Whitehead’s Underground Railroad Highlights Systemic Issues in Slave Narrative

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Doubleday

August 2, 2016

306 pp.

$26.95

Colson Whitehead engages with topics of slavery in an allegorical approach to address problematic and dominant narratives in the fiction novel, The Underground Railroad. Each American state Whitehead utilizes – Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana – all highlight different narratives in the traditional rhetoric surrounding slavery.  Whitehead creates a literal underground railroad to transport readers through each slavery narrative and, in doing so, effectively highlights a hazardous ideology engulfing the slavery narrative. His story makes the discussion of slavery accessible yet gives the true history of American slavery justice. The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, among other awards, and became a #1 New York Times Bestseller. It even holds a place on Oprah’s Summer Reading List and on Obama’s list of favorite novels. The book has been translated into 40 languages.  

The story follows a girl named Cora through five primary periods in her life which are marked by each state she is in as she flees slavery. The book opens with the story of Ajarry, a young woman captured by slave traders in Africa and brought to America to be sold in the slave trade. Ajarry is separated from her family and sold to the Randall tobacco plantation is Georgia. Over the course of her life, she births many children but only one survives by the name of Mabel. After Ajarry dies from an aneurism while picking cotton, the plot jumps to the live of Mabel’s daughter and Ajarry’s granddaughter, Cora. The preceding chapters follow Cora and Caesar, another slave on the Randall plantation, as they escape slavery and travel, literally, on the Underground Railroad.  

Raised in Manhattan, Colson Whitehead graduated from Harvard College and worked at the Village Voice where he wrote television, book, and music reviews. Before releasing The Underground Railroad, he wrote five novels for which all received awards. He has taught creative writing at a number of universities namely Columbia University, Hunter College and Princeton University.  

Whitehead’s literalization of the Underground Railroad creates a dream-like sequence of events as the story jumps from generation to generation. He employs each state as a different, and problematical, slavery narrative like the state of South Carolina where Cora and Caesar clean up their appearances and are purchased as Bessie Carpenter and Christian Markson by the government. Surprised by their ability to walk freely towards Main Street, they held their heads high and try to walk like free beings. Instead of embracing African-American culture or listening to the needs of newly “freed” slaves, the white occupants of South Carolina work tirelessly to scrub any last trace of blackness from their identities. Whitehead effortlessly communicates the nuances of these type of slave narratives.

Whitehead’s use of imagery goes above and beyond most slavery novels. He explains the architecture in the novel so well you’d think you were standing in the midst of these fictional cities. All of the physical descriptions (reflect the ideologies of each state like how the citizens of South Carolina characterize themselves as progressive, equitable, and constructive, while their infrastructures, seemingly clean and accommodating for all, are described as “pure and white.” The conditions are outwardly less physically and mentally abusive toward African Americans than those of the southern states, but their conventions contribute to deeply-rooted systemic issues.  

The way in which the book is laid out by state allows readers to pick up on each theme Colson is highlighting. While Colson is male, he successfully writes from the perspective of a young women. In conversations about the novel, he explains all of the research that went into the book including reading thousands of pages of slave journals which is made apparent by the writer’s impeccable voice.    Colson Whitehead successfully utilizes an allegorical approach to relay problematic narratives in American slave history. I personally found the theme of the novel thought-provoking with a thrilling story line to keep me engaged chapter after chapter.  Whitehead successfully explains a type of liberalism within the slave narrative that disguised forms of racial violence. His portrayal of this type of oppression is not only applicable but crucial to America’s current political and social discourse.