The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

Our April meeting was held at Saran’s house, with Joan, Linda, Mary, Paige, Margie, Libby, and Sheri joining the discussion.

This is a book rich with intertwined stories – a story about cruelty and greed, a story about betrayal, a story of animosity born of trauma and fear, a story of fact mixed with fiction, a story of courage, a stark critique on white supremacy, an ode to freedom, ultimately the story of our history.

Each of us gravitated to one of these stories, or maybe to a few, but struggled to put them all together to accompany Cora on her jagged road to …well…freedom, one hopes. A few got stuck with the brutality, which was so real and relentless that they could not finish the book. Linda repeatedly turned to the horrors of white supremacy, and her shame. Libby and I were compelled by Cora’s ever-evolving sense of freedom and of her self. We were all fascinated by Cora. Already at 15 years old, she was an outcast among slaves, abandoned by her mother, ‘seasoned’ by other slaves, beaten repeatedly, but had a spark that allows her to take the first step toward freedom and the courage or stubbornness to keep going in the face of shifting odds. Cora keeps getting up and traveling on even though she never knows what new atrocities or fears await her.

The story is a journey, both real and emotional. Cora travels from one state to the next, encountering new variations on white domination and privilege. It was hard for us to appreciate the story as a continuum because we were so flabbergasted by each of these variations. Syphilis experiments and forced sterilizations in the mid 1860s? That was Annie’s stopping point. Weekly public celebrations of lynchings? I found Cora to be a new person at each stop, and these discoveries propelled me through the book. Whitehead allows Cora to gain ‘agency’ with each step. She grows in confidence – in South Carolina, becoming comfortable with white authority and challenging it; it North Carolina, realizing she is less fearful and therefore more free than the town’s citizens; and in Tennessee, where Cora first realizes the indifference of fate and is also able to challenge Ridgeway. She blossomed in the freedom of the Valentine farm, but that too was betrayed. By that time I was confident that she would survive. Perhaps this was the fictitious part though, and I was more deluded than others in our group.

Fear pervades the book. Slaves fear punishment and death; their masters fear reprisal from a burgeoning slave population. Fear festers among whites, among blacks, among whites of blacks, and among blacks of whites. Against this backdrop of fear, what is freedom? Cora asks this question when sequestered in Martin and Ethel’s attic, where she is ‘free’ but in a living prison. Had she escaped bondage in that attic or become more entwined by it? I found this another profound change in Cora – her realization that being free had nothing to do with chains or space; it shifted as she examined and experienced it. It was the townspeople who were prisoners, perhaps more than she was. She could see them as shackled to fear, terrified of watchful eyes, huddled together to ward off diffuse dangers, hoping that numbers would forestall demons. Better to hide in attics than to confront what lurks behind the faces of neighbors, ‘friends,’ family. We didn’t spent much time talking about these questions although they remain pertinent today.

How much of Whitehead’s book is fact, and how much fiction? We discussed this quite a bit. Whitehead said, in an interview, that he stuck to the truth if not the facts. He obtained important facts – on plantation culture, daily life, relationships among slaves and between slaves and their owners - from reading extensive interviews of former slaves that were written in the 1930s. He used actual run-away slave notices because he could not compete with the language in those notices. So there is a lot of fact mixed in with his fiction.

Could specific acts of brutality really have occurred? Were the Randalls caricatures of brutal plantation owners? We found it easier to consider these as fiction. Was the Freedom Trail fiction? We wanted, collectively, to think so because the vision is so awful. Bryan Stevenson, the force behind the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, reminds us that the people who carried out this violence – the night riders, slave catchers, plantation owners – wanted to advertise their brutality. “They actually lifted up the bodies because they wanted to terrorize. They wanted the entire community to see it.” They displayed the lynchings and distributed flesh torn from the body as souvenirs. This is unbearably gruesome, but it is real.  We clung, in our discussion, to fiction in order to face the horrors. But we know that what really happened was much worse than what Whitehead wrote.

The book received lots of attention for Whitehead’s reliance of a real railroad, with stations and station masters and schedules. This underground railroad is presented as an allegory, but the actual ‘railroad’ was very similar. It was constructed with untold hours of work by untold number of individuals, maintained at tremendous risk, ‘stations’ were closed down, routes were altered, passengers hid away, and they emerged to unknown places for unknown periods of time. A very powerful section at the end of the book describes Cora escaping from Ridgeway for the last time, we hope, and using a handcar to propel herself mile after dark mile, putting the past behind her and emerging who knows where? Three wagons appear. The two driven by whites pass her by. The last, driven by a black man, stops, provides food, and takes her on to the next stop. Another kindness, another gain, another segment in a long journey.

Whitehead chose a female protagonist, and among our group, Cora engendered such sympathy that some of us couldn’t read about her while others of us couldn’t stop. He wanted to explore how an individual who knows only tragedy of the plantation finds it in herself to take the first step and – once taken –to keep moving forward on a trip that might take years. The threat of being caught does not diminish, and neither does the need to rely on strangers. What sustains her? We didn’t talk much about this although it was, for me, the main story. Would this book have been different, and easier to read, had the protagonist been male? Would it have been as effective? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. By the time she reached Tennessee, Cora had changed remarkably.  Chains no longer fastened her character or action; her skin was black and she was treated as the world treated blacks. No more, no less. And she could look Ridgeway right in the eye and question him.

Many relate this book to the recent recurrence of racial strife in the US. It is hard not to recognize fear in police shootings of unarmed black men and, in turn, fear and hatred in the responses from the African American community. When asked about these relationships Whitehead notes that we make very slow progress as individuals and communities on issues as difficult as these. Short periods of dissent and discussion are followed by long periods of silence and inaction. We talked about slavery and domination as pervasive throughout human history. Whether fact or fiction, Whitehead’s book reminds us of the price that silence pays.