When, towards the end of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Underground Railroad, one of the characters refers to "
the secret beneath us", he's talking about the titular railroad - in actuality, a metaphorical term for the network of sympathisers and safe houses that enabled people to escape slavery in America's Deep South, but in Whitehead's fiction, in a brilliant magic realist conceit that caught me totally by surprise, a literal railroad facilitating escape and evasion.
By this late point in the book, however, it's clear that "the secret beneath us" has a double meaning; it also refers to the dark, brutal history on which supposedly civilised modern America is built. As has been noted earlier, "[t]his nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft and cruelty".
Drawing on the testimonies of real-life slaves, Whitehead pulls no punches in detailing the savagery of life on plantations. He captures in visceral terms the sadistic horrors of punishment, perhaps most shockingly in an instance of sexual torture and immolation performed before a largely indifferent well-to-do white audience apparently more interested in enjoying their host's hospitality.
Slaves are utterly dehumanised: "Every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh." As a medical student and gravedigger's accomplice reflects, "when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal."
Whitehead is, however, careful to underline that the violence is not only perpetrated by white slaveowners and their minions against Black slaves. "Men start off good and then the world makes them mean" - and sure enough, some of the Black characters are complicit, aping the attitudes of their masters and seizing the opportunity to become oppressors rather than merely oppressed.
Whitehead's wonderful heroine Cora may be repeatedly victimised, but she steadfastly refuses to play the role of victim. Parentless, she grows up fierce and feisty, not afraid to take on injustice. Like her mother, Cora plucks up the courage and resolve to flee her plantation in Georgia, and the novel develops into a game of cat and mouse, her nemesis the dogged slavecatcher Ridgeway in hot pursuit across the country.
Along the way she finds herself, courtesy of supposedly enlightened folk in South Carolina, on display as a living exhibit at the Museum of Natural Wonders - a grimly ironic echo of the dehumanising objectification she has fled. Cora, characteristically, fights back: "She picked the weak links out from the crowd, the ones who broke under her gaze. The weak link - she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness."
The Underground Railroad is a phenomenally powerful, deeply unsettling novel, but it's Cora's unbreakable spirit and defiant rejection of her lot that drives the reader to devour the pages. Even then, though, she cannot entirely escape her fate: "Cora thanked the Lord that her skin had never been burned in such a way. But we have all been branded even if you can't see it, inside if not without."
