Published in 2016, Colson Whitehead‘s The Underground Railroad is a very hot property: best seller, Oprah Book Club selection, and extraordinarily topical. It’s not quite a work of historical fiction, but it’s not far off: the novel traces the story of an African in the Americas as she moves from state to state, experiencing quite different forms of slavery and oppression in each.
These range from the well-worn horrors of a cotton plantation to a seemingly integrated town that is using its population of ex-slaves in various medical experiments to a state hell-bent on eliminating all dark-skinned people from its population entirely to what seems like an oasis, a commune of farms owned and maintained by free folk (whether formerly slaves or not). While these are identified as states, and while they do follow the general arc of heading first north and then west towards better conditions for Africans, I would read the specific states in much the same way I read the railroad itself, as something that functions in the book as simultaneously real and ahistorical.
There are real trains and real tracks, but there is no claim for those to be historically real. Likewise, there is no claim that South Carolina (for example) was historically like this. Instead, Colson is working with the narratives of racism that plagued America’s early years (I’m not at all implying those narratives are done, but they are, while systemically and historically linked, different in the twenty-first century than they were in the eighteenth or nineteenth). Inextricably tied to that are considerations of early capitalism: what bodies and materials can be owned, what bodies produce capital, and at what cost.
These concerns are explored with skill, and with a deep historical awareness. The main character is well-drawn, and he succeeds at a very difficult task in humanizing her beyond her suffering. She is more than a target for whippings and degradations, and that makes those moments all the more powerful.
The Underground Railroad belongs in the pantheon of important novels that wrestle with the experience of Africans in the Americas: it may not reach the breadth of Roots, or even Some Sing, Some Cry, but that is part of what is striking about it: instead of following a family of characters over several generations, it takes a single woman through successive slices of America as an illustration of how what is often seen as progress is just as much the same systemic failures in different clothing.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Tackle these topics head on. There is clear political bent to my writing, but it’s all displaced and transposed. Whitehead has a critique of American capitalism that is explicit in the novel, and yet it is never preachy or didactic. That’s impressive to me.