The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

This is my official choice for Black History Month this year.

Here is the list of Black History Month selections since I started this blog, and also some related books:

2011:    50 Years and Other Poems by James Weldon Johnson

2012:    Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

2013:    The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois

2014:     Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

2015:     Kindred by Octavia Butler

2016:    Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

2017:    Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South

    And

    Black Boy (American Hunger) by Richard Wright

2018:    Poems 1921-1930 by Langston Hughes

2019:     Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

       

Other notable books by African American or African authors:

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Poems by Phillis Wheatley

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

I Greet The Dawn (Poems) by Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh by Daina Ramey Berry

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

The Honor Code by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 

White Rage by Carol Anderson

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Brian Mealer

Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

Books on Black History by other authors:

Red Tails, Black Wings by John B. Holway

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Ragtime (the Musical)

The Slaves’ War by Andrew Ward

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Vol.1 by M. T. Anderson

Devil In The Grove by Gilbert King

Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith

***

I first read about Colson Whitehead back in 2016, when The Underground Railroad was published - and won the Pulitzer. I didn’t read it then, because it was quite popular, and thus the library wait list was pretty long. Instead, I grabbed an audiobook of Zone One, best described as a literary fiction meets the zombie apocalypse. It was a bit out of my usual reading zone, but quite thoughtful, so I added Whitehead to my regular read list. That it has taken me more than three years to read him again is sad, although it isn’t for lack of trying. I nominated different books of his for our book club, but they never got enough votes to be chosen. Oh well. 

The Underground Railroad also defies expectations. On the one hand, it is fantastical: the Underground Railroad is re-envisioned as a literal railroad, with underground tunnels and trains. Kind of like a subway at continental scale. (This leads to one of the most hilarious lines in the book, from one of the station operators: “If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.”) 

Add to this a symbolic character: the slavecatcher Ridgeway, who is kind of a less appealing Javert, and that pretty much sums up the fantastical elements. There are other parts that I think can be seen as metaphorical - indeed, the whole book is a synecdoche. But much of the book is at least on the surface quite realistic. 

To be sure, Whitehead does not pull punches in showing the brutality of slavery and white supremacy. The book is in sections devoted to certain states, each of which has its own flavor - and expression of racial violence. It starts on the plantation in Georgia, which is pretty much a typical plantation narrative. (There are plenty of sad connections between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Kindred.) From there, once the protagonist, Cora, escapes on the Railroad, the scene shifts to South Carolina, where a “model” town of free negroes is revealed to be the center of medical experimentation and involuntary sterilizations. North Carolina (in this telling) has decided to attempt to end slavery by outlawing (and exterminating) its negro population, and replacing them with Irish and German immigrants. (While this didn’t happen on a statewide scale, and mass deportation was usually preferred to genocide, this idea was shockingly popular in white intellectual circles at the time.) Tennessee has become a fire and plague ravaged wasteland. Indiana, formerly a slave state, now a free state, expresses its violence by proto-Jim Crow and pogroms against free African-American communities which become “too successful.” 

Against this background, Whitehead tells of Cora, a teenage who escapes. But she is believably human - in fact, she just wants to live her life as a human, free from disrespect and violence. Which is pretty much what we all want, isn’t it? At least the decent people among us? 

The problem, of course, is that the United States still has a system of white supremacy that expresses itself in violence when threatened. (See, for example, our ongoing problem with police brutality, and our vicious approach to immigration from Latin America.) I think the strongest element of this book is the way that Whitehead demonstrates the way that slavery, white supremacy, and racism function as a system which brutalizes everyone. It destroys everyone, and makes the nation as a whole far less strong and functional than it should be. Even those who “benefit” from the system are degraded and spiritually violated. And those who fight the system fare badly almost across the board. It is easy to forget just how much those who worked the real-life Underground Railroad risked - and how many paid the ultimate price. 

Colson Whitehead’s style tends to be ironic and more than a bit snarky. This book isn’t quite that way, because of the topic. There are certainly moments which seem satirical, and there is enough of the combination of cynicism and determination to survive to make it recognizable as a Whitehead book. I also found a certain similarity between this one and Zone One. After all, the protagonist is on the run from an overwhelming menace, and finds ways to survive. And the ending is equally ambiguous. The book ends, but the journey doesn’t. 

