The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Summary

Zero to Well-Read: "The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead

Podcast: Book Riot
Episode Date: July 21, 2026
Hosts: Jeff O’Neal & Rebecca Schinsky

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, hosts Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Schinsky commemorate the 10th anniversary of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed novel, The Underground Railroad. The episode blends book club warmth and English class depth, exploring not just the novel’s plot but also its historical impact, what it feels like to read, why it matters, and what makes Whitehead one of the most versatile American novelists working today. The hosts reflect on first encounters with the book, discuss Whitehead’s genre-defying career, and chart the novel’s enduring cultural resonance.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Colson Whitehead’s Career & Place in American Literature

• Evolution of Whitehead:

  • Whitehead’s career spans multiple genres, from the speculative (Zone One) to realist fiction (The Nickel Boys).
  • "He likened himself in one interview I read for this show...to what Kubrick did. Like, here's his war one, here's his erotic thriller, here's his sci-fi fantasy one." – Jeff [03:18]

• Whitehead’s Approach:

  • Every Whitehead novel is “across his personal spectrum of cultural references, imagination, ideas,” with a distinct narrative voice each time.
  • “His ability to spin a fully realized narrative voice that feels singular from everything else in his body of work every time... He delights in language. He delights in really thinking about things and pulling apart threads that we're either scared to pull apart or that might seem silly to pull apart.” – Rebecca [27:00]

• Placement in Literary Canon:

  • Whitehead seen as “among the first rank of living American authors.”
  • His awards (Pulitzer, National Book Award, MacArthur “Genius” Grant) mark him as “in the highest echelons of American literature.” – Rebecca [22:01]
  • Notable: Only Black author to win the Pulitzer twice.

The Book: "The Underground Railroad"

• Premise & Structure:

  • "What if the Underground Railroad was a real train?" – Jeff [03:01]
  • The book’s speculative elevator pitch is a hook, but Whitehead’s genius is what he does beyond it.

• Plot Synopsis:

  • Cora, a 15-year-old enslaved girl in Georgia, joins Caesar in escape.
  • The literal Underground Railroad propels her journey through reimagined Southern states—each a different speculative take on race and society (South Carolina: Negro uplift with dark undercurrents; North Carolina: apartheid and eradication; Tennessee: burning, rebirth; Indiana: Black utopia).
  • Pursued by the slave catcher Ridgeway, the narrative intersperses flashbacks and vignettes focused on other characters, providing “kaleidoscopic” depth. – Rebecca [08:57, 34:47]

Themes & Artistic Achievements

• Speculative Elements as Artistic Tool:

  • Magical realism serves to make historical brutality even more pronounced.
  • “The surreal elements serve to make the real horrors even more real. Which is an incredible feat to pull off.” – Rebecca [33:58]
  • "It’s a metaphor of movement... allows Cora to move through different locations and get a holistic, stereo vision of slavery's reality." – Jeff [48:47]

• Imagination, Absurdity, and Atrocity:

  • Whitehead exposes both the absurd logic and unthinkable violence underpinning American slavery—ranging from forced medical experimentation to public spectacles of terror.
  • “All of it is absurd. And there's something about making a metaphor like the Underground Railroad literal that allows us to engage with the other literal absurdities of the practices in a way that feels grounded and powerful.” – Rebecca [18:36]
  • “There is nothing Whitehead could make up about what slavery did that I wouldn't believe is at least possible. And that I think is one thing the book is trying to remind you of...” – Jeff [41:12]

• Resistance and Creativity:

  • The Underground Railroad stands as both historical and creative resistance.
  • “Slavery is the ultimate expression of stinginess and greed, and generosity is the thing—a generosity of spirit and literal generosity—that drives the resistance work of the Underground Railroad.” – Rebecca [46:38]

Whitehead’s Research and Process

• Delayed Genesis:

  • Whitehead conceived the idea for the novel around 2000 but waited over a decade, maturing artistically and drawing on extensive research—slave narratives, oral histories, Douglass, Tubman.
  • “I think this is a novel that has to come from a mature writer...You need to have sea legs and to really know what you're doing and have your fiction skills like really in your hands for this.” – Rebecca [22:11]

• Historical Fiction and Invention:

  • Whitehead balances emotional and psychological truth, not literal truth.
  • “It's grounded in reality, and I'm not going to do something that it's emotionally true...without being factually true all the time. And that's what fiction is about.” – Jeff [21:58]

