I just learned that Colson Whitehead's
The Underground Railroad is a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. While I'm sure the other finalists are worthy of consideration, it's hard for me to imagine a more deserving work. This is a book I found impossible to put down. I thought of its protagonist, Cora, even when I wasn't actually reading - wondering whether she would escape or even survive the dangers that beset her on her journey to freedom from slavery and the looming threat of slave catchers. This book made me care that much, not only on an intellectual or empathetic level, but deeply, in the most visceral recesses of my consciousness. It is that good.
Whitehead, who grew up in Manhattan, has said that when he was much younger, he imagined the Underground Railroad as an actual railroad, with tracks, engines, and passenger cars, that ran through real tunnels, rather like subways. In this novel he takes that childhood fantasy and makes it real; Cora, a young slave woman, escapes with another slave, Caesar, via the railroad. Cora's odyssey north takes her to various states - South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana - each of which is like another world. While one state initially seems safe and welcoming, for example, the citizens of another indulge in ritualized brutality that almost surpasses what Cora left behind on Randall, the Georgia plantation she escaped from.
In interviews, Whitehead has readily acknowledged the influence of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in the vastly different worlds he creates for Cora to experience. As different from one another as Swift's Lilliput, Brobdignag, Laputa, etc., the states become illustrations of various historical outrages against those of other races: the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, and more. And although in this fabulist fiction Whitehead may take liberties with the details of history, what he describes can seem so uncomfortably real that I found myself thinking I should look up, for example, antebellum North Carolina's racial policies.
A friend told me she was afraid to read this book because she thought it would be gory. It's not. Really. Don't be afraid. Given that it is about slavery, violence is inescapable, of course, but Whitehead is a master of compulsively readable, nuanced prose that blends modern pacing with a sensibility that, to quote the nineteenth-century writer of a narrative captivity, "draws a veil over things" too painful or sensational or offensive to recall, except that the veil reveals enough so that we know exactly what is going on. Although we may be spared the graphic splatterpunk some writers indulge in, the horror remains. I admire Whitehead's writing more than I can express.
The Underground Railroad is and is not fiction. I suspect there were at least as many Randalls in the slave-holding South as there were benign Taras (in Gone with the Wind). Absolute power like that exercised by slaveholders does not bring out the best in people. Scholars agree that there is such a thing as historical, generational trauma, and the United States is plagued by it. We can see its aftermath in recent events on the nightly news, and we need to try to understand it (and each other) rather than deny it. We are a diverse society and we are all in this together. We need books like The Underground Railroad. Much has been written lately about how reading literary fiction helps people to become more thoughtful and empathetic. I can think of no better place to start than with this brilliant novel.
The organization of the book is also interesting, and brilliant. Unlike most cookbooks that are organized by the above categories - breads, soups, etc., etc. - this one is organized by types of vegetables: bulbs, roots, tubers, greens, stalks and stems, pods, shoots, leaves, flowers and buds, fruits (a category that includes more than just tomatoes; take a look at the Blistered Eggplant with Tomatoes, Olives, and Feta, above), and kernels. Leafing through to see what category various veggies fall into is part of the fun, but if you want to go straight to bok choy, the index is excellent.
