The Underground Railroad

Note: This contains spoilers for the first half of the book. I was surprised by some of the developments, which was enjoyable and fun! So I'd recommend reading the book first.

I’m about halfway through The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which recently won the Pullitzer Prize and basically has been the most critically acclaimed book that came out in 2016. It’s also our next book for my book club, which I’ll be missing since I’m going to my 5-year college reunion, but wanted to read the book for anyway. So far the book is pretty interesting. It’s going to be adapted into a miniseries by Barry Jenkins (who made Moonlight) and the choice to make it a tv show makes complete sense. The structure is episodic: the main character, Cora, travels from state to state on the Underground Railroad, and lives there a few months, discovering what’s going on in each place she visits.

This is where the central conceit of the book steps in: the US states that Cora travels through are not the historical US states, but mirror-universe versions that reflect the ways white people have tried to control black people in the US. This setting is revealed slowly. The first segment takes place in Georgia on the plantation where Cora is a slave. I’m not an expert on historical accuracy in how slavery is portrayed, but the portrayal is within the range of slavery narratives I’ve seen. The plantation is extremely violent — runaways are publicly tortured before being killed. This sets up the themes the book uses in terms of white control of black bodies and also the ideas it draws from horror; the plantation owner is sadistic and comes up with different creative ways to make recaptured runaways suffer. The first sign that Cora isn’t quite living in our world is when she escapes and gets taken to the underground railroad, which in the novel has recently extended a spur into the deep south. Here it is revealed that ‘underground railroad’ is not a metaphor: actual tunnels underground linking stations throughout the south have been built, and Cora escapes Georgia on a one-wagon train.

The train is an element of alternate reality and anachronism (I think the technology described, e.g. ventilation for a steam engine underground, would not be realistic for the 1840s-1850s), but it could fit in as an add-on to a realistic historical narrative: all along there was a hidden train conveying slaves from the deep south to freedom in the north. It’s when Cora arrives in South Carolina, however, that the novel reveals its true mode. The South Carolina in the book comes straight out of early 20th century progressivism and organization theory: workers (here slaves purchased by the government) are assigned to the jobs that fit them best and treated well, factories operate on assembly-line principles, and doctors examine and treat everyone, all the while controlling fertility for selective breeding of the black population. In terms of a historical setting contemporary with slavery, this is wholly anachronistic (the city is centered on a 12 story skyscraper serviced by an elevator, neither of which would have been invented yet, and the industrial efficiency paradigm would have been wholly foreign to the agricultural south at the very least). But the purpose of the book is not to be historical fiction. Both the book’s South Carolina, where efficiency and comfort are used to lull the black population into being victims of scientific experimentation (in addition to the use to sterilization to control for desired traits in the black population, this section also features a syphilis experiment reminiscent of Tuskegee), and in it’s North Carolina, where the white population has decided the solution is to expel its black population and now publicly kills and displays any black people found in the state, represent ways in which white americans have tried to control and repress black americans. The book presents chattel slavery (Georgia), technocratic scientific racism (South Carolina), and outright eliminationism (North Carolina) side by side as different facets of American institutional racist violence.

This violence is so far particularly focused on the black body. The Georgia and North Carolina sections of the book feature gruesome torture methods inflicted on slaves and freemen who violate the laws and customs imposed on them by the white authorities. The white characters who are not involved in the underground railroad relish this violence. In South Carolina, the violence is clinical instead of gruesome. All the black workers are subjected to regular medical exams. These are supposed to help them, but some of the men are being injected with syphilis, while most of the women are pressured to undergo sterilization so that the government can do population control. There is even an interlude set in Boston where a medical student goes hunting for bodies to dissect and specifically targets black cemetaries; even after death the black bodies belong to the whites. All these measures taken to control black people and their bodies are framed in the novel as ways to protect white bodies. The white characters voice the classic white supremacist fears of black people raping and killing them. Cora is specifically pursued because she killed a white boy during her escape. In the Boston segment, the city has cracked down on grave-robbing of white cadavers following a moral panic, making only the black ones available. The novel takes all these undercurrents of American society and  luridly makes them literal.

In doing so, the novel uses some literary techniques out of horror fiction. Cora is like a horror heroine trapped in slavery who has to escape but finds the slave catcher pursuing her at every turn. When she thinks she is safe — as in South Carolina — there is a sinister conspiracy lurking under the surface. I’d be interested if someone has written a comparison of this book and the movie Get Out, which from what I’ve read also makes literal the horror aspects of American racism. The use of different states as different episodes lets Whitehead use different types of storytelling — the North Carolina section has aspects of ‘The Lottery,’ where the whole village comes together for a public lynching — as well as ways that both legal and extra-legal violence participates in this horror.

So far I’m only halfway through, so we’ll see what the other parts of the US are like. The remaining segments are called ‘Tennessee,’ ‘Indiana,’ and ‘The North.’ I do think that Whitehead is (understandably) very excited by his worldbuilding, which means that he does spend a lot of time explaining it to us. The book doesn’t leave much of the subtext implied rather than explained. For example, in the South Carolina section, Cora is happy and thinks everything is fine until BOOM it’s revealed they’re all medical subjects and then Cora narrates how awful that is. Cora in general learns a lot of the customs of the places she visits in explanations and then narrates others to us. So I think the book could have been more reticent with the details and left more to subtext. But overall so far it’s very inventive and I am continually anxious about what horrors await Cora next.