Structure & Literary Touchpoints

• Picaresque Tradition:

  • The structure riffs on the picaresque, plunging an outsider protagonist through episodic adventures, enabling exploration of “ideas or a social milieu” (Huck Finn, Candide, Don Quixote). – Jeff [36:25]
  • “Survival in making sense, I think, is not a terrible way to think about what this book is doing.” – Jeff [36:54]

• Literary & Historical Connections:

  • Intertextual nods to Greek myth (Cora as Persephone), Morrison’s Sula, Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and direct references to Gulliver’s Travels and Candide.
  • “I think that's one of the reasons to read the great books— is that they draw on each other, but also you start being able to connect them for yourself.” – Rebecca [76:23]

The Reading Experience

• Tension & Engagement:

  • Both hosts describe the reading experience as “riveting,” “vivid in all the ways,” and impossible to put down, even as it's harrowing.
  • “For being about subject matter that is as painful as this is...I didn't want to like put it down and get away from it...he really knows how to temper it.” – Rebecca [32:48]

• Emotional & Intellectual Impact:

  • The novel achieves the rare feat of being “entertaining without softening the difficult elements,” providing “magic trick” balance between horror and engagement.
  • “The language itself is accessible, the writing is accessible, the story is easy to read, makes it a little bit more approachable for the subject matter.” – Rebecca [39:15]

The Power, Limits, and Uses of Speculation

• On History & Imagination:

  • The hosts wrestle with what the imaginary can add to our engagement with history—highlighting, distorting, or expanding it.
  • “What can the imaginary add to our experience and understanding of history? I don't have a good answer to that...” – Jeff [90:35]

• Absurdity as Analytical Lens:

  • “Absurd is the word to hold onto here...absurd things that white slave owners come up with to highlight how cruel...and then he's also showing us other expressions of creativity through the ingenuity of the conductors of the railroad.” – Rebecca [18:36]

---

Memorable Quotes (with Timestamps & Attribution)

• “What if the Underground Railroad was a real train?” — Jeff [03:01]
• “The way that he delivered on what that blurb is is going to be surprising, unexpected, and even more imaginative than the synopsis makes it sound.” — Rebecca [04:33]
• "All of it is absurd. And there's something about making a metaphor like the Underground Railroad literal that allows us to engage with the other literal absurdities of the practices in a way that feels grounded and powerful." — Rebecca [18:36]
• “There is nothing Whitehead could make up about what slavery did that I wouldn't believe is at least possible.” — Jeff [41:12]
• "Slavery is the ultimate expression of stinginess and greed, and generosity is the thing...that drives the resistance work of the Underground Railroad." — Rebecca [46:38]
• “An insurrection of one.” — Jeff [68:15]
• “America too is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes...it is their right to take the land, to kill Indians, make war, enslave their brothers." — Whitehead, quoted by both hosts [52:50, 66:50]
• “He delights in language. He delights in really thinking about things and pulling apart threads that we're either scared to pull apart or that might seem silly to pull apart.” — Rebecca [27:00]
• “This is an incredible reading experience. It knocked my socks off the first time. This was my first reading since 2016 and I knew what was going to happen. But it doesn't matter that you know what's going to happen. Like, how he does it...” — Rebecca [95:22]

---

Notable Segments & Timestamps

• Whitehead’s Genre Range & Voice: [03:18], [27:00]
• Book’s Premise and Plot Recap: [03:01], [08:57], [32:48]
• Historical Context and Themes: [14:28], [32:48], [41:12]
• Picaresque Structure & Literary Ancestry: [36:25], [48:47], [76:23]
• Resistance and Generosity: [46:38], [55:25]
• The Absurdities of Slavery and American Racial Logic: [52:50], [57:20]
• Discussion of the Museum of Natural Wonders: [86:53]
• The Reading Experience: [32:48], [39:15], [95:22]
• Score Breakdown: [91:25] onward

---

Notable Moments & Observations

• Personal Connections: Both hosts recount reading The Underground Railroad at release and experiencing the full scope of Whitehead’s career together. [01:27], [31:34]
• Whitehead’s Literary Reputation: Discussion of his rarity as a two-time Pulitzer winner. [22:11]
• On Slavery’s Realities and Metaphors:
  • The “delusion” of America and how the novel confronts foundational American myths.
  • The “customer of pain” line reflecting on historical memory and representation. [68:44]
• On the Power of Allyship: White and Black conductors; sacrifices rarely remembered. [71:45]
• Modern Relevance: 2016 election context, ongoing American reckoning with race. [24:21], [93:19]
• Comparisons With Other Novels: Connections to James, Their Eyes Were Watching God, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Children. [87:30]

