The Underground Railroad
How Colson Whitehead packaged a great idea
This is the thirteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, his widely lauded, magic-realist take on the historic (and metaphorically-named) “underground railroad” in which runaway slaves escaped to the North in the years before the US Civil War.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
I am fortunate to call Colson Whitehead a former instructor, and though his workshops were a joy to me in college, looking back he did not offer much insight into his own process or aesthetic. Which was a disappointment, since Whitehead is one of the most prominent and successful voices in fiction today, as well as someone who likes to incorporate genre elements into his work, which bookstores label as “Literature” with a capital L.
Before reading The Underground Railroad, I had read The Intuitionist, Whitehead’s inventive neo-noir novel about elevator inspectors, a book I enjoyed for its funny take on rival escalator inspectors as well as its incorporation of an homme fatale to counter the novel’s female protagonist. However, one thing I found frustrating with that book is that, for the most part, it didn’t have defined chapter breaks—something I think detective novels really need to facilitate pacing—and instead just kind of kept going and going, interrupted by occasional scene breaks.
Structure isn’t a problem with Underground Railroad, which may have also assisted in this book’s massive popular success. This novel is organized into chapters, predominantly chapters about the book’s runaway slave protagonist, Cora, interspersed with shorter chapters about various white opponents who are either tacitly or actively complicit with the institution of slavery.
The Underground Railroad’s tantalizingly simple and alluring premise—what if the physical railroad was real, and not just a metaphor?—is boldly framed as Cora’s Odyssey from the South to the North, but the novel itself also seems strangely detached from Cora’s plight. The premise is such that this novel could have easily been 500 pages and been even more dramatic with its reversals, if Cora found refuge and capture within a few more scenarios, but instead Underground Railroad comes in at an industry-standard 313 pages, and therefore feels a little sanitized, a book crafted exclusively to be a hit, to be enjoyed by critics and airport book-buyers simultaneously. There’s no shame in being a hit, but I wonder if Underground Railroad lost some of Whitehead’s trademark charm in the editing room. Overall, I think Underground Railroad ultimately succeeds because it is also a picaresque novel in the tradition of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; both are novels in which the hypocrisy and complicity of white society regarding prejudice toward Blacks is heightened and examined across various layers of social strata.
After an intense opening section which explores Cora’s origins and ancestors on a plantation in Georgia, Cora discovers the literally-underground railroad at about page 67, roughly 25% into the novel. This pacing is worth noting, because it ensures that the book gets to its premise quickly.
And Underground Railroad’s thesis comes as soon as the railroad is revealed, when Lumbly, a train conductor, tells the runaways Cora and Caesar:
“If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” (Whitehead 69)
Each section tests this hypothesis, as every stop on Cora’s journey reveals a different type of racism, a different type of oppression. Thus Whitehead’s novel is less about Cora’s journey than an intellectual Odyssey through America’s most evil impulses, moving through many windows of society to show racism in picaresque fashion.
One of the most interesting of these sections is Cora’s sojourn in Charleston, South Carolina, a place where Blacks enjoy seeming relative freedom, though in fact they are being sterilized in Tuskegee-esque experiments. Whitehead cleverly uses a museum display which Cora works at as a human prop to develop the ideology of Charleston society:
The first room was Scenes from Darkest Africa. A hut dominated the exhibit, its walls wooden poles lashed together under a peaked thatch roof. Cora retreated into its shadows when she needed a break from the faces. There was a cooking fire, the flames represented by shards of red glass; a small, roughly made bench; and assorted tools, gourds, and shells. Three large black birds hung from the ceiling on a wire. The intended effect was that of a flock circling over the activity of the natives. They reminded Cora of the buzzards that chewed the flesh of the plantation dead when they were put on display. (Whitehead 109)
Whitehead’s vision of the Charleston museum display involves interesting atmospherics while also reemphasizing the Heart of Darkness Social Darwinism of the exhibit, one that means to reinforce white supremacy. Whitehead’s description does double-duty in that the buzzards link to Cora’s experience and give her pause to her traumatic past, while also connecting her experience as a prop to that of crucified bodies on the plantation.
The second, even more nefarious exhibit that Whitehead outlines is a sanitized version of the Atlantic slave trade—one that pretends the Atlantic journey was pleasant and not a murderous, genocidal exercise:
The soothing blue walls of Life on the Slave Ship evoked the Atlantic sky. Here Cora stalked a section of a frigate’s deck, around the mast, various small barrels, and coils of rope. Her African costume was a colorful wrap; her sailor outfit made her look like a street rascal, with a tunic, trousers, and leather boots. The story of the African boy went that after he came aboard, he helped out on deck with various small tasks, a kind of apprentice… (Whitehead 110)
Because Whitehead has already staged the Atlantic crossing in his prologue about Ajarry, Cora’s grandmother (“Chained head to toe, head to toe, in exponential misery” (Whitehead 4)), the text is heightening the contrast between what actually happened and how American propaganda disguises the truth.
