The Underground Railroad

I can’t say I enjoyed this novel. Much like Holocaust fiction, you really can’t enjoy slave narratives (especially ones bent on exposing every cruelty imagined). But I didn’t dislike this novel either. Ripe with metaphor and reimagined horrors perpetuated against African Americans, it kept me interested with its strange mixture of fact and fiction.

Whitehead’s novel reconfirmed my childhood misconception that the underground railroad contained a real train that ran underground. The reader is conveyed through a network of dark tunnels and iron tracks, carried on rickety engines with strange conductors. We accompany Cora, the protagonist and runaway slave, whose fierce desire to run to freedom is awakened when the cruelties, both present and anticipated, of the Georgia plantation she is on become heavier than the fear of capture and torture. Early in her journey on the railroad, Cora is told that if she “look[s] outside while [she] speed[s] through, [she’ll] find the true face of America.” It doesn’t take a skilled English major to interpret this metaphor, which is repeated throughout the story. The only light Cora ever sees in the tunnel is when she comes to the end of it. What lies beneath, what’s in the heart of America, is only darkness.

This novel was bleak. Whitehead reminds the reader that even though slaves can escape, memory will never allow them to truly break the bonds of their past. The white people are generally depicted with an overinflated love for cruelty and barbarianism. Even the white people who help convey Cora to different stops on the railroad or hide her at their own peril are not shown in an advantageous light. I found his depiction of Ethel particularly degrading. “No one was spared, regardless of the shape of their dreams or the color of their skin” (216).

In one memorable scene, Cora is hired to work as an actor in a display for a Museum of Natural History. As she participates in this pantomime of the slave experience, Cora begins to rebel against the sneering faces that scowl and mock her by staring back at the crowd, “her eyes, unwavering and fierce,” (125) until the person she has chosen to give “the evil eye” turns away from her. “They always broke, the people, not expecting this weird attack, staggering back or looking at the floor or forcing their companions to pull them away. It was a fine lesson, Cora thought, to learn that the slave, the African in your midst, is looking at you, too” (126). Black history has been stolen by white narrators and Whitehead aims to take it back.

This novel was thought provoking and certainly worth reading, but Whitehead’s emphasis on violence often seemed indulgent, as though the only way to drive his point home was to make a spectacle of horror. The fact that this novel won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a testament to the current racial tensions in our country. While I didn’t agree with all of Whitehead’s racial conclusions, the truth of this statement is what I will take away from my reading:

“All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together” (286).

Find the book here: Amazon