The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead Stacy Parker Le Melle (bio) Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.* When Cora, the protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad boarded an escape train in antebellum Georgia, fleeing the only landscape she’d ever known, the Black conductor turned around and said: “Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll see the true face of America” (69). At first, Cora saw darkness. So much darkness. Until they arrived at the first stop: South Carolina. The underground railroad representative who met them, a white man named Sam, assured them the following: “You’re a long way from Georgia. South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south. You’ll be safe until we can arrange the next leg of your trip.” And with that, Cora began her new life, and despite this exchange happening on page 91 of a 306 page narrative—meaning I should know better than to think this could mean happily ever after—I felt hope. I couldn’t help it. Perhaps it’s the seduction of the American dream, seducing again. A new place means hope and possibility. Until it doesn’t. On New Year’s Day 2017, at 3:30am, I finished Colson Whitehead’s gripping novel The Underground Railroad. I’d purchased the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner and Oprah Book Club selection over the previous summer but had put it down early, not ready to go back to plantation life after watching the harrowing first season of the WGN series Underground. Underground showed slavery’s horrors, but also honored the enslaved characters’ will to love and protect, their mighty sacrifices made to survive. The characters transcended fiction, felt like stand-ins for our ancestors. That’s why I stayed with the show. When I picked up Whitehead’s novel again, I found horror in every direction, but the insight—and magic—went deeper with his book-length storytelling. In The Underground Railroad, we follow a young enslaved woman named Cora as she makes her way northbound, each state its own “state of possibility.” She rides trains that are magically real—the tangible “underground railroad” had been the locus of early attention for the book. Yet her journey follows a cruel pattern: whenever she finds a haven, she finds the familiar suffering behind the façade. In South Carolina, her first exit off the underground railroad, she relishes a structured new life where she can work as a domestic, live in a dormitory, and go to school. This new life feels utopian, given the tortures of Georgia; the white people seem committed to “racial uplift” and creating communities where Blacks and whites could co-exist in peace. But the tilt begins. Cora is assigned a new job as a “type” in a natural history museum. She is kept on perpetual display as an African woman rotating between scenes of an African village, a slaveship, and an American plantation. At a doctor’s appointment she must rebuff the doctor’s offer of sterilization, and later her dorm proctor’s requests that [End Page 936] she talk-up sterilization with her peers. Soon she learns that the out-of-state white doctors who had deluged South Carolina’s new hospitals were running syphilis experiments on local Black men. Cora realizes she has made a horrible mistake: If they had been sensible and kept running, she and [fellow runaway] Caesar would be in the Free States. Why had they believed that two lowly slaves deserved the bounty of South Carolina. That a new life existed so close, just over the state line? It was still the south, and the devil had long nimble fingers. And then, after all the world had taught them, not to recognize chains when they were snapped to their wrists and ankles. The South Carolina chains were of new manufacture—the keys and tumblers marked by regional design— but accomplished the purpose of chains. They had not traveled very far at all. (145) As Cora’s story progresses, she travels through South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and ultimately “The...