144 pages • 4 hours read
Colson WhiteheadThe Underground Railroad
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The American Imperative: The Theft of Indigenous Land and the Enslavement of Black Bodies
Contrary to ideologically propagandistic renderings of the origins of America, Whitehead asserts that it is not lofty ideals of freedom for all nor the underdog’s escape from persecution, religious or otherwise, that are at the root of the American story. Instead, in a far cry from the romanticized notion of America as the land of the free, home of the brave, savior of the battered horde, Whitehead presents us with an America that is ceaselessly violent, corrupt, oppressive, and rotten at its core.
This theme is most prominently displayed through the character of Ridgeway, who proclaims this truth repeatedly and without qualification. Ridgeway can be seen as a kind of American emissary. Naked in his proclamations that the white man is entitled to steal Indigenous lands, massacre Indigenous peoples, and enslave Black people to force them to generate profits that only the white man will enjoy, Ridgeway does not sugarcoat the deep brutality, entitlement, and shameless greed that is the true impetus of the “American Spirit.”
This theme is also iterated in Lumbly’s memorable quote, which is repeated at various times throughout the narrative. Before Cora boards the Underground Railroad for the first time, he says, “If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America” (71). Initially, Cora is bewildered when she sees only darkness from her vantage point on the rails. But by the end of the book, she realizes that that darkness was exactly what Lumbly was referring to. Beneath the shiny exterior of the convenient and bombastic narratives that America tells about itself lies the truth: America was founded on the darkness and violence of Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement and murder. For Whitehead, that is the nation’s true face.
American White Supremacy
This theme is most poetically exemplified during the final confrontation between Cora and Ridgeway, in which Cora wraps her arms around Ridgeway to propel him down the stairs and into the ghost station. Whitehead writes:
On Randall, on Valentine, Cora never joined the dancing circles. She shrank from the spinning bodies, afraid of another person so close, so uncontrolled. Men had put a fear in her, those years ago. Tonight, she told herself. Tonight I will hold him close, as if in a slow dance. As if it were just the two of them in the lonesome world, bound to each other until the end of the song. She waited until the slave catcher was on the third step. She spun and locked her arms around him like a chain of iron (308).
This quote reveals the intricate and brutal intimacy that paradoxically exists between these two characters. For Whitehead, this intimacy exists because, in a sense, each of their identities are dependent upon the other. Cora is defined by her escape from enslavement, and Ridgeway is defined by his pursuit of enslaved people. Neither character’s journey would exist without the other, and their fates are intimately tied to one another. On Cora’s end, this fact is obvious, but Ridgeway’s understanding of the reality that his entire identity would not exist were it not for his sanctioned ability to hunt, kill, and violate black people is not entirely established as certain.
When Whitehead likens Cora’s embrace of Ridgeway to the embrace of a chain, asserting that Ridgeway is also chained to and enslaved by his own pursuit of his white identity. This is because that identity depends upon the ability of white people to enslave Black people. It is the enactment of this intricate violence against the Black Other, both physical and mental, that forms the very basis of white identity. By likening this process to an enchaining, Whitehead speaks to its hollowness and its weakness: whiteness has no leg to stand on independently, it most yoke itself to the enslavement of the Other to proclaim righteousness and superiority. This dynamic can be understood as a symbol of the tension at the heart of the white American identity. While whiteness proclaims its superiority, it cannot prove or reify that superiority without materially and psychically oppressing and violating Black people.
Slavery as an Economic and Political Institution
At many times throughout the novel, Whitehead presents us with Black characters who carve out places of relative privilege within the white supremacist social, political, and economic order. We see the peculiar and inexplicable Homer, who serves Ridgeway because “he’s seen enough to know a black boy has no future, free papers or no. Not in this country” (207). There is Moses, who does not turn vicious after being brutally punished, but only after being selected by Connelly, the overseer, and given the “special” station of being able to aid in the domination of his fellow Black people, rather than being a simply abject recipient of that domination. We see Blake offered a similar position. Each of these characters use their special position to claim a bit of power for themselves by contributing to and enabling the subjugation and violation of their fellow Black people. However, this special place can be rescinded at any moment, which we see in the terrible and violent eventual demise of Blake. Still, through these characters, Whitehead illustrates that enslavement was not a cut-and-dried matter of white versus Black: the institution was heavily dependent upon the psychological violence of not only producing fear of the white man in Black people, but of turning Black people against one another.
Whitehead also depicts a peculiar disturbance in the loyalties of white people that the institution of enslavement engendered. This aspect is most salient in his depiction of North Carolina, where white people exploit the atmosphere of paranoia and the laws about harboring enslaved people to settle business and personal scores. They report on each other (sometimes falsely, it is implied) to unleash the wrath of the law upon white people whom they wish to exact revenge. Children are even taught to inform on their parents—all in service of the institution of enslavement and the maintenance of the society that depends upon it. Through these details, Whitehead asserts that enslavement engendered loyalty to itself, primarily and foremost: white people were not beyond the ken of its violence simply by virtue of their whiteness.
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