It cannot be a coincidence that 3 of the several award-winning
novels published in the US in the last 2 years, all deal with the question of
race and America’s unreconciled problem with it. While The Sellout is a comic satire about race, Between the World and Me explores the whole question of destiny and
free-agency as evinced in a Black life, and The
Underground Railway (TUR) is a fictional account of the appalling life on a
Southern plantation and how similar it was to the one in the free world outside
then.
There is much in TUR to
make the reader angry even as we shudder in disgust at the description of the putrefying Black bodies that hang from
trees along a path in North Carolina ironically called the Freedom Trail. However,
it is not the graphic descriptions of the routine outrages of plantation life
that are particularly revealing or poignant. After you’ve read pages full of descriptions
of daily whippings, rape, assault, castrations, wounds being doused with pepper
water, you reach a point when you wonder, “After such knowledge, what
forgiveness?”. Whitehead knows this and it is to his credit that throughout the
novel, he spends time focusing attention on the minor deprivations, the sense
of helpless longing for freedom that chains every slave, the stink of fear that
taints even the free slaves, the almost unbearable poignancy captured in the familiar,
yet unimaginable luxury of a Black being the first recipient of a book and
inhaling the scent of its unwrinkled pages. Such descriptions form the powerful
engine that draws this tale of abomination and hope across the American deep
South from Georgia, to North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana to the hope of a
frontier far beyond the tentacles of slavery.
The novel opens with Ajarry’s story which forms a kind of prologue
to that of our heroine Cora, who is a slave on a Georgia plantation. Ajarry was
kidnapped in Africa, shipped abroad a slaveship and bought and sold several
times before she landed on the Randall plantation in Georgia where she gave
birth to Cora’s mother Mabel. There is a matter-of-fact, unabashed tone to the
hardships that accost Ajarry which act as a kind of prelude to the horrors that
Cora’s story contains. Cora’s story is interspersed with those of the other
major characters such as Caesar, Ridgeway, Mabel, and Sam. Cora’s nemesis in
the novel is a relentless slave catcher Ridgeway whose code of personal honour
does not allow him to return home empty handed.
Cora’s story begins on the Randall plantation which is ruled by
the vicious Randall brothers and their foreman Marshall. While freedom may seem
like am impossible dream here, we are told “Every
slave thinks about it. In the morning and in the afternoon and in the night.” Cora’s
mother, Mabel, escaped from the plantation, abandoning her 11-year-old
daughter. Left a “stray”, Cora develops the unique ability to silently question
and rail against the misfortunes that govern the lives of the plantation
slaves. This is important since she is our protagonist who escapes from the
plantation at 16 and the rest of the novel is the story of her flight across
different American states, her experiences of brief moments of fulfilment and
joy, the selfless support she receives from several white Abolitionists and
free slaves on the run, the macabre public hangings she spies as she lies
hidden, Ann-Frank-like, in a secret attic in North Carolina, and the duplicitous
kindness of the white folks she encounters in North Carolina.
Colman skilfully reveals to us the less-than-pure motivations of
the white folk who appear to be supportive of the Negro emancipation cause. While the underground railway of the title
refers to a secret railway carriage that runs deep in the tunnels of the South,
working to ferry escaped slaves to the North, its historical counterpart is
actually the network of white abolitionists and free slaves who created a
secret system of safe houses, coded messages, safe passages, and tips that
enabled escaped slaves to reach freedom. Whether it’s an actual railway car or
a resistance movement, there is no doubting its role in offering a beacon of
hope to so many impoverished, unfortunate lives.
What is unmistakable in the novel’s tone is Colman’s raging anger
at the country of his birth and its legacy of bloodshed and oppression. This is
beyond disgust or mere cringing or embarrassment and makes the read that much
more compelling. Compare this, “The white
race believes – believes with all its heart – that it is their right to take
the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This
nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its
foundations are murder, theft and cruelty.” with a line like, “Throughout 1990, Pandits are picked up
selectively and put to death. They are killed because Kashmir needs to be
cleansed of them.” (more on the 2nd novel hopefully in my next
post later,) and you will know what I am talking about.
One of the things that struck me as I read was the truism of “The
more things change, the more they remain the same.” In Cora’s world, slave
patrollers “required no reason to stop a
person apart from color.” Compare this with the spate of police brutality
videos that have exploded across America in the past 2 years where white
policemen routinely and with little cause, stop, harass and often shoot men of colour,
coupled with the anti-immigrant rhetoric that runs through American politics
and policy today. The novel achieves a precarious balance in its end, a note of
faint hope that accompanies the realisation that centuries of death and
oppression cannot be washed away by the faint promise of a better tomorrow. However,
it is better than living without hope.
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