The Underground Railroad

“Master said the only thing more dangerous than a nigger with a gun,” he told them, “was a nigger with a book. That must be a big pile of black powder then!”

So this book wasn’t originally on my radar. A friend of mine was reading it and talked about going to see the author who was a big deal and all the awards he had won. She then decided to gift it to me when she was finished. I am very grateful for the recommendation. This blog is so focused on classics that it can sometimes forget modernity. Reading so many old books with nothing from this century can trick your mind into thinking that Black culture is in a creative rut, when that is far from the truth. The modern classic is something that I have not covered and sometimes forego even thinking about. Modern classics like Moonlight, Get Out, To Pimp A Butterfly, Renaissance, Insecure , When They See Us, The New Jim Crow, and The 1619 Project will probably be my children’s equivalent to the books the I am currently reading. But it is important to read things as they come out as well. I figure that a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning novel with a scripted series directed by Barry Jenkins, is as good a place as any to start.  

So What Had Happened Was…

The novel starts with the enslavement of the main character’s grandmother. With memories of freedom on a distant continent, the grandmother would go onto die on the same plantation that her grandchild, Cora is living on when the book opens. Cora is an outcast, due to her mother being the only person to ever escape the plantation and leaving Cora behind. However, a man new to the plantation, Caesar, approaches Cora to escape slavery. Cora while initially reluctant, eventually agrees and her Gulliver’s Travels or the Illiad esque journey to freedom begins.

The journey begins with tragedy as Cora’s friend is captured and while trying to defend herself Cora kills a 12 year old slave catcher. Cora and Caesar barely make it out of Georgia, not only runaway slaves but dubbed as murderers, and catch an actual train on the underground railroad to South Carolina. In South Carolina, everything seems different. Cora and Caesar take new names and are under the care of a society which is trying to better the lives of negroes. Everything is seemingly fine and a pseudo-freedom has been attained. However, Cora finds out that the society is sterilizing the women and Caesar discovers that the medical treatment of men is little more than a syphilis experiment. Shortly, after this discovery a slave catcher named Ridgeway appears in town. Ridgeway is obsessed with the capture of Cora as her mother is the only slave to ever escape him. Cora escapes Ridgeways onslaught by going into the underground tunnels, however Ceasar never appears. We later learn that he was killed by an angry mob after they discovered the allegations of murder.

Cora is able to escape to North Carolina, which is no longer a stop on the underground railroad. North Carolina has eradicated Black slavery, by selling them off or killing any slave or abolitionist. The state is now using Irish indentured servants for labor. Cora is hidden in an attic for months, however she is eventually discovered by the townsfolk and Ridgeway.  Ridgeway attempts to take Cora back to Georgia, but is thwarted on a detour in Tennessee by 3 Black men already working for the underground railroad.

The men take Cora to Indiana where there is a growing farm which harbors free and escaped Black folks. The farm is an abolitionist haven with the exchange of money and ideas being freely exhibited. However, eventually there is a suspected Judas in their midst and slave catchers come and burn the farm down. Ridgeway finds his way amongst the number of slave catchers and again captures Cora. Ridgeway forces Cora to show him an abandoned stop on the Underground Railroad, however Cora is able to use the tunneling system to her advantage to greatly injure Ridgeway and escape. Cora follows the unknown tunnels until she pops up in an unknown environment and agrees to go west with a kindly looking black man.

Aiight so boom..

There are plenty of things we can talk about in this book. The fictionalized parallels to real history, the dream of freedom being deferred to both Cora and the reader in the end, the importance of its publication in 2016 (a time of racial unrest due to waves of police brutality). Instead what stands out to me is a narrative choice made in the penultimate chapter. There we learn that Cora’s mother did not escape and instead died in the swamps near the plantation. She turned around from her plan of escape because she could not bear to leave her daughter and on her journey back was bitten by a snake. Her body was never found. Cora’s mother leaving her was a huge part of Cora’s character and story. Being supposedly left behind without a mother in the treacherous environment of plantation life lead to further disenfranchisement (acknowledging that Cora was already a slave). Cora was disenfranchised from large swaths of life when it came to society, but Cora was further disenfranchised amongst the enslaved community. Cora no longer had control over things such as where she lived, her friends, bodily autonomy- all things that her mother could have helped with/protected her from. Her mother’s supposed escape was also a large portion Ridgeways obsession. However, an answer to the need for this narrative choice became my obsession. There had to be a better reason than simply making a slave narrative even sadder.

My first thought was not empowering at all, but rather confusing. Throughout the book Cora’s mother is viewed negatively for her choice to escape to freedom. When we learn that she never attained freedom, but rather died alone in a swamp, are we then supposed to view her more positively? If so, what role does freedom play in this story. One would think that freedom, no matter how attained is a net positive. Especially in a story of people breaking the law to attain freedom. But herein, we have a mother who is ridiculed for attaining freedom and lauded for foregoing freedom. Is the point that none of this makes sense? That slavery is such a backwards system that norms no longer work?

I was unsatisfied with an answer that was merely a question so I began to think further. The second conclusion was that the mere idea of freedom is what did all of this. The reality of Cora’s mothers freedom was never realized. But it was the idea of her freedom that led to her daughter’s actual freedom (hopefully). It was the idea of her freedom that so greatly bothered a racist institution. It was the idea of her freedom that sparked possibility in the mind of Caesar.  As such, her not actually attaining the freedom makes the point that freedom is not necessarily accomplished via the superhuman feet of making it north (remember Cora’s freedom is not a given), but rather through the ascertainment of hope. That freedom is so powerful that its mere concept, whether realized or not is a fierce weapon against injustice.