Amazon Prime has made a mini-series out of Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” that premieres today on its streaming service and the New York Times has its review out. Just to be clear, the book and film are not an attempt to recreate the historical Underground Railroad. This version is set in an America that could be in the 1820s or could be right before the Civil War. The UGRR fugitives travel on real trains and the railroad is really underground, in deep tunnels that extend for hundreds of miles.
Here are a few excerpts from the review:
If you choose to watch “The Underground Railroad,” whose roughly 10 hours arrive Friday on Amazon Prime Video, yes, you will see atrocities. But you will also see humanity and resistance and love. You will see a stirring, full-feeling, technically and artistically and morally potent work, a visual tour de force worthy of Whitehead’s imaginative one….
As in several recent stories — the movie “Harriet,” the series “Underground” — an abolitionist network abets Cora and Caesar’s escape. But in a magic-realist twist, this underground railroad is no metaphor. It’s a rough-hewed network that honeycombs the country, its stations ranging from grotty caverns to palatial terminals. “Just look outside as you speed through,” a railway worker tells them, “and you’ll see the true face of America.”
That face proves to be multiple and monstrous. Cora’s journey into an alternative antebellum America takes her to South Carolina, where a paternalistic regime of uplifting Black people hides sinister intentions; North Carolina, of the horrific Freedom Trail, where Black people are banned entirely, on pain of death; Tennessee, smoldering from a biblical litany of disasters; and Indiana, where free Black families nurture a tenuous prosperity. (The last setting is the series’s most idyllic, and thus its most heartbreaking.)…
It’s not up to me to dictate that you need to see “The Underground Railroad” (the kind of backhanded praise that turns great stories into homework). I won’t pretend that it’s not brutal.
But I can say that it is not only brutal. Cora carries her personal and ancestral memories of abuse on her journey. But she carries something else: a small, rattling packet of okra seeds, the germ of a plant brought by Africans to the Americas, and the last remnant of the garden her mother once tended on the plantation.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
