THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by COLSON WHITEHEAD Publisher: Doubleday, First Edition Published: 2016 ISBN13: 978-0385542364 ISBN-10: 0385542364 pp 320; Price: $15.41 Reviewed by: Olatoun Gabi-Williams The historic Underground Railroad of America which made legends of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass was not located underground nor was it a railroad. A loose organised network with no clear, defined routes, the word underground relays the secrecy of the network’s activities and the fear of exposure of slavesfleeing the hell of the confederate states. In his fictional interpretation of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead keeps faith with recorded history in important ways even pasting as visual propsand as prefaces to chapters, notices about runaway slaves with slave profiles and specifics about rewards for their capture. Rampaging the book’s pages are the hordes of feral patrollers and slave catchers he unleashes, their blood singing as they go nigger hunting. But Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel transforms the metaphorical into the concrete. So new and yet so logical. Here, an historic symbol has become a real underground railroad. Here, tracks have been made throughman-made tunnels burrowed far beneath the earth, connecting the states of America in what appears to be an endless maze leading to an unknown terminus. The tracks are plied by a succession – with interruptions - of steam powered trains: rusty, dilapidated box-cars without exception except once when a shining carriage appears -magically in the tunnel- to ferry the slaves onward, and to carry, in its attractive simplicity, a glimmer of a future of decency and of the kind of comforts they would never dare even to dream of. Whitehead overstretches Ridgeway. He forces his lord of the hunt to serve zealously not only as a functionary ofthe confederacy but additionally as a megaphone for racism. Ridgeway articulates highfalutin thoughts which are not only chilling, they are unrealistic coming from the mouth of a blacksmith’s son and a common if infamous slave-catcher. His speeches are even less realistic given the total lack of education of his audience, a runaway slave. She is Cora Randall, the story’s heroine in flight from a plantation in Georgia, one of the confederate states which show no mercy towards slaves who try to read. But if Ridgeway’s intellectualism is misplaced, caricatural, the beliefs he expresses were common currency amongst patriotic whites whose predation on the fear they inspire in the slaves furnishes more of the book’slandscape than the cotton fields in which the slaves labour. Ridgeway’s articles of faith are: the inherent inferiority of the black race; the inherent superiority of the white race and America as a beacon of light. Economic imperative – the booming cotton trade - and racist beliefs, combined to perpetuate the transatlantic trade of African men, women and children. Into one of his myriad, piercing sentences, the author inserts the idea that while Ridgeway’s blacksmith father made tools, the son grew up to retrieve them. This must be the greatest understatement of the kind of torture meted out to Africans in America in the four hundred year span oftheir enslavement and this novel stands proudly as a showcase of black people as tools to be bought, sold, swapped, discarded, degraded and destroyed. Critically, Colson Whitehead's book stands as a museum of what the total objectification of humans looks like when it is carried out by powerful and godless men out of control. Ifwith this novel the author successfully presents the extent of the damage done to the psyche of millions of slaves groaning under the yoke of slavery, he is masterful in his exposure of the total degradation of the souls of the slave-masters. Economic imperative additionallymeant that the population of Africans in America would explode and the author uses North Carolina as an exponent of the reactions of the white American under this kind of siege. Speaking for his people, one character boasts that by hiring poor German and Irish migrants to work for meagre wages in the cotton fields, they had not abolished slavery: what they were in fact doing was 'abolishing niggers' whom they expelled from North Carolina under new race laws rendering the slaves homeless, rendering them even easier targets of racial violence. But if chains, manacles, cat o’ nine tails, the gruesome iconography of slavery brand the novel’s terrain, the road to freedom from those horrors emerges as the story - as history - unfolds . These early days in the civil rights movement are bearing rich fruit with the operations of the Underground Railroad front and center. Anti-slavery meetings connected tothe UR take place with increasing frequency across the northern states. Long before he meets her, Royal, Cora’s saviour and lover, has been active in them using their secret codes. “I oil the pistons” he says about his work in the Underground Railroad. We hear the ground-swell of freedom from the music the fugitives are making in the dormitories of South Carolina, a progressive state: symphonies of sounds originating from the slave plantations they have flown. Freedom is palpable in the education programmes and rehabilitation measures for wounded spirits and broken souls. Colson Whitehead paints these efforts in poignant scenes. Round the table at the fugitive sanctuary of Valentine Farm, abolitionists debate the coloured question. Luminaries who visit the farm deliver rousing speeches that quicken the blood of the negro residents. In the mounting resentment of the farm's white neighbours, freedom for Africans in America is brewing. The whites who witness the flourishing and prospering of this negro outpost in the middle of Indiana, sense with growing fear, the rising of a black nation. Freedom will come with the rise of courageous and generous men and womenexemplified by: Cora whose lion heart, loving spirit and sufferings are the heart of this story; Royal, born free and destined to capture and bind the slave-catcher with his own chains; Elijah Lander the rich, brilliant mulatto who could have been anything, living in his own peculiar and privileged space, ‘happily rising alone’ but who chose to inspire his people with his words and to dedicate his life to making‘room for others’. Published in the UK by Fleet, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, The Underground Railroad is deceptively easy to digest on a first read. It took a second read for me to comprehend the grandeur of the novel which Colson Whitehead has written. On my second read, I discovered an epic poem constructed with a tiered magnificence that conjures the mountainous land out of which a multitude hands –black and white – have carved out and mapped out pathways to freedom. A multitude lives risked and often lost to free from oppression not only those who disembarked onto American shores fleeing poverty or persecution in Europe but those otherswho were brought (and bought) against their will, captives, human cargo on the Transatlantic slave trade route. The novel’s stature as a great parable dawned on me gradually, an unfolding revelation of ‘the real Great War’ proclaims a character in the book, the one ‘between blacks and whites’. In the brightening light of old andnew testament vision, I began to see in the tribulations of the slaves of America, the world’s age old struggles between order and disorder, mercy and hate, gratuitous cruelty, the discipline of kindness; courage and cowardice. The age old binary of victim and victor began to manifest as the story of humanity which Christians call His-story. At its heart stands the cross. Before it, the perpetual groaning of slavery. Through and beyond it, the Kingdom: the indestructible, glorious freedom of Easter morning. The racial division and injustices which drive Colson Whitehead’s historical fiction read like a clarion call to evaluate the progress the United States of America hasactually made in ‘making room for others’. What comes quickly to mind are the racial divisions which came hot on the heels of Donald Trump’s controversial victory in the presidential polls of 2016. Across the globe, witnesses described Trump’s success asa ‘white-lash’ - a reaction of white nationalists (whether or not they describe themselves as such) against the two term presidency of Barack Obama which preceded it. It is hard to forget Donald Trump at the helm of the Birther Movement which challenged the truth of President Obama’s American citizenship. Across the states of America, lifted high above motorways, the movement sponsored billboard after billboard making the humiliating demand that the sitting African-American president produce his birth certificate. Click here for full article