Street Roots • Jan. 6-12, 2017
Book Review
Page 12
A horrific journey to the bottom of our soul
BY ELLIOTT BRONSTEIN
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“The Underground
Railroad” by
Colson Whitehead
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
ie Underground Railroad is bigger
‘T £ than
its operators —' it’s all of you,
JL too.
to The small spurs, the big trunk
lines.”
Then Colson Whitehead was a child, he
thought the Underground Railroad was an
actual train that ran underground. Funny
how those childhood confusions stick
around. Decades later, the author of “The
Intuitionist” and a MacArthur Fellow
returned to that childhood fantasy to tell a
fable of life in hell.
There’s a once-upon-a-time quality to the
novel’s opening pages, as Whitehead guides
us through the initial back story of a woman
named Ajarry sold in Ouidah by Dahomeyan
raiders in the late 1800s. Soon — several
decades and a few pages later — we are deep
inside an American slave compound, a
timeless succession of miseries meted out
by white slave owners and the people who
work for them.
We meet 15-year-old Cora, the
granddaughter of Ajarry, daughter of Mabel,
who disappeared on a run for freedom when
Cora was 11. Now Cora is a stray, living in
the Hob, a shack for damaged women. More
unspeakable miseries, a morass of
depravity. And then when Cora is 15, she
makes a run for it, too, with a man named
m
young dream, actual locomotives and flat
cars rattle deep underground through
endless tunnels, tunnels pulsing northward
like arteries under the brown skin of the
American heartland.
The Underground Railroad that Cora
rides is only there to take her in the general
direction of a safe place that she and all
other travelers have to take on faith — since
no one ever returns to confirm it exists.
Whitehead makes us see and feel what it’s
like to be hunted and chased across an
unfamiliar country with few roads, no maps
and never knowing whom to trust — or
rather, knowing you can’t trust anyone.
And the stops and turns along her way
unfold like successive rooms in an open-air
House of Horrors. There’s no turning away
from the violence and the threat, the
tension of anticipated violence, like the
opening scene in Quentin Tarantino’s
“Inglourious Basterds” or Joe Pesci in
“Goodfellas.” There’s no turning away
because the horror is in every direction,
including the North.
What makes the novel work so well, what
keeps you reading, is Whitehead’s deft ,
characterization and heart-stopping
explanations. Listen to this:
“Round white faces like an endless field
of cotton bolls, all the same materials.”
“Sometimes a useful delusion is better
than a useless truth.”
travel s’from’CeorgSTfo1™
the Carolinas, from Tennessee to Indiana,
long nimble fingers.”
pursued by the implacable slave patroller,
“The other patrollers were boys and men
Ridgeway. Ridgeway pursues Cora to ease
of bad character; the work attracted a type.
his failure to snare Cora’s mother, who
In another country they would have been
vanished, possibly, into the North and
criminals, hut this was America.”
freedom.
Whitehead’s writing bubbles over with
The novel’s hook - the twist that makes
small, strong touches like these. His voice
anyone who hears it want to pick it up and
fills in a delicate detail to help you see the
start reading - is that in this parallel
Story as real, but at the same time
universe of the past, the Underground
reminding you that this is a made-up tale
Railroad is real: just like in Whitehead’s
written by a hardcore dude.
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And this:
“Unstoppable racial logic. If niggers were
supposed to have their freedom, they
wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was
supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still
be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to
take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now.
Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine
thread connecting all human endeavor if
you can keep it, it is yours. Your property,
slave or continent The American
imperative.”
Cora’s journey also takes her to a black-
run farm in rural Indiana, an isolated haven
from oppression, where she receives a
glimpse of what life could be like if
malevolence were not actively stalking
them. Here the newly assembled group
debates their age-old questions: to isolate
themselves as a community or to trust in
relations with the white townspeople.
You probably want to know what happens
next: Does the farm survive? Do Cora and
Caesar make it North? Is Cora’s mother,
Mabel, there to greet them? Does Ridgeway
earn the death he deserves? Is fictional
justice served? Gan we dream of a happy
ending?
Well, you know I can’t tell you that; you’ll
just have to take the trip yourself. And if
you’re white like me, be prepared to see
yourself as the villain of the story. On this
DarWTader. IfrlTO'MSSMt,"
we’re sieg heiling the Führer. It’s taken a
while, but many of us are finally starting to
comprehend the enormity of what happened
and what keeps happening in and beneath
this crazy land of ours. “The Underground
Railroad” has tracks and tunnels pretty
much everywhere now. We’d best get on
board.
Courtesy o f Street Roots sister paper Real
Change News, Seattle.
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