Colson Whitehead Takes The Underground Railroad From Metaphor to Devastating Reality

The Underground Railroad, just named the latest Oprah’s Book Club selection, is a guided tour through the worst of American history. It makes brief detours to West Africa and aboard slave ships, but for the most part, it begins in the deep South, travels up to the Carolinas, and goes West to Indiana. Whitehead’s protagonist, Cora, initially escapes in the company of Caesar, a young man who is her equal in resilience and determination. Both have suffered. Both know they will suffer far more vividly if they are caught, especially since the man chasing them is a sadistic professional tracker named Ridgeway.
Although the flap copy compares The Underground Railroad to Gulliver’s Travels, Whitehead’s book reads more like the American answer to Les Misérables. Like Victor Hugo’s 19th-century epic, Railroad follows a survivor who wants nothing more revolutionary than her own freedom. She tries to escape a man who is relentless in his pursuit of her. Whitehead uses Cora’s story to indict a society built on the injustice of the idea that an entire population of people like Cora is somehow biologically, morally, and intellectually subhuman.
But while Hugo puts faith in, well, faith, embracing Christianity as a corrective to the meanness of man, Whitehead’s characters are not redeemed by religion. The cruelties visited upon characters like Fantine and Cosette pale in comparison to those Whitehead depicts. In many cases, those cruelties are even administered by people who consider themselves Christians, and think their actions are justified by the Good Book.
In this world, the average American is not innocent. The average American is complicit: in clearing the deep South of Native Americans via malice and massacre, and then in farming that stolen land using labor stolen from people who were, themselves, stolen from their own land across the sea.
Whitehead’s 19th-century America is a colder, more brutal place than even Hugo’s 19th-century France. But though the end result is bracing, it’s not overdone. It’s history, unwhitewashed, and that can be hard to take in, but Whitehead leavens his creation with a dash of hope, some humor, and just enough characters who aren’t sinister, callous, or bloodthirsty. Then he lets just enough of those characters survive.
Still, those characters, like Caesar and Cora, who live up to the royal nature of their names and whose fierceness and intelligence keep them going no matter what, are liable to break your heart. At one point, in South Carolina, Cora hears the word “optimism.”
Cora didn’t know what optimism meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.
This woman was born into the bleakest kind of bondage and was never taught that she deserved anything: not liberty, not the pursuit of happiness, not even her own life. But she stays hopeful, anyway. Keeps moving. Keeps trying.
Over his years as one of America’s most imaginative, capable authors of literary fiction, Whitehead has become known for writing stories that tweak the circumstances of everyday life. The worlds he describes are grounded in reality, but they grow in unexpected directions, toward elevator-related mysteries or zombies. In The Underground Railroad, the tweak is the railroad itself: instead of being a metaphor, it is an actual network of tracks running like a hidden subway from South to North and back again, serviced by a few devoted eccentrics who, even when threatened with torture and death, refuse to condone a status quo of slavery.
Because of those engineers, the reader cannot entirely despair, even of a society in which a weekly lynching is considered family fun. Like trains, Caesar and Cora may stall, but even in hellish darkness, they keep pushing forward, hoping that, at the next station, or the next, they may finally find freedom, or at least light.
The Underground Railroad is on sale now.