The Underground Railroad, Part I

Colson Whitehead is a writer whose fictions have always traversed reality in strange ways. From his début novel, The Inuitionist, which is set in an imaginary conflict between two different schools of elevator inspection, through to Apex Hides the Hurt, a novel about an advertising writer whose specialty is giving new names and tagline to old products -- including towns and cities -- Whitehead has followed his own particular muse. Some of his novels, such as The Colossus of New York and John Henry Days, are apparently so offbeat that their current Wikipedia entries are practically blank! And yet, with The Underground Railroad, a far wider readership discovered an embraced Whitehead; the book won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

What if? In a manner reminiscent of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Steven Millhauser, Whitehead's fictions are often driven by a single fantastical conceit; in this case, a strikingly simple one: what if the "Underground Railroad" were actually a railroad that ran under the ground? Everything else in the novel could be said to flow "realistically" from this single central conceit -- although, as you'll see, there are some permutations that follow which re-shape the fabric of that reality at every station of the train.

We will take this train a few stops at a time: this week, we'll be reading just the first three: Ajarty, Georgia, and Ridgeway. Some of the stories will seem familiar, although what's familiar is the most painful: a multigenerational saga of a family sold off into slavery, cruel slave masters, and a desperate attempt to escape them. This is no Roots, though -- Whitehead pulls no punches, and the visceral suffering and mental anguish of slavery have never been more acutely captured. And yet, on top of or within that hard reality, a strange, uncanny secondary reality arises. Not to be glib, but it's somewhat like the 'butterfly' theory of time travel -- when one steps on a butterfly, all kinds of alterations are made in the future that follows, entire epochs or empires may fall or never have risen. Some of these alterations may be disorienting, but all are deliberate; many are infused with the aura of other key texts in the African-American literary tradition. Like variations on a theme, they repeat, but with a difference.

So, in your responses, try to think of each section in the context of the others, somewhat like longer versions of Billy Pilgrim's unstuck leaps, only this time connected by a train. What changes at each stop? And what is the significance of those changes, to you?