Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad. Fleet, 2017; 20161
This is not an easy read. The opening section portrays the brutal treatment of slaves on a Georgian cotton plantation. The two brothers who own it are, respectively, a deviant psychopath and a slightly less sadistic version of him.
Cora, the compellingly spirited protagonist, not surprisingly opts to escape from this living hell. The rest of the novel tells her story of terrifying pursuit, of finding temporary safe havens that turn out to be not so safe.
She’s helped in her flight by the brave network of abolitionists who helped fugitive slaves like Cora escape from their oppression. The metaphorical ‘underground railroad’ they composed is realised daringly here as a real subterranean system of railway tunnels, with steam locomotives spiriting away the fugitives.
It’s difficult to read some sections that relate the vicious cruelty of the slave-owning community who saw their position as a God-given right. Their epitome is Ridgeway, another psychopath who’s proud of his record as a gifted, ruthless slave-catcher. He sees his task as defending
the American spirit, the one that called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilise. And destroy that what needs to be destroyed. To lift up the lesser races. If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate. Our destiny by divine prescription – the American imperative.
In this respect the message of the novel resembles some aspects of that in Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, about which I wrote last time. While Stegner focused (among other things) on exposing the rapacity and duplicitousness of white pioneers in the pre-Civil War west, Whitehead unflinchingly portrays the supremacist hypocrisy and cruelty of those who saw it as their natural role to ‘subjugate’ and exploit what they saw as inferior beings – who didn’t even qualify as human in their eyes. This included the Native Americans, who they had systematically slaughtered or evicted from their homelands as part of their belief in manifest destiny. Now it’s the turn of the slaves kidnapped and transported from Africa to boost the economy of this not-so-brave New World.
Although I didn’t always find the railroad non-metaphor sat comfortably with the otherwise realist style of the rest of the novel, the overall effect was deeply moving, even disturbing.
As America moves into its second era in the modern age of ultra-nationalist/populist autocratic rule (now with added blatant plutocracy), with the new president’s views about DEI not a million miles away from those I just outlined above, I found this novel, in which decency and goodness ultimately outshine evil, a bright light in a world that seems increasingly dark and forbidding.