I live in Suriname and travel around West Africa and the Caribbean for work. When the Covid epidemic trapped me at home, I sat down to write a novel that had been gestating in the back of my mind for years, about marronage, or the escape from slavery. Suriname is home to the world’s largest Maroon population, descendants of original escapees who formed communities that have remained physically, culturally, and linguistically distinct from the rest of the country’s population.
During the years that I was merely thinking about writing the book, I’d buy new novels about escapees from slavery, or about people who made the crossing, and set them on my bookshelf, determined not to read them until after I’d written my own. Accordingly, I read several all at the same time in the weeks after I finished my first draft, in order to clear my mind before doing revisions.
My own novel is now making its way out to literary agents, but the release of Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of The Underground Railroad inspired me to put into writing my reflections on the literature I read between drafts. Don’t expect references to my own manuscript to pop up in the pieces, though; if some agent smiles on it, and then an editor does the same, then it can come out. For now, let’s talk about books that are in the public eye, starting with the Pulitzer Prize winning 2016 novel by Colson Whitehead that inspired Jenkins’ miniseries. A note for people fearful of spoilers: this book came out five years ago, and every single episode of the miniseries is now there to be seen.
Brit Bennett, whose first two excellent novels were still in front of her, put The Underground Railroad in the context of slave narratives. These stories, which at first were non-fiction books by formerly enslaved men — just as 80% of escapees from slavery were male, the vast majority of slave narratives were written by men, from the currently famous-in-English-Departments Olaudah Equiano to the famous-everywhere Frederick Douglass. These books were published before emancipation, often shepherded to the printer by abolitionists, and tended to follow a specific formula. Bennett summarizes the formula, which might be reproduced in list form as follows:
1. A person is born in bondage;
2. They have a cruel master;
3. They observe torture;
4. They struggle to obtain literacy;
5. They attempt to flee;
6. The attempt fails; and
7. They successfully escape.
Whitehead, a clever, playful, and intellectualist author, plays with this formula by adding recursion. Accordingly, his plot follows a longer trajectory, which (if the many instances of observed or learned-of torture are collapsed), runs as follows: 1–2–3–5 — 4–3–2–6–5 — 6–2–3–4–6 — 3–2–5 — 4–3–5–6 — 7.
Even more than the recursion, the most obvious change that Whitehead introduced to the slave narrative was the literalization of the Underground Railroad. In his book it is no metaphor for the path escapees take to freedom, aided by black and white allies, many of the former of whom had escaped plantations themselves. Instead, it is a railroad. A risk Whitehead takes here is that, in mechanizing the part of the escape that was mainly performed by black people, he risks whitewashing the entire operation, as black conductors are largely transformed from experts in the institutions and geographies of freedom and slavery to performers of comic relief between the relentless succession of traumas. I remember flying from Miami to Paramaribo in 2011, and seeing the check-in desks in the airport populated almost exclusively by black and Hispanic clerks. Eighteen months later, when I made the same trip, the people of color had all been replaced by ostensibly user-friendly computerized kiosks at which travelers raged impotently. The same mechanization happens when Whitehead literalizes his railroad.
While it is set entirely in the past, it would be wrong to read Railroad as a historical novel, and Whitehead has good reason for avoiding the fidelities of the genre. Since American emancipation in 1863–1865, the old purpose of the slave narrative, advancing the cause of abolition, has been absent. Whitehead’s novel is not about reminding readers of the toll slavery took on the enslaved (a task well accomplished by Toni Morrison’s unimprovable Beloved). Instead, it is about the accumulated burden of historical trauma which weighs on black Americans today. As such, Railroad, which steams forward through its plot while exposing its characters to all manner of trauma, does a lot of things that would be highly questionable if looked at through the lens of historical fiction, but which make sense when understood as a way of compressing centuries of pain into a single novel taking place over the course of a short span of time. By the end of the book, readers have seen and heard expressed much of the cruelty which never ceases to weigh, unspeakably, on black people today. Cora, Whitehead’s protagonist and Final Girl, ends up being an effective audience surrogate in this regard.
The first main section of the book lulls readers by being a fairly standard historical passage. The beats of the standard slavery narrative, especially in the first, plantation-bound act, are as drearily familiar as the chords to an overplayed Frank Sinatra tune (“‘My Way’? Really, you don’t say”). Thus, while the second Whitehead starts writing that Cora doesn’t think it’s a good idea to run away, there’s a risk that this often-played progression might go on for some time, the atmosphere he creates in the Hob when not ringing his slavery-narrative changes is so well-realized that there’s a sense he could have spun out a whole novel here. Furthermore, the fact that the minor characters of the first section are the only named ones whom the novel does not execute or sterilize en masse gives a certain retrospective poignancy to them, as they are stuck forever in the atrocities of antebellum slavery while Cora hurtles traumatically down the deadly tracks that ever-closer approach America’s present.
