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Reading Guide on Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2015)

The second-class treatment accorded African Americans shows that the ‘African race’ was not

included in the Constitution, let alone to have rights the white population is duty bound to

respect (Dickerson, 2004: 66-67). In American Democracy in Theory and Practice (Carr,

Bernstein, Morrison and McLean, (1957) argue that for every citizen to enjoy the inalienable

right promised by the Founding Fathers of America: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,

a government has to be instituted and has to be fair to all in administering its justice system.

Carr et al (1957) again argue that “Liberty in the modern state is dependent upon authority for

its existence. But a free people must be ever on guard lest this truth becomes a rationalization

used to justify unnecessary encroachments by government upon the individual’s freedom”

(103). The negligence on the part of government or the feigning of ignorance over the fact that,

this liberty most times are not attributed to African Americans in itself is an encroachment on

their fundamental human right. This notion is sometimes shared because white supremacy

thinks African Americans during slavery are incapable of logical thought and are therefore not

considered human. That black men once “lived in caves, swung from trees and ate their meat

raw in an era they now dubbed prehistoric” (Baldwin, 1993: 92). This lends weight to why they

have been disenfranchised before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of

1965 were passed. While the mythic claims of supremacy are established, Johnson (1995: 341)

goes down memory lane to assert that:

The art of letters, of poetry, of music, of sculpture, of painting, of drama, of architecture;

the science of mathematics, of astronomy, of philosophy, of logic, of physics, of
chemistry, the use of the metals, and principles of mechanics, were all invented or
discovered by the darker and what we now call inferior races and nations. We have
carried many of these to their highest points and perfection, but the foundations were
laid by others. Do you know the only original contributions to civilization we can claim
is what we have done in steam and electricity and in making implements of war more
deadly? And there we worked largely on principles we did not discover… We are a
great race, the greatest in the world today, but we ought to remember that we are
standing on a pile of past races…

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This questioning of historical truth has led the protagonist of Johnson’s (1995: 341) The

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man to rhetorically inquire: “If everything is good about the

Anglo-Saxon, why wasn’t the German forest the birthplace of civilization rather than the valley

of the Nile?” These postulations question the veracity of history from the Western perspective

and their perception of the black race.

Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is a historical narrative that details the lives of Cora

and Caesar, two slaves who try to escape from their Georgia plantation using a network of

footpaths, waiting houses, a chain of informants and trapdoor lodges referred to as the

underground railroad. But Whitehead creates a physical underground system where Caesar,

coming from Virginia, encourages Cora – a slave girl, to escape with him to freedom and were

being chased by a slave-catcher called Ridgeway. Using the underground railroad as a

metaphor, Whitehead explores the fears of both slaves and runaways through despicable

history and laws that either condemn or support their liberty through several states. With twists

and narrow escapes, the two slaves made it to the North through the horrors of racism and

subjugation that depict the history of American slavery and America not only as a slave nation,

but as an immigrant country that denies full opportunities and citizenship to African Americans

who has been the burden bearers of its growth and greatness. In other words, Whitehead offers

a mediation on slavery from surviving the Middle Passage from Africa, to auction blocks, life

on the plantation, and how a nation claimed to be free still enslaves the best of its citizenry to

a mythic and paradoxical perception of its exceptional notion of liberty.

The white masters in colonial and post-colonial America never considered the humanity of the

enslaved other than, they are to be used for their entertainment and wealth generation.

Monetary value is the major connection between slaves and their masters. Such was the

tradition that influential African Americans like Booker T. Washington (2013) conceded

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during his Atlanta Exposition speech that in “all things that are purely social, we can be separate

as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (292). African

Americans have been the burden bearers of their society right from slavery. Thus, the economic

growth that gave America its world power status in the present was built on the back of slaves

in the plantations. Whitehead argues about blacks breaking the jungle’s back to usher in

civilization in form of the railway (67) and the genesis of American capitalism. It is in like

manner that Lucius Brockway, in Ellison’s Invisible Man, who was working at the paint factory

assert: “We the machine inside the machines…the machines do the cooking, these right here

hands do the sweeting” (Ellison, 2001: 218). This situates the value of black labour as fuel for

the industrialization of America and its developmental projects. Ajarry, the mother of Mabel

and grandmother to the protagonist Cora in Whitehead’s polyphonic representation of the black

experience avers: “A young buck from strong tribal stock got customers into a froth. A slave

girl squeezing out pups was like a mint, money that bred money” (6) to demonstrate the value

of blackness in the flesh market. The concept of trading black bodies both as commodities with

direct commercial value and as asset for future enterprise created ventures for slavecatchers

acting as middlemen of the flesh markets. Ridgeway, the slave catcher sees black bodies as

every name, an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh that he could secure a bounty of $50

for each catch (212-215).

Brannigan (1998: 6) for instance, asserts that New Historicism is a mode of critical

interpretation which privileges power relation as the most important context for texts of all

kinds. He further asserts that as ‘a critical practice it treats literary texts as a space where power

relations are made visible’. This is best exemplified in the works of African Americans in

which the text serves as a battlefield for the fight against domination or control. Whitehead

captures this type of struggle in his presentation of the socioeconomic politics of slavery thus:

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“More slaves led to more cotton, which led to more money to buy land to farm more cotton.

