fact for which Cora never forgave her mother. A new arrival to the plantation, Caesar, tells Cora of the Underground Railroad, and before long, their harrowing journey begins.
As persistent and relentless as a natural disaster is the slave catcher Ridgeway. The one paper note in a story filled with otherwise three-dimensional characters, it was that very Biblical inevitability that made him reminiscent of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, an avatar more than a living breathing piece of the scenery here. But perhaps more subtle, though just as immediate, are the dangers that Cora and Caesar come upon in each new state and each new world they alight upon.
In one, the ostensibly beneficent whites have embarked on a project of medical racism, and the sterilization of black women and the discourse on eugenics that for so long informed American scientific academia rumbles beneath the surface of what otherwise strikes one as Eden. In another place, lightning and subsequent fire have made a post-apocalypse of what was once a thriving farm community, and one could be mistaken for thinking it was the God of the revenge fantasy visiting eschatological justice on the race of owners for what they had done and were doing to the race of the owned. In yet another place, we see what a community looks like when blacks are expelled from it completely, present only to be lynched in gleefully macabre performance. Elsewhere, a black community thrives with satellite communities powered entirely by African American industry until white resentment visits upon them a facsimile of what befell the Greenwood community in 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma and what rained upon the Rosewood community in rural Levy County, Florida, a year and a half later.
In that respect, the book, though just over 300 pages, is scopic. So much of African American history is captured here, is rendered real in the very movement or migration of Cora and those she encounters.
Slave narratives run the risk sometimes of devolving into torture porn, but The Underground Railroad is a love letter. Not to America, whose genocidal and avaricious impulses are on full display here, but to that particular genre of Americans who weathered it. Who continue to weather it. And will persist in doing so when we can no more.