介绍:
Read by Yang Yong, this is a small segment of the weekly literature program: Ink&Quill.
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What is the first thing that comes to your mind at the mention of "The Underground Railroad"?
A more menacing name for a subway? Some mythical tracks that could traverse space and time like what you might find in science fiction?
In reality, this so-called "Underground Railroad" was neither underground nor an actual rail.
in the early 19th century, as the cry to abolish slavery grew louder in the Northern states of America, a vast network of individuals were involved in helping fugitive slaves escape. Through secret routes, passageways, and safe houses, they aided escapees flee the slaveholding South to the Northern states and "the promise land" of Canada. Since all the activities had to be carried out in secret, a code name for the system, "the Underground Railroad", was coined and it has gradually gained currency since 1830s.
For years, in the eyes of many Americans, The Underground Railroad has been associated with those brave men and women who risked their own lives in lending a helping hand. They have never thought of it as a literal railroad.
Until one day in 2000, a random idea suddenly occurred to Colson Whitehead, a New York-based novelist: why not get real trains involved?
"I was sitting on my couch and came across a reference to the Underground Railroad. I remember when I was a little kid in the fourth grade, I envisioned there's been an actual, literal railroad beneath the earth. Then my teacher explained how it actually worked, I was very disappointed.” The writer recalled: “That afternoon on my couch, it seemed like making it into a literal railroad would be a corky idea for a book and that's not much for a premise. So I quickly added the additional elements that each state the protagonist goes through is a different alternative state of America, sort of like 'Gulliver's Travels'. Each state, like a different island, presents a different take on the American history."
But the then 31-year-old didn't put pen to paper right away, since he was afraid he might “screw it up” and failed to “treat this subject with the respect it deserved”.
It took this budding writer more than a decade to sharpen his skills. In the coming years, Colson Whitehead published a couple of books, including the coming-of-age tale "Sag Harbor" and futuristic zombie thriller "Zone One". Each of them drew accolades from critics.
It was in 2015, when this already celebrated writer finally acted on the whimsical idea he had fifteen years ago. By ploughing deep into one of the darkest chapters in American history, he named his new novel, "The Underground Railroad".
Although there are not enough historical records of how the Underground Railroad actually worked, Whitehead went to slave narratives for main sources.
“One is by Frederick Douglas (and) Harriet Jacobs, (both famous abolitionists). And in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the US government hired writers to talk to former slaves to capture their oral histories before they died. There were people who were eight or nine at the time when the slavery ended and people who worked on small plantations, big plantations. They picked tobacco, cottons, representing every fibre, every factor of the slave experience. And there are hundreds and hundreds of these stories and gave me vast portion of plantation life, which I used to play the Randall plantation in my book."
Just like the protagonist in his debut novel, "The Intuitionist", the hero of Whitehead's latest work is a young woman, a fifteen-year-old slave who was born and grew up on a plantation.
The author admitted that it took a while for him to decide to write from a female perspective: "Over the years, in the back of my head, the main character changed a lot. He was a man looking to save himself; a man looking for a spouse who's been sold out to another plantation; a parent looking for a child. But I never actually explored the mother-daughter dynamic before and that seemed worth exploring. One of the more famous slave narratives (that) have a big inspiration is from Harriet Jacobs, who wrote the book 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl'. She ran away from her master and spent seven years hiding in an attic before she was able to get passage out of North Carolina. In a part of her memoir, she talked about how a slave girl becomes a slave woman, she ends up in a more terrible stage of slavery. She is expected to produce more babies, because more babies mean more hands to pick more cotton, more slaves, and more money for their master. It's a different kind of hell with the one that faces male slaves. And that seemed worthy of exploring. "
Opening up the first few pages of "The Underground Railroad", we first meet Ajarry, who was kidnapped from her village in Africa and was sold as merchandise many times over until she ended up in a cotton plantation in Georgia. There is a brief encounter with her daughter Mabel and finally we are introduced to the heroine of the book, Cora.
A third-generation slave, Cora is forced to fend for herself from the tender age of ten, since her mother Mabel ran away. For every slave on the Randall plantation, life is not "Uncle Tom's Cabin". It's harsh and cruel, but particularly dreadful for the orphaned girl, since she is an outcast even among the slaves. Thoughts of escape never cross her mind, until the atrocious violence and inhumanity on the plantation becomes too much to handle.
After Cora receives a near-fatal whipping, a punishment she suffers for helping a young boy, she reaches out to Caesar. A recent arrival from the northern state Virginia, Caesar once told her about the Underground Railroad and persuades her to escape. The two set foot on the road and manage to find a station, thus a gripping yet grisly itinerary begins.
In this fanciful, mind-bending story, the Underground Railroad is no longer a metaphor for a network of sympathetic parties; rather, it has become a real subterranean transportation system that stretches in darkness with actual locomotives, boxcars and conductors.
However, unlike the modern day rail system with a fixed timetable, the trains in this novel run at unpredictable times and go to unplanned stops. Therefore, this uncertainty runs through Cora's expedition.
In the eyes of Colson Whitehead, his book is not merely a fact-based historical novel.
"The North Carolina section is a good example. Proceeding from the story that Harriet Jacobs who spent seven years in an attic, you think attic, you think Anne Frank. That structure allows me to bring the Nazi Germany and open up a conversation between North Carolina about depressions, the depression of the black Americans in 1850s and Jews in Europe in 1930s and 1940s. All the eugenic ideas of the Nazis, there are scientific racisms, and ideas of blood purity, came from American scientists in the 19th century. So whether it's 19th century America or 20th century Germany, white supremacists everywhere, they are all the same jerks. So by sticking to the truth of things that are not facts, the novel becomes more than just a story of one slave escape."
Cora first gets off in South Carolina, then again proceeds to North Carolina, and afterwards, Tennessee and Indiana.
In a way, each stop represents a different face of evil. In a town of South Carolina, a place that seemingly beams with hope, acceptance, and potential in the very beginning, she finds out that the apparently well-intentioned local medical centre is in fact a laboratory that carries out some sinister eugenic scheme. In North Carolina, the bodies of battered and tortured souls, both black and the white who helped them, dangle from trees "as rotting ornaments" along the road and locals name it, "the Freedom Trail".
As Cora's tumultuous journey proceeds, she realizes that although she has moved out of the "daily sting" of the plantation, like an old ghost, it still haunts her despite being miles away.
During the latter part of her journey, Cora has found herself on a self-sufficient farm in Indiana, a sort of utopia for African Americans, a free black community immune from persecution and oppression. Yet that community is not Cora's terminus on her ride to freedom.
Combining elements of different genres, like science fiction, horror, history, and adventure, "The Underground Railroad" is surely a nightmare-introducing magnifying lens into the atrocities of slavery. But at the same time, the book also serves as a powerful, grandiose ode to human persistence and kindness.
By following Whitehead's calm, sometimes even overly sober prose, we are joining Cora and drawn into the breadth of America. Just as one of the characters in the book, the station's agent Lumbly once said: "If you want to see what this nation is all about…you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America."
Once published in 2016, "The Underground Railroad" soon became a literary blockbuster. Translated into forty languages including Chinese, the novel not only won a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction, but also is long listed for this year's Man Booker prize.
The overwhelming success of "The Underground Railroad" elevates its author into one of the most established names in English-speaking literary firmament.
But how could a story on pre-Civil-War America have such a global influence?
The author gives his answer: "What I have learnt that is in different countries (and) cultures, people either been oppressed or oppressors. So that parallel dynamic of being dominated or dominating of course is a great dynamic in human history. So even though it's about American slavery, that relationship obviously goes back a long way in every country. "
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