Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad depicts the brutality of American slavery in a relentless, sometimes difficult to stomach, reproach of the peculiar institution. Whispers of uplift run throughout, however, as Whitehead balances the despondency of slavery with the indomitability of his heroine, Cora. The author has already received acclaim for this work - both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction - and the quality, tone, and singularity of the novel makes one wonder whether this work will be viewed by posterity as the standard for its kind.
The slave narrative is nothing new, of course, and Toni’s Morrison’s Beloved, comes readily to (my) mind (I can’t comment on 12 Years a Slave because I haven’t seen it). In the movie version of Morrison’s work, slavery is more or less a setting, and the characters in it aren’t battling slavery or particularly plagued by it; audiences are more or less aware of slavery as they would the rainy weather of a film made in the Pacific North West: it affects everybody but doesn’t demean and debase them in an overt way. Whether intended or not, Whitehead treats of slavery a way in which other authors treat characters. He depicts it as so depraved and caustic - eroding the worlds and characters of slave, freeman, master, slave-catcher, and abolitionist - that it appears as an uncredited antagonist, reminiscent of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings), a god-like and unseen villain who saps hero’s strength, and whose defeat is inconceivable.
Much of the treatment of slavery is so poignant because Whitehead has done his homework. Serious, academic treatments of slavery abound in bookstores, so one needn’t attend college to experience readable, award-winning testaments of slavery’s depravity. Rough Crossings and Slavery by Another Name, are only two among many accounts non-academics will find palpable. From my experience, history books, even the ones just mentioned, lucidly written as they are, take audiences to brink of feeling the weight of slavery must have had on its victims. Novels, by their very nature, get readers closer to the texture of characters’ lived experience, thrust, not up to the point of feeling what others felt, but allowing readers to actually feel what it must have been like. Whitehead’s narrative is both novel and history. The reliance upon historical research and breathtaking readability make for a riveting depiction of slavery, every bit worth its Pulitzer and National Book Award.
Given its accuracy, the book is bound to appall. Whitehead spares little by way of depicting slavery’s horrors, in a graphic, visceral and unrelenting manner. Its brutality, the spread of its tentacles; the corruption of the soul of slaveowners; the racism it cultivated inside both blacks and whites, are all on full, heartbreaking display. This reader found them difficult to bear, particularly the horror that awaited runaway slaves, carted back to their masters. The Underground Railroad exposes the peculiar institution, in all its life-draining capacity, in such a way as to appall, as it appalled during its day; and, Whitehead provides the closest we will come to entering the world of slavery for the black American, in all its humiliation, hopelessness and resignation.
On a side note: while reading, I recalled Eddie Murphy, in his stand-up, Delirious, making fun of a hypothetical, modern black man scoffing at the idea of being himself enslaved ("I wish I was a slave, I'd f*ck somebody up!") and, by extension, heaping ridicule on his enslaved ancestors. But once the whip cracks, Murphy points out, all bets are off. At the heart of the enslaved, as depicted by Whitehead, is the a resignation that the best one can hope for is to survive into the afterlife with as few rapes, beatings and mutilations as possible. There are other outcomes, but the risk of absconding to the north on the rumored underground railroad, being caught and brought back to face one's master, includes a violent and dehumanizing demise.
This is a fantastic work, but, like another account of egregious depravity, Åsne Seierstad’s, One of Us, it is at times nearly impossible to read. Several aspects of slave-life, as depicted by Whitehead, are either revolting or severely depressing. One in particular is that for slave women, rape is so common - be it at the hands of masters, master’s underlings, or fellow-slaves - that it approaches mundanity. Forced concubinage is a not a matter of whether, but of when and how long. The unwanted sexual advances slave women (in some many cases, children) must not only endure, but almost embrace, are plainly stated, as if to underscore their commonality.
The Underground Railroad is a human tale written about the sufferings of blacks, not a tale about which only blacks can relate; nor is it a tale about which only those-who-believe-they-would-have been-abolitionists can relate. The characters are so real, and the depth of their suffering so visceral, that no one with a sliver of a conscience could, if it were in her power, remain unmoved to provide all emotional and material aid at her disposal to alleviate the horrors of slavery, or denounce it today.
On a final note, Whitehead’s work stands as a condemnation of the trivialization of American slavery, which is no less regrettable than the trivialization of the systematic annihilation or degradation of any human being. Slavery in America is trivialized, or at least forgotten, than in the debate over the South's legitimacy as a Conferderation independent of the North, that is, independent of America. The other side of the coin of state’s rights and nostalgia for the Confederacy is the enslavement and at times, wholesale slaughter of life - a fact about which many a state’s rights proponent seem oddly aloof. Also, some authors subordinate slavery to a backdrop of a more important story, when slavery is so haunting and debased as to deserve a starring role, albeit as a villain.
Underground Railroad is a must-read worthy of its achievements.