Finally, we see Cora react to an exhibit supposedly depicting her own former existence—a full-scale diorama of the plantation:
Typical Day on the Plantation allowed her to sit at a spinning wheel and rest her feet, the seat as sure as her old block of sugar maple. Chickens stuffed with sawdust pecked at the ground; from time to time Cora tossed imaginary seed at them. She had numerous suspicions about the accuracy of the African and ship scenes but was an authority in this room. She shared her critique. Mr. Fields did concede that spinning wheels were not often used outdoors, at the foot of a slave’s cabin, but countered that while authenticity was their watchword, the dimensions of the room forced certain concessions. (Whitehead 110)
The fact Cora had suspicions about the African and ship scenes adds to her resistance to performing in this final narrative. As a former slave, she criticizes the inclusion of the spinning wheel, which softens the reality of her servitude, and as a dry humorous touch, Whitehead’s curator concedes that spinning wheels are not accurate but such “concessions” are a result of the minimal space, a realistic cop-out to the tremendous flaws of the exhibit.
Through these three scenes, Whitehead contrasts the reality of Cora’s experience and that of her ancestors with that of the sanitized narrative of the museum. He is using setting as a tool for establishing theme and message and also character development, pushing Cora to place even less trust in the seemingly more generous white authorities in Charleston. Whitehead’s skill at using description for multiple purposes is certainly an aspect I can incorporate more in my own writing, which often relies too much on description as cinematic window dressing without being necessarily cloaked in other aspects of theme and message.
The last aspect I am most fascinated with in Underground Railroad is how Whitehead takes care to flesh out Cora and Caesar’s opponents, such as the slave-catcher Ridgeway, the “benevolent” slave owner Mrs. Gardner who deceived Caesar and his family into servitude on false promises of future freedom, and finally Ethel, the long-suffering wife of abolitionist Martin who long dreamt of being a white savior:
Ever since she saw a woodcut of a missionary surrounded by jungle natives, Ethel thought it would be spiritually fulfilling to serve the Lord in dark Africa, delivering savages to the light. She dreamed of the ship that would take her, a magnificent schooner with sails like angel wings, cutting across the violent sea. The perilous journey into the interior, up rivers, wending mountain passes, and the dangers escaped: lions, serpents, man-killing plants, duplicitous guides. And then the village, where the natives receive her as an emissary of the Lord, an instrument of civilization. In gratitude the niggers lift her to the sky, praising her name: Ethel, Ethel. (Whitehead 191)
Each of these characters depict a different example of racism and/or the doctrine of white supremacy, and Ethel’s section is particularly haunting, reflective of a missionary spirit that is not for the glory of God, but for the glory of the minister at the expense of the “natives,” a distinctly American pathology, historically speaking. More damningly, several aspects of Ethel’s dreams reflect pulp tropes that have been inspired from romanticizing imperialist ventures: “lions, serpents, man-killing plants, duplicitous guides” (Whitehead 191). Whitehead raises a critical point that, if not handled carefully, this type of pulp adventure storytelling can reinforce existing prejudices. Ethel’s dream to be a white savior is also informed by the ideologies Whitehead raises in the museum scene; throughout the book he is developing and explaining how so many Americans for so many years (and still today) prevaricate their worldviews to tolerate slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination; in Whitehead’s telling, there were and are far more ways to be racist than to be an abolitionist.
The importance of Lumbly’s “Ride the rails”/ “you’ll find the true voice of America” line is underscored by its repetition toward the end of the novel, when Cora recalls the line as she finally arrives at a temporary sanctuary in Indiana: “It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness” (Whitehead 262). The darkness Whitehead refers to is not only the literal “underground” nature of the railroad but also the darkness of the whites who oppress Cora and the Black community. Though the book ends on a (slightly) hopeful note, with Cora’s final escape to the West, most of the book is not (Whitehead 312-313). Furthermore, we know as readers that in California Cora will face the same discrimination she has confronted elsewhere; escape is impossible. Underground Railroad thus functions as a modern update and more digestible version of the type of storytelling in Invisible Man, an intellectual exposé disguised as a magical realist adventure novel.
Works Cited
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (Vintage International: New York, 2010).
Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist (Anchor Books: New York, 2000).
-----------. The Underground Railroad (Anchor Books: New York, 2016),