Spoilers!
If you’re a Black person during slavery in America, freedom is a delusion, but perhaps a useful, necessary one, all the same. Such is my takeaway from Colson Whitehead’s 2016 book, The Underground Railroad, about Cora, a third-generation slave, running quite literally for her freedom via the Underground Railroad. Her grandmother died on the same Randall plantation she and her mother, Mabel, were born to, and then her mother escaped to freedom without her, causing bitter resentment to swell up within Cora. A slavecatcher, Ridgeway, has animus toward Mabel for absconding beyond his reach. However, we find out at the end of the novel that Mabel didn’t even experience a full day of freedom; she died after being bit by a snake in the swamps on her way back to the plantation to be with Cora.
Mabel’s is a fable fitting for the life of a slave in Whitehead’s book. Brutish life, brutish death; senseless life, senseless death. Luck, no luck, fate or no fate, and God or no God. When the lash is coming, or the barking dogs at the end of the slavecatcher’s leash, does it really matter? There are good people, like those who help Cora along the way of the Underground Railroad, and bad people, like the white folks in North Carolina who host Friday fun days dedicated to minstrel shows and hanging a black person for sport. But within the hearts of each they share the bond of fear, fear of the other, one justified and one not so much. Because within an America like this, even so-called freed Blacks — whether “safely” within the boundaries of the North or not — still fear that the delusion of freedom will be shattered by an angry slavecatcher, or for no reason at all, where like the swamp snake, a white man will bite and take it all away.
What makes Colson’s book particularly intriguing is that he takes the metaphorical and makes it literal: teeming underneath America is an actual underground railroad ferrying runaway slaves to different stations, like South Carolina, or Indiana. In fact, those in the South would be aghast to know that the Underground Railroad reaches as far as Georgia. In Colson’s book, vestiges of later time periods also populate the early 1800s: elevators and high-rise buildings, and the dastardly plot of South Carolinians and a pernicious “resurrectionist” doctor to use Black people as unwitting test studies to learn more about syphilis echoing the Tuskegee syphilis study. I think the former was Colson’s way of building the delusion of freedom, and safety, for Cora and the other freed and runaway blacks she built community with, first in South Carolina, and then later in Indiana. There’s even a figure, Lander, who comes to the latter community reminiscent of Frederick Douglass. He’s an orator and abolitionist. To the latter with the doctor, that was a plot point to show to Cora, and the others, that their freedom was indeed a delusion. That South Carolina wasn’t any more high-minded about Black people than the rest of the South.
Fortunately, Cora is able to continue fighting and running beyond the reaches of Ridgeway and others who would have her returned to her plantation and/or sullied and killed. Last we hear from her in the book, she’s escaped from the raiding of the Indiana community and is headed out to California, another delusion of a sort, the ephemeral allure of the West and its bounty.
Along the way of her journey, Cora often meditates on her situation, such as being free to roam, as it were, on the Randall plantation, but free from slavery, yet captive to a tiny attic in North Carolina while in hiding. Without chains or with literal chains fastened by Ridgeway, the mind of a Black person like Cora in America is always under threat, never fully owning your body or property. As she ruminates, “Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic, America remained her warden.” The psychological, and indeed, generational, trauma imbued in such a rumination speaks for itself. And this was part of the debate between Lander in Indiana and a formerly enslaved man, Mingo: Some Blacks are too traumatized by slavery to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” to paraphrase the latter, while Lander is more opaque about it. “For we are Africans in America. Something new in the history of the world, without models for what we will become.” Without precedent is itself a kind of freedom. Or a form of paralysis, depending on how you view it.
Whitehead’s book is written with insights about the messiness of America, to understate it, reminiscent of the underground tunnels he brings to life in his book, he excavates and extricates from the dirt truths about what it means to be a person endowed with personhood, or lack thereof. As the passenger of his book, I found myself wanting to pause along the route many a time to think about the sentences or Cora’s reflections, similar to how one conductor tells Cora to look out the train to take the full measure of America (I’m butchering that paraphrase, but that was the gist of it!). Whitehead’s book is not easy reading because it’s infuriating that people were like this, of course, and it’s not even a book with a happy ending, per se, even though Cora survives and is voyaging to California. After all, it’s still a delusion, if a useful and necessary one, that she’s free. In that America, hardly. Just free for now. But that’s still something. It has to be.
Milam's Musings 