About those later executions: The Underground Railroad is, structurally, a cross between a picaresque novel and a horror thriller (hence Cora as its Final Girl). The episodic nature of the story enables Whitehead to investigate a variety of historical traumas, while literalizing the Underground Railroad and opening the second main section with a view of South Carolinian skyscrapers quickly acclimates readers to the fact that things that would be anachronisms or out of place in their world won’t be in Cora’s. In the standard picaresque novel, minor characters are drawn with a sufficiently broad brush, and their stories are left sufficiently self-contained, that the reader appreciates having met them, but doesn’t much pine for them when they’re gone. By contrast, Whitehead elects to invest the reader deeply in his minor characters and leave their stories sadly incomplete as the narrative moves past them. On a purely structural level, the book wouldn’t work if we didn’t find out sooner or later that they were dead — had they lived, the readers would want to know what happened to them (a reader might imagine Cora’s fellow-escapee Caesar winding up in Mexico, the Great Dismal Swamp, or New York: well, how did he do that, and what happened next? Only hearing of his early death prevents the book from ballooning into Pynchonian dimensions). Of course, in a novel with strong echoes of trauma, killing off vulnerable characters merely because their survival would be a distraction would be, by itself, a heinously inappropriate way to go about telling their story. But this is where the core theme of Railroad becomes key. The book is about the collective weight of historical trauma on today’s black Americans, for whom everyone like the novel’s minor characters are indeed dead. That is a core part of the trauma: people who tried to escape slavery are by now deceased whether they succeeded or failed. So are the victims of nineteenth-century Jim Crow, as are, of course, people who have died in mass shootings. Their deaths, either during their victimization or sometime thereafter, are part of the continuing horror of past trauma that weighs on people today. The fault for all this death lies not with the author’s choices, but rather with the society he is representing. America’s real murderousness necessitates (well, not necessitates: no one has to write a book in a particular way; but it fully and sadly justifies) the book’s development into a Final Girl horror show.
There are some weaknesses. Watching horror movies with Maroons here in Suriname means joining in and listening to the audience’s chorus about just how stupid Americans are: Americans (as they are represented in such movies) always go back to where the danger is. They want to see more, or they think the threat is over when it isn’t, or they are misguided as to their capacity to survive. They stick it out when they should run. Cora, having first survived slavery in Georgia and a near-miss escape to the first station on the Underground Railroad, does not become skittish or develop a wariness of staying in one place too long, because the novel wouldn’t get to show all the nation’s atrocity if she did. As readers beg in their heads for her to keep going, the plot requires her to stick around long enough for the next trauma to catch up with her. In the third main section, “North Carolina,” the closure of the local station and the dangers outside the house where she hides provides a solid external justification, though in other sections, the novel’s need for her to be overly sanguine about her safety overrides any impulse for her to have a reasonable reaction to stormclouds on the horizon (“people are receiving medical treatment from strangers in buildings separated from both the community and their families and sometimes never return — this resembles nothing that has ever portended good for anyone I’ve ever known, but my boss is nice, so I’ll just see how it goes and show up for my next appointment”). Yet this is a quibble. Whitehead succeeds by bringing genres together, and one of these genres requires characters to be blind to the dangers they could escape if they stuck to the plan (get as far from the American South as quickly as possible).
Other choices that the novel makes, choices that would be highly questionable in any other context, are astoundingly and despairingly well-justified. If another writer were to say, “Jim Crow wasn’t terrible enough — I’m going to mash it up with the Holocaust,” she’d probably be encouraged to woodshed her concept one more time. But here’s the thing: though Jim Crow’s terrors, state-sponsored, parastatal, and private, were spread over the course of a century, they all weigh together simultaneously on today’s America. The integration of a Holocaust-style timeline in “North Carolina” enables that collective weight to be actualized in Railroad over the course of a few weeks in Cora’s life. Similarly, the Tuskegee experiments, forced sterilization, and European human zoos were distributed widely over time and place, but contribute together to America’s current trauma burden. Putting them all together (with a little Never Let Me Go and Gaslight) in the “South Carolina” section illustrates the way in which traumas which actually spread out over the course of decades can weigh simultaneously on a person exposed to knowledge about them. If Whitehead had left his anachronistic mashups out in the name of synchronic accuracy, he wouldn’t have done as good a job illustrating the relationship between the present and all of what is past.
Part of the point of the book is that we wish for the moments of happiness to last, but America simply does not let such sustained positivity happen. The Underground Railroad is a great, ingeniously structured novel that will long be read and appreciated. The tragedy of the United States is that a novelist as supremely talented as Colson Whitehead, writing during the country’s first black presidency, was right in turning his unmatched skill not to writing about a nice multicultural town’s futurism, or a successful black settlement that remains unvictimized by mass shootings and other trauma, but to reproducing an excruciatingly numbing series of his homeland’s traumas in concentrated form. This American tragedy is the story that The Underground Railroad itself presents so aptly to its readers.
