The Tropological Infrastructure of Colson Whitehead’s Black Midwest

Abstract

This essay reads Colson Whitehead’s novels John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and The Underground Railroad as articulating a frustration with foreclosed possibilities for Black Americans’ flourishing outside the North-South binary. His metafictions grapple with a paradox of historical representation: narrativizing the past requires subordinating its incomprehensible enormity to familiar forms, at once explaining and erasing significant details. Literalizing the Underground Railroad, restoring connections between moneyed patrimony and barbed wire as metonym for American economic biases, and showcasing railroads as sites of Black history’s erasure, Whitehead’s fictions depict infrastructure’s role in the disfranchisement of Black Americans. Highlighting mechanisms that transform land into a nation that works to efface Black history, and how tropes such as metaphor and metonymy inadvertently complement those processes, Whitehead’s poetics reminds his readers that the African American past literally surrounds all Americans every day, in objects and idioms that simultaneously manifest and obscure Black history.