"Who Builds Anything in this Country"
by endless
When the heroine of Colson Whitehead's National Book Award winning novel, The Underground Railroad, asks who built the system of passages and caves that burrow throughout the southern states, a conductor answers "Who builds anything in this country?" It's a rhetorical question in the novel, but Whitehead's novel itself challenges our mythology of the underground railroad. From middle school history lessons through to the Underground Railroad museum in Cincinnati, white Americans have used the underground railroad as a way to imagine ourselves on the right side of history. And yes, there were white underground railroad conductors, many of them Quakers. But more often escaped slaves were smuggled by free blacks, branches of the African Methodist Episcopal church, or gained freedom by purchasing it from their masters. Whitehead includes these characters in The Underground Railroad: Ceasar, who was promised freedom when his master's wife died, only to be sold off to settle his debts, the elderly free black "proctors" at Cora's state run community in North Carolina with their pressed dresses and their equally pressed respectability politics, and Cora's mother who ran off when Cora was a small girl, choosing freedom and abandoning her daughter to slavery.
The Underground Railroad owes "our" ability to engage with it as a literary topic to a wave of stories about Harriet Tubman, the engaging Underground Railroad Museum that opened in Cincinnati in 2012, and the popular Jim McBride novel Song Yet Sung Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, andSue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings. White Allies with a penchant for magical realism will appreciate this last book, as well as "Song Yet Sung." If you liked Whitehead's second most popular novel The Intuitionist, Paul Beatty's White Boy Shuffle and Baratunde Thurston's How to be Black deal with similar themes with more of Whitehead's usual sardonic tone.
This book is perfectly pitched to be an Oprah’s choice, to form part of high school curriculums, or to be a freshman reading experience novel at the U of M. The violence is off stage or muted, the history is traceable, and it answers a question we grapple with today – what are the benefits and violence on all sides of interracial solidarity?
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