The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I see The Underground Railroad as a beautifully simple story of black people's attempts to escape from slavery to freedom. As much a fairy tale (in the original Grimm's Brothers sense) as a historical novel, its primary interest is to lead the reader through the experience of slaves born and bred to feed the economic machine of Southern agriculture, to bear witness to the brutality of their shortened lives as human farm implements, servants, or targets for sadism (sexual or otherwise), and to honor their struggles to live the self-evident truth that all people are created equal.

Cora, the protagonist, is the lens that refracts the spectrum of cruelties visited upon black people who dared (dare?) to reach for their own piece of the American dream of freedom. She is met with chains and prison bars at every turn - whether they are cloaked in the velvet of a South Carolina rooming house and the mirage of gainful employment (but help us convince your sisters that they are better off being unable to bear children) or are as unsparing as the North Carolina attic hidey hole where she is confined for months. By the time she arrives at a free black community in the Midwest, we may hope, but we cannot shake the certain knowledge that no Eden can long survive an America haunted by its original sin of black slavery and denial of African humanity.

We know this because we've met the white people of Cora's (and our) America: the few good men or women who stand against the inhumanity of slavery, the sadistic slaveowners and overseers, the bullies and thugs who find their calling in terrorizing all black people, slave or free, and make their living tracking down escaped slaves. Always behind them there is the mob, the crowd, the general public who are uninterested in the fate of black people, at best. At any time, with any provocation, or none at all, they will help to tie the rope or kick out the lynching ladder, or will simply watch, approvingly, as men, women, or children cease their struggle.

It is interesting that the phrase "good Germans" has come to connote those who remain silent in the face of manifest injustice and holocaust; for most of the first 200 years of America's experiment in democracy, being a "good American" was little different.

In these conditions, the miracle of Valentine's farm is even more exceptional, and it is telling that only there, near the end of the novel, that Cora begins to unseal her internal barricades to emotions like love and to be able to acknowledge and speak of her own past. Some reviews I've read criticize Whitehead because they felt he had not given the reader sufficient insight into Cora's inner life, or at least not enough for them to relate to her. Instead, I see Cora presented as a survivor, who, in that quest to obtain her own humanity, has carefully walled off and defended all approaches to her heart; to love, and sadness, and affection, and to joy. In the America of the 19th (and much of the 20th) century, such emotions were a weakness for white people to exploit, to feel them was cruel trick to be followed up by a more devastating blow. (And in truth, the only difference today is one of degree.) My heart ached for her, because I could see the terrible restraint she exercised over her own soul.

The Underground Railroad is a great story. You should read it. Like all great stories it uses fiction to tell us truths that are difficult to see looking if we only look at the facts and have no reason to venture beyond the confines of our own experience. Great stories like this give us the excuse to trick our minds into stepping outside the trap of what we already know, and provide us the excuse to see the universe through fresh eyes. To glance, however briefly, through Cora's eyes, is to understand your brother's and sister's worlds just a little bit better.

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