Colson Whitehead, 2016
When I started teaching high school English, I soon discovered that many of my colleagues wanted us to stop teaching kids to start their essays with a hook. Those who taught the lower grades were scarred after reading hundreds of essays that began “Have you ever wondered…” or “Webster’s Dictionary defines…”; those who taught AP classes tended to argue that there was no time (or points) for a hook on the AP exam, so students should get in the habit of banging out a bare-bones introduction and plunging right into the argument. I was at the other end of the spectrum—I had my sophomores write entire hook paragraphs. Some of my favorite moments in the classroom came when we brainstormed hooks for different essays: I loved watching the lightbulbs switch on as students hit upon interestingly oblique ways into the subjects of their own assignments. But of course there were always a few skeptics. Yeah, yeah, a hook is supposed to grab the reader’s attention. What’s the point of that? Who writes anything longer than a text message these days unless they have to for school? And if it’s for school, then you don’t need to grab anyone’s attention—the only one reading these essays are teachers, and they have to read them. Has anyone’s attention ever really been grabbed by a hook?
In 2011 I was poking around on a now defunct site called Grantland and happened across an article about the World Series of Poker. Gambling is not a subject in which I have a lot of interest, so normally I would have moved on. But here was the first line:
I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside.
Attention: grabbed. That line bought the author a paragraph before I decided whether to click away.
I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze had helped my game ever since I started playing 20 years ago, when I was ignorant of pot odds and M-theory and three-betting, and it gave me a boost as I collected my trove of lore, game by game, hand by hand. It had not helped me human relationships-wise over the years, but surely I am not alone here—anyone whose peculiar mix of genetic material and formative experiences had resulted in a near-expressionless mask could relate. Nature giveth, taketh, etc. You make the best of the hand you’re dealt.
And that is how I got hooked into reading four thousand words about the World Series of Poker. Even if the prose style hadn’t been compelling, the fact that the author claimed to be a representative of the Republic of Anhedonia would have been enough to get me to go by to the byline and find out “Who is this?”, for I am a citizen of that republic. And this would be a fairly pointless anecdote had the author not turned out to be Colson Whitehead, of whom I had never heard. So I made a mental note: keep an eye on Grantland and see whether this guy gets any more articles published there. Maybe even read his upcoming novel, which the blurb at the end said was due out in the fall. But these days my mental notes might as well be written on a Buddha Board. I can say “Colson Whitehead, Colson Whitehead” to myself, but I can also say “zucchini, zucchini” to myself and when I get to the store it doesn’t actually help me remember what I went there for. So even while making this mental note, I assumed that in all likelihood I would probably never see or even think of his name again.
And then the novel plugged in that blurb, Zone One, started to pop up on syllabi I saw as I browsed course descriptions at berkeley.edu, looking for classes to audit. A couple more years pass, and I see that Colson Whitehead has just won the Pulitzer for a different novel—The Underground Railroad. Gadzooks! The poker article guy got famous! And I couldn’t help but hear that this one was alternate history—the subject my sophomores selected as the class theme during my last year at that school where the English teachers don’t like hooks. The key change to the timeline: what if the Underground Railroad were not a metaphor but an actual system of tunnels with locomotives carrying escaped slaves to the North? And, uh, I gotta admit that I managed to graduate from eighth grade and get an A in U.S. history thinking that that’s what the Underground Railroad actually was. Anyway, I’d been meaning to read this pretty much from the moment I heard about it, and finally got around to it.
And… the “alternate” part of this alternate history doesn’t matter much. Make this a straight historical novel and you still have pretty much the same book; the train stuff is window dressing. The Underground Railroad is one of the many works of literature attempting to counterprogram the message, in the news of late for being explicitly incorporated into the history curriculum of the state of Florida, that slavery was an essentially benign institution and that, to the extent that it did cause any harm, no effects of that harm are felt by anyone today. On the contrary, Whitehead makes it clear that antebellum America was a hellscape, as great a stain on our history as the Third Reich is on Germany’s, except that the Third Reich lasted for twelve years while American slavery lasted for centuries and continues to shape our society the way that binding in childhood shaped the feet of women in Qing China. What distinguishes this version of the polemic from some others—for instance, this one, which I read last year—is that Whitehead sends his protagonist, Cora, on a journey that echoes Gulliver’s Travels, which Cora reads: Gulliver “roved from peril to peril”, she muses, “each new island a new predicament to solve”. Her perils and predicaments are:
Georgia: Plantation slavery of the sort familiar to anyone who’s ever read a book or watched a movie about American slavery. Evil overseers, gruesome tortures for minor infractions (or for no reason at all), rape and concubinage, mothers powerless to keep their children from being sold down the river, grotesque living conditions… and that’s before mentioning the actual slavery, the day after day of backbreaking labor until the final release of death.
