Literacy Narrative
When one looks at what is happening in the United States, one is reminded of what happened during slavery times. Black men and boys get gunned down in the streets by white policemen on mere suspicion that they could be perhaps portraying a similar posture to that of a criminal. The intolerance to rationality is slowly losing applicability in modern society, similar to what was happening during the slavery era, which ended several decades ago. Today’s happenings, however, get one questioning whether slavery was abolished completely. Perhaps what was ended was the outright brutality against blacks, but the mentality of slavery seems to have continued. Known for his virtuoso novels, which have included Zone One, John Henry Days, and Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead is a familiar face in the world of literature. Colson Whitehead novels have often been a combination of horror, science fiction, heady skepticism, and down-home wisdom that have allowed him to have such an in-depth richness of writing approaches that has distinguished him from the rest of the writers of his era. With his latest literature, which has been labelled by some as a colorful masterpiece, Whitehead gets bolder and produces a piece of literature unbound by what has been written before and shows that what has been taught about slavery has been a watery half-truth.
Whitehead’s novel opens up on the horrific Georgia plantations where blacks are subject to whippings, castrations, burnings, and rape. Everyone’s intention and priority in the plantations is to escape. The novel is based on a small girl called Cora’s journey, whose mother abandoned her when she was just a small girl. Even since she has struggled with the feelings of abandonment. Another slave then approaches Cora with a plan and information about how they could escape through the underground railroad. At first, she hesitates as she is not sure if the plan is actually viable or whether they would actually succeed in escaping. Then life happens in the form of humiliation and rape, which gives her the nudge to follow through with the plan to escape. With the novel, Whitehead does what many of the writers before him avoided doing (Whitehead). Whitehead opens his eyes, where others would have preferred to look away. While novels, before would only talk of the horrors blacks underwent during slavery, Whitehead puts a face to the horrors and ensures the reader can live through the horrors and humiliations of slavery through actual characters. In order to escape, Cora had to kill a white man and is soon pursued by an experienced slave catcher, Ridgeway.
Whitehead the episodic tale framework where each episode corresponds to a new stop in the journey. Two of the episodes are Carolina, an episode in Tennessee and another in Indiana. Each of the episodes, evil, is brought into everyone’s eyes through the mechanics of slavery. Whitehead portrays such a striking introduction that depicts the lives of the and relationships of the slaves thoughtfully before Cora decides to escape. Whitehead depicts something that is so often sentimentalized in shallow depictions of slavery. Whitehead gives a voice to the people who all their life has been brutalized, traumatized and dehumanized. Whitehead lets the world stop and pay attention and reflect on the difficult lives the vulnerable in society have often been subjected to. The Underground Railroads is about the myriad of ways that black history has often inadequately been represented by white narrators. Whitehead research on the book involves ploughing through oral archives detailing first-person accounts of slavery as documented by those who experienced slavery. The novel is with such authority and authenticity of telling us what we already know but in a way that we already don’t know by vindicating the powers of fiction to interpret the world of slavery.
Whitehead also writes more generally about children and parents. Cora’s character is galvanized in both love and fury towards her mother, Mabel. On the one hand, her mother represents the possibility that one could escape successfully, but on the other hand, she represents a mother who can abandon their children to the horrors of slavery. Both of these representations wrap up Cora’s behaviors through the book. More importantly, perhaps is what these representations would mean in our current lives. The representations address the gap between what we might know of people and who those people might actually are. So often, we are quick to judge people based on what we know of them. We draw a conclusion and make up our minds about what kind of people they are. We rarely take to question ourselves who those people could be without the information we might have heard of who they might be. Whitehead’s perspective on that gap between what we know of people and who they really are is a life lesson that anyone could pick to maneuver life and its varying experiences. Whitehead defies the plot’s pleasures that so often overwhelm many writers, and they end deploying customary tricks of revealing certain pieces of information, especially whenever the subject matter is too traumatic. Whitehead stands his ground and lets the readers run wild with their imagination, trying to figure out what might have happened to Cora’s mother.
Although Whitehead did not write the novel with the intention of drawing comparisons with the contemporary times, more and more, one begins to notice the strong parallels that are portrayed, more so when one begins to recognize the justifications the slave catchers and owners used for their harsh treatment of blacks. A similar phrasing of justification has been used for the race-based discriminatory practices that have continued all those decades after slavery was abolished in the United States. In particular, the struggle has not been about whether slavery ended or not; it’s been about whether the mentality to justify heavy-handed practices when dealing with black people continued to thrive beyond the days of institutionalized slaves. The novel is an encouragement for one to recall and reflect on their mindset on social relationships and family that will remain generation after generation. A parent, teacher, or even a peer might decide that particular behaviors are wrong coming from their child, student or friend, and as such, they might demand the behavior to stop. While the behavior would likely change, the more important concern should be on whether the student, child or peer understood why they had to change their behavior. Slavery and all those heavy-handed practices seem to only have ended because people had pointed out how blacks were being treated was wrong. Doing away with the practices was only because the practices were labelled wrong. Not many understood the “why factor” about those practices being wrong. As individuals, we are so often quick to adapt and change behaviors and practices that might perhaps be deemed outdated or wrong but never do people invest their time and resources to understand why the behaviors are practices are wrong. The current struggles of the contemporary times are still existent as people have not quite understood why the blacks needed freedom, why they are deserving of being in this country just as the whites and why it was never a favor that the humiliation, discrimination, and heavy-handed practices were ended, to begin with.
Work Cited
Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.