Michiko Kakutani reveals the inner scenario as depicted by the writer
In his dynamic new novel, Colson Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad - the loosely interlocking network of black and white activists who helped slaves escape to freedom in the decades before the Civil War - and turns it from a metaphor into an actual train that ferries fugitives northward. The result is a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. It possesses the chilling, matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison's "Beloved," Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables" and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," and with brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift.
"The Underground Railroad," the latest selection of Oprah Winfrey's book club, chronicles the life of a teenage slave named Cora, who flees the Georgia plantation where she was born, risking everything in pursuit of freedom, much the way her mother, Mabel, did years before. Cora and her friend Caesar are pursued by a fanatical, Javert-like slave catcher named Ridgeway, whose failure to find Mabel has made him all the more determined to hunt down her daughter and destroy the abolitionist network that has aided her. Traveling from Georgia to South Carolina to North Carolina to Tennessee to Indiana, Cora must try to elude not just Ridgeway, but also other bounty hunters, informers and lynch mobs - with help, along the way, from a few dedicated "railroad" workers, both black and white, willing to risk their lives to save hers.
Although the basic escape narrative will remind some readers of the WGN America television series "Underground" (about a group of slaves fleeing a Georgia plantation), this novel jumps around in time and space, lending Cora's story a fractured, modernist feel and reminding the reader of the inventive storytelling in such earlier Whitehead novels as "The Intuitionist" and "John Henry Days." In "Underground Railroad," there's a kind of prologue that recounts the story of Cora's grandmother Ajarry, who was kidnapped in Africa, sold into slavery and repeatedly swapped and resold in America; and Cora's story is intercut with interludes featuring portraits of other characters, like Ridgeway and Caesar. The literalization of the Underground Railroad is not the only dreamlike touch in the novel.
And these surreal elements inject the narrative with a mythic dimension that lends "The Underground Railroad" more magic and depth of field than Yaa Gyasi's ambitious but methodical novel, "Homegoing," which recently looked at the damage slavery inflicted on eight generations of one family. One of the remarkable things about this novel is how Mr. Whitehead found an elastic voice that accommodates both brute realism and fablelike allegory, the plain-spoken and the poetic - a voice that enables him to convey the historical horrors of slavery with raw, shocking power. He conveys its emotional fallout: the fear, the humiliation, the loss of dignity and control. And he conveys the daily brutality of life on the plantation, where Cora is gang-raped, and where whippings (accompanied by scrubbings in pepper water to intensify the pain) are routine.
Over the years, Mr. Whitehead writes, Cora "had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with the cat-o'-nine-tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres. Feet cut off to prevent escape and hands cut off to stop theft." A man named Big Anthony, who escaped and made it 26 miles before being hunted down, is whipped for the entertainment of plantation visitors, then castrated, doused with oil and roasted. Even the threat of such horrifying torture cannot squelch Cora's determination to escape, though she will learn, on the road, that freedom remains elusive in states farther north, where she is continually on the run or on the lookout for slave patrollers, who had the power "to knock on anyone's door to pursue an accusation and for random inspections as well, in the name of public safety." In North Carolina, slave patrollers "required no reason to stop a person apart from color," Mr. Whitehead writes. Defending the need for night riders, one senator tells an angry mob that their "Southern heritage lay defenseless and imperiled" from the "colored miscreants" who lurked in the dark, threatening "to violate the citizens' wives and daughters."
Such passages resonate today: the police killings of unarmed black men and boys, the stop-and-frisk policies that often target minorities, and the anti-immigrant language used by politicians to ramp up prejudice and fear. Mr. Whitehead does not italicize such parallels. He does not need to. The harrowing tale he tells here is the back story to the injustices African-Americans and immigrants continue to suffer, but a back story only in the sense, as Faulkner put it, that "the past is never dead. It's not even past." In recounting Cora's story, Mr. Whitehead communicates the horrors of slavery and its toxic legacy rumbling on down the years. At the same time, he memorializes the yearning for freedom that spurs one generation after another to persevere in the search for justice - despite threats and intimidation, despite reversals and efforts to turn back the clock. He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present. The reviewer is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic for The New York Times www.nytimes.com
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