Going underground

"A ride for liberty: the fugitive slaves" by Eastman Johnson.
Online collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Public Domain.

Colson Whitehead's novel, The underground railroad is a chilling but compelling book following Cora, a woman born into slavery on a Georgia plantation. Abandoned by her mother, who runs away from the plantation, Cora is left alone to fend for herself in a brutal setting, where the cruelty of the slave-masters begets cruelty among the slaves. Cora however has never thought of running away until she meets Caesar, a fellow-slave, who by a piece of ill-luck or possibly negligence on the part of a former owner, should have been freed. Caesar sees a spark in Cora, and invites her to join him on a desperate flight to freedom.

Whitehead expertly undercuts all the "happy slaves on plantations" rubbish. Uncle Tom's Cabin may have been the book that was allegedly a catalyst for the American Civil War, but even that (perhaps because of the censorship of the times, perhaps because even Harriet Beecher Stowe didn't fully comprehend the situation) was nowhere near as brutal as this. The underground railroad is shocking in its intensity, its knowledge of what man can do to man.

Although the book is set roughly around 1850, Whitehead incorporates later racial abuses into the book too, for example, the shocking Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the use of sterilization of black men and women, allegedly for their own good, and the collaboration of some people within the northern states (which I had always believed were fully anti-slavery) in the capture and return of escaped slaves through the Fugitive Slave Act. Against these cruelties and abuses though, Whitehead also sets the genuine heroism of many ordinary people who attempt to end the abuse of slavery and set up new communities for runaway slaves. For a fascinating interview with the author, see here.

Besides the cruelty that is a constant throughout the novel, I was struck by the sadness of a slave's world. They could never depend on spending the rest of their life with their family. From the time they were enslaved to when they died in chains, they might never know what had happened to their children, to their parents, to their loved ones. And this is reflected in Cora's world, where she completely misjudges her own mother's actions.

It's an astoundingly dystopian world that Whitehead creates. All the more extraordinary for being in its essence historically true. You think that surely this can't be true, this can't have happened, how can people ever have behaved like this? How could they forget their humanity? How could they treat human beings as though they were "other"? There is a grim side to this when one character, a trainee doctor turned resurrectionist, muses wryly that a dead black man is as good as a white man to the body-snatchers, yet alive, they are a different being, not another kind of human but another type of animal.

The underground railroad has, quite rightly, won its share of prizes; most notably the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the 2016 National Book Award, and a selection for Oprah's Book Club. It's perhaps not too surprising that the dystopian elements earned this very unlikely novel a nomination for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction too.

Some of the narrative I found if not unconvincing, difficult to work out quite what was going on. Unlike the real underground railroad, which was largely a network of helpful people across the United States, a substantial part of this underground railway is a proper below the earth steam train, with platforms, cattle wagons and the occasional posh carriage. I wasn't always sure what was reality, and what was in Cora's mind. The ending especially left me confused, but perhaps that's fair enough. In a strange dystopian world, which is recognisably part of this earth, and yet adrift from the normal concepts of humanity, morality and  justice, it makes sense that the world should be confused drifting between normality both mentally and physically. And in writing like this, the reader too is drawn into the mental confusion of Cora's world.

The underground railroad is a stunning novel - stark, terrifying, upsetting, but also oddly uplifting. It may be mired in cruelty, but through Cora and her helpers, a light shines.