As usual, I have to quote a few lines that were outstanding. First is this one, about the first white man working on the Railroad that Cora encounters, a man named Fletcher who offers Cora’s fellow slave Caesar a ride.

He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them.

That’s a classic Whitehead observation, ironic, snarky, and uncomfortably true. Another is essentially Ridgeway’s observation about the white immigrants and their future role in America. 

The possibilities lay before these pilgrims like a banquet, and they’d been so hungry their whole lives. They’d never seen the likes of this, but they’d leave their mark on this new land, as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable racial logic. If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now. 

Here was the Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor - if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

Damn, that’s ugly, stated that way. But what else is the meaning of Manifest Destiny? What else is the meaning of the “peculiar institution”? And, although my ancestors didn’t come to the US until the 1880s, didn’t we just assume it was our right to free stolen land through the Homestead Act? Didn’t we assume that we had the right to the benefits of a segregated society? Alas, that’s the case, from what I can tell listening to my ancestors. (And far too many of my extended family, sadly.) 

While slavery as it was no longer exists, the poisonous ideas linger. I was struck by what Valentine, the free farmer in Indiana who is concerned about white hostility and considering selling out and moving west, said about the problem. 

What we built here...there are too many white people who don’t want us to have it. Even if they didn’t suspect our alliance with the railroad. Look around. If they kill a slave for learning his letters, how do you think they feel about a library? We’re in a room brimming with ideas. Too many ideas for a colored man. Or woman. 

And years later, a woman born in freedom - a survivor of the destruction of the farm - comments in a similar vein. 

She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can’t control it, they destroy it.

This is a thread that runs through our history, as Carol Anderson details in White Rage. (Highly recommended.) This too is something I still hear on a regular basis. An acquaintance talked about moving out of California to a very white (and white supremacist) part of Idaho. “A better cultural climate” was the goal. Which is, well, code for...I don’t think I need to explain that. An older former neighbor said he was planning to move because “when I got here, it was all Americans, but now it’s Mexicans everywhere.” We live in a nice, middle class suburb/exburb filled with professionals and government workers. Cops, lawyers, doctors, teachers, firefighters. But yes, I guess there are a lot more successful non-whites in the neighborhood than there were 30 years ago. I find that rather nice, honestly, but a lot of whites apparently don’t. That makes me sad. 

And what is the destruction of the public sector but an example of the “we’d rather destroy it if we can’t control it and keep it away from brown people”? 

I also want to mention two interesting scenes. The first involves one of the several “character background” chapters disconnected from the main narrative. It is all about a corpse stealer - providing the medical schools with cadavers. I was reminded of a chapter in Stiff by Mary Roach. Like Roach, Whitehead notes that the advantage of stealing negro corpses is that nobody noticed or cared. Yet another example of the dehumanization inherent in racism.

The second scene is one with Ridgeway and his servant Homer. Ridgeway sees Homer being sold to pay a gambling debt, and buys him, then frees him. But Homer stays on. There is a hint later in the book that some suspect Homer of being Ridgeway’s lover, but Ridgeway has a rather simpler explanation:

“If he’s free, why don’t he go?”

“Where?” Ridgeway asked. “He’s seen enough to know a black boy has no future, free papers or no. Not in this country. Some disreputable character would snatch him and put him on the block lickety-split. With me, he can learn about the world. Find purpose.” 

And this, contrasted with Cora’s experiences, gets at the truth. It wasn’t enough to end slavery. It wasn’t enough to end official segregation. Equality requires true equality: political, social, and economic equality. And until that happens, we will never be a truly “free” country. 

Colson Whitehead is a fascinating author to me. His writing, as can be seen, has “unliterary” features like contractions and simple sentences. But it is also clearly literary, not boilerplate. It is accessible, but keeps you thinking long afterward. And that includes his zombie novel, which continues to haunt me. I have a few more of his books on my list, and it will be interesting to read them. Not one is in the same genre as another, which is unusual for an author. But so far, the themes in both of his books have some overlap. The survivor against the odds, an ironic detachment, piercing insights into reality, and a refusal to live in denialism of how America really works for people who lack racial privilege.