South Carolina: Seemingly much better than Georgia. Livable dormitories, a job as a household servant rather than a field hand, a small measure of autonomy. Even the humiliation of playacting a sanitized version of her former life, or a denizen of “Darkest Africa”, for a “musuem” whose visitors come primarily to jeer, seems to Cora like a small price to pay to escape the plantation. Except then she discovers that the “civilized” people in charge of her South Carolina haven are actually practicing mass sterilization of and performing medical experiments on (e.g., deliberately spreading syphilis among) those they call “the colored pilgrims”. I mentioned the Third Reich above; Cora has essentially escaped from Vernichtung durch Arbeit only to find herself in the clutches of Josef Mengele.
North Carolina: And here we encounter the Final Solution. Southern slaveholders could do very well for themselves living off the stolen labor of a subjugated race, but the price was the constant terror that comes from being surrounded by, even outnumbered by, people who have every reason to want to kill you. So here we have a state whose solution is to replace slaves with indentured servants from places like Ireland and Germany, now that we have reached the mid-19th century and such immigrants are arriving of their own accord, desperate for work. Sounds like an improvement—except that now that the North Carolina of the novel has done away with slavery, there is no role whatsoever for people of African ancestry in its society. Their very presence in the state is illegal; the sentence is torture and execution. Anyone of any race who attempts to help them evade such a fate is sentenced to share it. And the effect is to make life a nightmare even for the “fine famil[ies]” told to “celebrate our good fortune” in living in a state where “the negro race did not exist except at the ends of ropes”: such a society can only function as a police state, and so the remaining residents’ homes are subject to frequent unannounced inspection by the “night riders”. Mutual suspicion is the oil on which the engine runs, as anyone is subject to being informed upon by anyone else: neighbor against neighbor, servant against employer, child against parent. It’s essentially Nineteen Eighty-Four set in eighteen forty-nine.
Tennessee: By the time Cora reaches Tennessee—having been captured by a slave catcher who has tracked her from Georgia—it is an apocalyptic wasteland, scourged by fire and pestilent with yellow fever. The Pulitzer committee praised the novel for its “melding of realism and allegory”, and while that’s true of every section it’s particularly hard to miss here.
Indiana: The triumphalist version of American history depends on happy endings, and the “ending” part is even more important than the “happy”. Okay, yes, a huge swath of this country did practice slavery… but then we had a civil war, and that’s over! And, oh, all right, the freed slaves and their descendants were subjected to Jim Crow laws and other manifestations of racism… but then we had a civil rights movement, and that’s over! That’s certainly the way I was taught history: slavery ended in the 1860s, racism ended in the 1960s, and now it’s the 1980s and total equality has been achieved. And much the same is true of stories of the actual underground railroad. Here’s the story of someone who escaped from the South, made it all the way to the North, and… lived happily ever after, of course. Right? Once you make it to a free state, surely your story can’t go on from there—you’ve made it to the finish line! Except, of course, it’s not like the northern states were full of abolitionists who believed in equality of and harmony among all races. The free soil movement was based much less on morality than on the principle that no one could earn a living wage competing with slave labor. Consider the provisional government of Oregon—the real Oregon, not any kind of alternate version dreamt up for this novel—which banned slavery in the 1840s… and also banned people of African ancestry from residing within the territory. The punishment wasn’t execution, as in this novel, but it was twenty to thirty-nine lashes, every six months. And of course all states became free states after the Civil War, but that didn’t prevent African-American settlements all over the country from being torched and their residents massacred by racist mobs. Indiana proves not to be the last stop for those who follow the novel’s underground railroad—not in a good way, at least.
Interspersed among the location chapters are shorter chapters focusing on a single character—a different one in each—and the way these are deployed is interesting in that there’s no obvious logic to it. Sometimes they give us backstory on characters we have yet to meet in the main narrative. Sometimes they give us backstory on characters whose part in the story is long over, filling in details that make a number of earlier moments retroactively ironic. Sometimes they just flesh out the world of the novel a bit, telling us the story of someone we haven’t heard about before and will never hear about again. You know, the sort of person I assumed Colson Whitehead would be after I read that poker article. Very glad to have been wrong on that one!
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