A Savage History Reimagined by Whitehead

[caption id="attachment_55032" align="alignright" width="393"] Colton Whitehead. Photo by Madeline Whitehead[/caption]

By Joan Baum

In his spectacular new book (his eighth) “The Underground Railroad,” Colson Whitehead reimagines a savage period in American history and proves once again that fine fiction immersed in historical facts can often be more truthful—and powerful—than nonfiction. As with his earlier award-winning books, particularly his knockout first novel, “The Intuitionist” (1999), about Lila Mae Watson, a black female elevator inspector, Mr. Whitehead again focuses on a female protagonist who through persistence, ingenuity, intelligence and courage makes her heroic way. For sure, the “lifts” that confront Lila Mae are nothing like those that try the Georgia-born plantation field slave, Cora in “The Underground Railroad”— torture hangings she encounters along her fugitive way presented as sadistic entertainments and admonitions. As for her name, “it just came to me,” Mr. Whitehead says, when one day, as he was musing on a choice, “a friend came to dinner with his daughter, Cora.” The theme, however, has a deeper and disturbing significance.

Mr. Whitehead’s delighted, of course, though a bit “surprised ” at all the media attention surrounding his new book. Initially scheduled for release in mid-September, the book was moved up a month when in August Oprah Winfrey announced it would be her book club selection for the year, and when “the press reported that ‘The Underground Railroad’ was on President [Barack] Obama’s reading list for his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard,” Mr. Whitehead points out, with a laugh. Factor in the special section excerpt that appeared in the Sunday, August 7 New York Times, and it was inevitable that the book would rise to number one on the best-seller charts for hardcover fiction. It’s also being looked at “by some people in the movie industry,” Mr. Whitehead modestly allows.

Although male slave-narrative protagonists may come readily to mind, because of the popularity of “Roots” and “Twelve Years a Slave,” Mr. Whitehead notes that Cora’s tale was “inspired” by the autobiographical writings of Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897), whose grueling story of “hiding out for seven years in an attic in North Carolina” plays out in one of his chapters. He also had in mind the writings of the indefatigable Underground Railroad abolitionist Harriet Tubman (c.1822-1913). He knew he wanted to write about a lost relationship, “thinking originally of following a male runaway looking for a sibling, a child,” he said, but the pull of a story about a young girl left alone at 10 by her fleeing mother and is repeatedly raped and scarred but who also escapes, was the perspective that prevailed. Cora’s has an unsentimental but passionate drive to reconnect with her mother—all the more moving because of her ambivalence at having been abandoned.

The novel abounds with scenes involving vicious overseers and lynch mobs, ruthless bounty hunters, informers, kidnappers, rapists and eugenics experimenters intent on killing off or controlling the growing black population. They sear into consciousness all the more for Mr. Whitehead’s apt dispassionate but lyrically inflected prose, often wrought as emphatic sentence fragments. The narrative itself, suspenseful and unblinking, is irregularly structured—12 chapters of varying lengths, some named for people, some for places, and some prefaced by ads for runaways that contain month, year and day and then by the 1840s only day, suggesting the increasing frequency of flight and the hardened vengefulness of owners.

It’s a horrific time that Mr. Whitehead revisits in “The Underground Railroad,” arguably the most divisive and intransigent period in American history and one that has already generated a cornucopia of literary masterpieces and masterly monographs and movies. Mr. Whitehead’s take on this feature of The Peculiar Institution, however, is unique. Just about everyone has heard about “The Underground Railroad,” that secret network of houses, outbuildings and clearings that served as safe houses for blacks fleeing north (and sometimes south and west). But what if there really was a railroad with tracks, tunnels, stations and conductors going from point to point, state to state, as here, through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana—“secret trunk lines and mysterious routes” that ran fitfully on coded schedules? The concept is ingenious because the railroad in the 19th century exemplified the “American Spirit.” It was an “American imperative” sanctioned by “divine prescription,” reflecting a manifest destiny that “called us from the Old World to the New, to conquer and build and civilize,” as the pitiless slave catcher Ridgeway tells Cora. Of course, that destiny was manifest only to and for whites. It did include a command to “lift up the lesser races,” Ridgeway says, but then adds, “If not lift up, subjugate. And if not subjugate, exterminate.” It’s a remark worthy of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

What more bitterly ironic than slaves travelling by railroad, a vantage point, Cora is told many times, from which the growing country can best be seen. But what’s to see from underground? What’s for blacks to appreciate about expansion? By taking what Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. refers to online as a “marvelously improvised, metaphorical construct” and realizing it as a physical tunnel operation designed, built and run mainly by blacks, Mr. Whitehead short circuits salvation myths—many spawned in the north by white abolitionists—that still dominate many accounts of this frightening and dangerous enterprise.

Although Mr. Gates cites a print reference to “the underground railroad” that he found in “The Liberator” in 1842, the term really took off in 1850 when Congress passed the infamous Fugitive Slave Law which legitimized slave-catching incursions into free states. The law destroyed (or should have destroyed) other myths about slavery which Mr. Whitehead explores: namely that it was only a Southern problem in antebellum days; that the exclusionary motive of The Civil War was economic, when cotton was king; and that since The Emancipation Act, race issues have subsided. Toward the end of the novel the daughter of a murdered abolitionist farmer who winds up living on Long Island with a sailor from the Shinnecock Nation says, “The conflict in Europe was terrible and violent “ but she takes “exception to the name. The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.” Would the controversial critic and Atlantic journalist Ta Nehisi Coates agree? “ I never met him,” Mr. Whitehead says, and he would defer to Coates to comment if he so chose. As for Mr. Gates, Mr. Whitehead has met him over the years and has been heartened by his “support.”

Mr. Whitehead, who went to Manhattan schools and was graduated from Harvard University, is a long-time summer resident on the East End. His experiences growing up in Sag Harbor are recounted in his award-winning autobiographically informed novel, “Sag Harbor,” about hanging out when he was a teen. He has an 11-year old daughter who he hopes will read—and appreciate—“The Underground Railroad” in a few years. What’s he writing now? “Something about Harlem in the 1960s” is all he will say, but he certainly knows how to pick culture-changing hot times and topics.