2020 Reading List: ‘The Underground Railroad’

Words and art by Talisker Scott Hunter.

At 15 years old, I sat in class and half paid attention to a module that taught me this: chattel slavery was practised until the 19th century. It involved the mass importation of people from Africa to the Americas. Individuals were bought, sold, imprisoned and worked to death. 

In order for us to heal from our past, we must first understand it. Often, this understanding is not meaningfully achieved through the memorisation of dates and events, but through well-told fiction. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is a novel that sheds light on essential truths about human behaviour, past and present. It explores what drives cruelty, desperation, and the will to survive. 

The novel tells the story of Cora, an enslaved girl who escapes a plantation in pre-civil war America. On her tail is Ridgeway, a slave catcher whose determination comes less from hatred, but a deep commitment to a toxic worldview. While the first 70 pages are beautiful, visceral pieces of writing that explore the arbitrary horrors consistent with our understanding of plantation life, there’s a sense we’ve been here before.

This is a wily trick. By chapter four, the narrative is yanking protagonist and reader down a series of tunnels, both real and figurative. By chapter 6 we’re immersed in a story steeped in allegory, blending fact with fiction to breathe fresh life into history. For instance, the titular Underground Railroad was a real historical metaphor used to describe a web of operatives that helped smuggle enslaved people to the free states and Canada. While this real-life network ran on safe houses, Whitehead’s Railroad runs on rails - a literal steampunk subway that transports escaped slaves north.

Cora travels via this network to several US states, each characterised by a unique set of symbolic tropes. For instance, in South Carolina, Cora finds gleaming skyscrapers and societal harmony. Here, she takes a job playing a slave in the state museum. For wages, she acts out the menial work she tried so desperately to escape while white children gawp at her from behind a screen. In Tennessee, she finds biblical plagues, while in North Carolina she encounters an American rendition of Nazi Germany. 

On Cora’s heels is Ridgeway, the novel’s most potent intersection of fact and fiction. 

This lawman sees the capture of runaways as the fulfilment of a duty ordained to him by a higher power. If God had not meant for Africans to be slaves, reasons Ridgeway, then they would not be enslaved. This banal, fundamentally flawed logic echoes many real voices, past and present.

From their place at the top of social order, individuals like Ridgeway convinced themselves that the artificial hierarchy from which they benefited was the proper order of the world. This rationale represents the kind of ethos that regards cruelty as an unfortunate but necessary by-product of maintaining ‘natural’ order. 

Lest we think our Aoetearoa’s hands are clean. While the British Empire abolished chattel slavery in 1833, indentured servitude remained legal until 1916. This practice involves the contractual binding, through debt, of labourers to employers for set periods of time. The system, like slavery, was predicated on the same racist belief in a hierarchy that excuses dehumanisation and suffering. 

Indentured servitude carries many practical hallmarks of slavery. For instance, employers could sell the labour of an indenturee to a third party, meaning that in 1915, a person from Mumbai could be sold to a Westport coal mine without their consent. 

Many labourers were kidnapped and sold into the trade; many more were lured into contracts by false promises. Most were paid under 20 cents per day, with an amount subtracted each month to pay the cost of travel, food, and shelter. It was in the interest of employers to ensure indentured workers never left, and thus the institution is now outlawed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a form of slavery. 

Between my flat and the local fish supply, there is an old house that today serves as a wedding venue. John Cracroft Wilson built it 1870, to house his indentured servants. 

The worldview at the core of systems like slavery and indentured servitude is the true antagonist of The Underground Railroad. It’s an ethos that drives Cora’s former owners to view her as inhuman, as livestock, as property. It’s the spirit that consumes Ridgeway, who commits to his trade with the banal ambivalence of a parking warden, believing himself to be an essential cog in the world’s upkeep. 

The Underground Railroad is a novel that sheds light on the engine that drove inhuman behaviour for centuries. By colourising our past and making that engine tangible, Colson Whitehead asks one, salient question: sure, it looks like an old locomotive, but does it still run?  

Favourite lines: 

“Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see it’s true limits.”

“The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.”