"America has always been racist"

America, beginning of 1800s. The harshest years of slavery. Looking back from our comfortable lives on when black slaves worked in cotton fields and lived stacked by hundreds in plantations under the worst possible conditions, even imagining how hard their lives must have been is difficult. Underground Railway is a novel based on the history of slavery that focuses on the story of escape of a woman, Cora, born in one of those plantations and who never managed to find a way out. If everything in the novel is related to true facts, what turns it into a fantastic story is the underground railway. In the 1800s, slaves were known to escape from plantations by digging tunnels called “underground railways”. Whitehead says many tend to imagine these tunnels as a railway with trains and locomotives passing through when they hear about the “underground railway” for the first time. He then builds up his story by asking the question “what if there was an underground railway system which connected entire states all together, allowing slaves to flee?”

The novel is also a story of personal growth. With every danger she faces throughout the novel, Cora, the story’s protagonist, goes through changes, turning into a stronger and a more complex character. Underground railway is the story of a slave, of an enslaved woman as well as of a bloody and merciless history and of being a slave in America.

Colson Whitehead answered our questions about his novel Underground Railway:

You have said before that you decided to write this story sixteen years ago from your novel had published. How long have you been working on the novel during all this time? Thinking on it such a long time how reflected to story?

I had the idea in 2000 and decided to pull the trigger in 2014. The story was in the back of my head and germinating. If I’d written in earlier, before I’d finished some other books, it wouldn’t have been as concise and controlled – if you keep doing something for 20 years, hopefully you get better at it, learn to do things differently.

The Underground Railroad is rooted in historical fact and captures the cruel realities of what it was to be black in America during the time of slavery. What was your research process for the book?

I mostly used primary materials – slave narratives and oral histories of formers slaves. There are a lot of tiny details – about wooden shoes, slave interactions, and how they spoke – that wouldn’t make it into history books.

The Underground Railroad is not just a story of slavery, it’s also story of a very powerful woman. It was amazing to follow how Cora’s personality change during the story. Why did you choose a female protagonist? What was the possibilities and limitations of this?

In her famous slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs writes very compellingly about the dilemma of the female slave – being subject to others’ sexual designs, being forced to pump out babies, because more babies meant more money for you master. It was worthy of exploring.¹

The Underground Railroad has many layers – on one level it is the story of a slave’s struggle, on another level it is an oppression tale of three generations of women, yet on another level, with the revelation that comes at the end, it has a heartbreaking mother-daughter relationship component. The South Carolina chapter that focuses on reproductive freedom in particular makes me think that this is also a feminist text – did you have this in mind when writing the story, to write a “woman’s” novel?

I don’t classify books as Men’s Novels or Women’s Novels, but if you’d like to call it a feminist text I would be flattered.

Are any of those taken from actual ads for escaped slaves? Why it was important to add that ads to story?

I like doing different people’s voices, figuring out how they use language, but I couldn’t compete with the original slave ads, which are compact stories that capture so much of a person’s life in 8 lines. The small details of life make fiction live.

When James Baldwin give a speech he says that: “The future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.” What do you think about future of America in the context of racism?

America has always been racist, is racist at this moment, and will continue to be so for my lifetime.

The Underground Railroad is translated more than 40 languages. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (and more). How do you feel about a story about history of slavery is reaching so many people?

I wasn’t thinking about it when I was writing, but of course the dynamic between the oppressor and the oppressed, the dominators and the dominated is a prime force in human history. So different cultures can see their own history in this American story.

You have a very eclectic writing history that includes a zombie apocalypse novel and a book about coming of age in the Hamptons. How does The Underground Railroad fit into your pre-works and what was the new for you about this novel?

I try to do different things in different books – if you know how to write one kind of story, why do it again? I like figuring out what I like about different genres, what I want to throw out, what conventions I want to upend.

What do you think current atmosphere of racisim and xenophobia in America and also Europe and all around the world?

I have kids, so have to be optimistic that the world they are growing up in will be better than the one I grew up in.

In the novel, one of the characters states that America is a delusion, the greatest delusion of all. Do you share this sentiment? If so, to what extent?

No, but I of course there are American ideals laid out by this nation’s founders that they and we do not live up to.

What are you working on next?

I compact novel about Florida in the 1960s.