Even with the termination of slave trade, in less than a generation, the numbers were

unattainable…” (161). This unpacks one of the most outstanding myths in American history:

that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1883. In fact, some

states continued holding innocent slaves ransom and later introduced sharecropping in order to

not lose their services and consequently even practice indentured slavery again. The Freedom

Bill did not go into effect at once. Certain states still held unto their slaves. In Whitehead’s The

Underground Railroad, one of the Randall brothers that owned the plantation where Cora

worked in Georgia, schemed ways of increasing their loads – human capital by sending it to

New Orleans in order to wring every possible dollar out of it. Whitehead reiterates that when

“black blood was money; the savvy businessman knew to open the veins” (23). This is a

constant reminder to the slaves that their entire being rested on servitude and the white man’s

commercialization.

The myth of the supremacy of the white race is ruined by the participation of lower classed

whites as farm hands in the plantation. Gates (2019: 51) in arguing for the phase of Second

Slavery in the United States avers that “American slavery is the perfect fusion of race and

class” and when it ended formally, “ways have to be found to reinvent and maintain the

exploitation of black labour to sustain the modes of production on which the South’s profits

were based.” Sven Beckert in Gates, 2019: 51) argues that “Global cotton consumption

doubles from 1860-1890 and then by 1920 doubled once more.” Maintaining the profit margin

after the war becomes the imperative of the South and the need for more hands. This is to

suggest that slavery became the leading capital investment in the antebellum era (McPherson,

2007: 11). Hence, less privileged whites joined the black population on the plantation; except

they have the leverage to buy themselves out of the bondage of service when they could afford

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it (30). Even with these claims, the cultural and economic historian Gene Dattel assert that

“Poor whites found themselves ensnared in the sharecropping as well, but the owners of cotton

land grew richer than ever” (Gates, 2019: 51). These are the same whites who came to America

to escape the tyranny of their masters, fleeing famine and political unrest streamed into the

harbours of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, are denying others similar ideals they escaped

from (117 & 164). Whitehead (2016) captures this imbalance dichotomy when he said:

True, you couldn’t treat an Irishman like an African, white nigger or no. There was the
cost of buying slaves and their upkeep on one hand and paying white workers meagre
but livable wages on the other. The reality of slave violence versus stability in the long
term. The Europeans have been farmers before; they would be farmers again. Once the
immigrants finished their contracts (having paid back travel, tools, and lodging) and
took their place in American society, they would be allies of the southern system that
had nurtured them. On Election Day when they took their turn at the ballot box, theirs
would be full vote, not three-fifths (164).

Most importantly, slave trade and its antecedents exposed the myth of the Whiteman’s

exceptional nature, as a supreme and fearless being who is high above mere mortals. The

growing population of slaves imbued fear into the heart of white farmers in the form of

insurrection, and miscegenation. Taylor & Wagner (2004: 20) contend that in the South, by

1763, the colonial population included about 230, 000 blacks and most of them slaves. The

whites feared a situation where they would be outnumbered, or that the state would be mixed,

and they would be lost in the equation. The historical imperative surrounding domination and

myths of black men taking over white women is succinctly presented by Whitehead (2016)

when he posits:

A short tour of Bourbon Street forecast the result to any observer: a repulsive mongrel
state in which the white race is, through amalgamation with negro blood, made stained,
obscured, confused. Let them pollute their European bloodlines with Egyptian
darkness, produce a river of half-breeds, quadroons, and miscellaneous dingy yellow
bastards – they forge the very blades that will be used to cut their throats (165).

The fear of being “stained” by black, and whites losing their identity has to be demystified.

Baldwin (1993: 110) posits that “What one would not like to see is the consolidation of peoples

on the basis of their color” because “color is not a human or personality reality; it is a political

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reality.” This has introduced segregation in housing, low wages, education inequality,

transportation discrimination among other rights violations of rights anchored by Jim Crow. It

is in the light of this type of crisis which never left the American consciousness that King Jr.,

(2010: 12) observes: “the persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro

demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white

resistance in North and South.” American history is replete with such examples.

Harriet Tubman who earned the nickname Moses, was said to have mastered the underground

railroad through which she liberated and aided hundreds of slaves to escape to the North with

Charles Nalle in 1860 as a principal example (McGovan & Kashatus, 2011; Taylor & Wayne,

2004). This system of the underground has been lauded as a myth since physical passengers

have not been seen boarding any train on the railroad, rather, it is a network of footpaths,

abandoned barns and backdoors of cellars and cottages controlled by buggy-drivers, cooks and

farm hands who through word of mouth assist runaway slaves on transit to make their way to

safety. This seeming magical realist invention is brought to life in whitehead’s narrative when

he demystified the network by creating a physically traveling system African Americans use

to escape their bondage. Cora enjoyed a ride on the underground railroad on her path to freedom

(148 & 152). Whitehead espouses on the myth of the underground through the discerning

character of Cora who told about her scape but omitted the tunnels. This is because it was “a

secret, but an intimacy so much a part of who you were that it could not be made separate. It

would die in the sharing” (266). It is important to note that African American literature draws

inspiration and is inspired by myths and folklore as “indices of an alternative ontology, which

generally have not been given sufficient attention by critics” (Peach, 1995: 11), probably

because they are still in denial of the power of black narrative and its power to sustain a

people’s culture.