The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

(Today's entry is in English because this book hasn't been translated yet. You need a good level of English to read it, but it's worth the effort.)

I had never heard of Colson Whitehead until a few months ago. I follow several American literary magazines on Twitter and his name kept coming up in all of them when talking about new and expected releases. The Underground Railroad was an Oprah Book Club choice even before it came out for the general public; it was in all the lists, in all the magazines, in all the articles; it was all the hype. Usually this means I wait a little before I buy it, to see if it's really worth it or is just another best-seller that I'm going to shun once I've read it, but then I started reading about Whitehead, following him on Twitter, seeing what he was interested in. I liked him so much that it became one of those cases in which the author inadvertently speaks loudly in favor of his book, so I finally bought it.

It took about two months for me to get the book, because yes, globalization means you can buy any book printed just about anywhere, but they still get lost, or are out of stock, or who knows what happens; I just know I had to order it twice and waited forever to get it, but it was worth it. The Underground Railroad is a slave narrative; more precisely, it is the story of Cora, who runs away from the plantation where she is enslaved when her owner dies and his brother, much more cruel than him (and that is saying something), takes over. She escapes with Caesar, another slave who takes her along as a symbol of good luck because her mother is the only slave who was able to fly from the Randall plantation without ever being caught again. They use the underground railroad, which Whitehead has reimagined as an actual railroad that crosses the south of the United States below the surface, a huge tunnel that signifies freedom. White station masters help Cora and Caesar and they are able to leave Georgia. Their first stop is North Carolina, where they have a brief taste of what it means to be free, although they are not. Slaves here are still slaves, but are the property of the state. Even though her living conditions have improved tremendously, they can't forget that they are owned. Sterilization experiments are being carried out with the men and women of color, where the subjects either have no idea they are being used or they are forced to do it. Cora and Caesar, who have found a rhythm of life that works for them and would rather stay, start thinking that they have to leave. But that choice is taken away from them: they are being hunted, they are wanted. A slave who runs is never free.

The Underground Railroad is written in a very unsentimental way. Whitehead doesn't linger in the gory details of the punishments the slaves received, he doesn't describe the screams of the people who are being burned alive, or the pain of a beating. He just places in front of us a picture and tells it like it is, as a journalist would. He shows us the white guests drinking tea and enjoying the weather while next to them the smell of burning flesh scared the rest of the slaves. His language is crude, full of racially charged words (I would be curious to see how they translate some of the terms to Spanish, if there is ever a translation), just like it would have been if this book had been written a hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago. The main characters never catch a break, except for that brief period of time in North Carolina and another one almost at the end of the book (no spoilers, don't worry). Cora herself is the shadow of a character, we never see inside her; we know she is going through all types of hell, but she doesn't let out much, we're not able to know her, because she learned from a very young age that people let you down and you can't trust anyone, so why bother.

This is a very uncomfortable book to read, mostly because you know from the beginning that is based on real facts. Outside the USA we've grown up with pictures of the Old South in which we think all the slaves lived like the ones in Gone with the Wind, although that has been changing lately. Black adults singing while they picked cotton almost at their leisure, with little black children running and playing among them; white women in big dresses seating on the porch while perfectly dressed and happy slaves served them lemonade and fanned them. We have absolutely no idea of what the reality was like; I found myself looking for a white person in the book who wasn't evil, but boy was it hard! White people were afraid of the slaves because there were too many of them. What would happen if they revolt? What will happen when they revolt? I've read this book while the American election was going on, and a strange feeling of déjà vu kept crawling into my reading. Low income whites against blacks? Rich white men trying to control the lives and reproductive rights of black women? It sounded too familiar to be fiction.

All in all, a great read. It won't be the last slave narrative I read (I think this time I'm going to try real slave accounts), but I need some time to recover. I think the next book I read will be something light and funny, like, I don't know, a Stephen King horror story. It will be less scary than this one.