---

Related Media & Adaptations

• Barry Jenkins’s Miniseries Adaptation:
  • Praised as “magisterial,” but the hosts note the book is “easier to bear” than the visceral visuals of television.
  • “Whitehead put them on the page and so Barry Jenkins put them on the screen. And like, it took me like 10 weeks to watch these 10 episodes.” – Rebecca [82:40]
• Influences & Readalikes:
  • Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward, James by Percival Everett, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs.
  • Direct inspiration from Gulliver’s Travels for the book’s episodic, “kaleidoscopic” structure. [87:08]

---

Zero to Well-Read Score Breakdown

1. Historical Importance: 8/10

   • Recently published, but widely considered a landmark 21st-century novel.

2. Readability: 8/10

   • Prose is accessible and compelling, structure is propulsive—but the subject matter is harrowing.

3. Current Relevance: 8.5/10

   • Addresses foundational, ongoing questions of race and American history.

4. Book Nerd Read Cred: 8/10

   • High read cred; even higher for those who’ve delved further into Whitehead’s oeuvre.

5. Oh Damn Factor: 9/10

   • Numerous passages, themes, and craft decisions that amaze and provoke.

---

Key Takeaways for Dinner Parties, Book Clubs, and Beyond

• The Underground Railroad uses speculative fiction not to escape history, but to defamiliarize it and force the reader to see old truths anew.
• Whitehead’s artful balance of genre, emotional resonance, and intellectual depth situates him among America’s greatest living novelists.
• The book’s portrait of resistance, agency, and community amidst systematic horror is both a reminder of the country’s past and a commentary on its present.
• The novel’s structure—echoing the picaresque, mythic, and modern—enables wide-ranging exploration of American identity and the legacy of slavery.
• Whitehead’s inventive use of metaphor and allusion highlights both the horror and the absurdity of America's original sin.

---

Episode Highlight Quotes for Sharing

• "An insurrection of one." – Jeff [68:15]
• “America too is a delusion, the grandest one of all.” – [66:50]
• “Who builds anything in this country?” – [67:32]
• “Cora had never been the first person to open a book before.” – Rebecca [81:45]
• “The Underground Railroad was a metaphor at the time…they had no subways, right? This was an imaginative description, flex, I mean, it's weird how it is both really applicable and not…” – Jeff [43:57]

---

Final Thoughts

This episode offers a rich, layered discussion that does justice to the complexity, innovation, and emotional force of The Underground Railroad. With warmth, irreverence, and sharp insight, Jeff and Rebecca make the case for its enduring significance — both as a reading experience and as a reckoning with American history.

---

For further discussion of supporting characters, join the podcast’s Patreon Office Hours.

---

Transcript

[A]

This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by ThriftBooks.com Today's episode is the Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. In a lot of ways, I think this might be the sweet spot for buying used books for a certain kind of person. I'm not necessarily a collector of vintage editions, but I do like to get a deal on a book I'm interested in reading and having. And because the Underground Railroad was so popular, such an award winner. And it's not that old, but it's also not that new. We're 10 years out. You can get a lot of really good additions now. There are not a lot of COVID variations, at least in English for this. So you're, you're going to have the original cover either in paperback or hardcover, but you can get a hardcover in like new condition for seven bucks. And that's a really cool thing to have on your shelf, a really good reading copy to have if you want something to mark up and then get another one to have for your collection. So go to thriftbooks.com get free shipping and order of get free shipping on orders over $15 in the U.S. all right, time for the show. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I am Jeff o'. Neill.

[B]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. This week on the occasion of its 10th anniversary. I can't believe it's been 10 years. Jeffrey R. We are talking about Colson Whitehead's National Book Award winning, Pulitzer Prize winning best book of the year on all the lists novel, the Underground Railroad.

[A]

A shared favorite author for us and something that we got to experience together as a new title 10 years ago. We'd been doing the Book Riot podcast for a while, been working in Book Riots for a while. And then I am very personally connected to Colson Whitehead. He doesn't know I exist, but when I moved to New York, I picked up the Intuitionist at the Strand in like a used pile and, you know, felt like I discovered it. And this was a new author who was about my age and writing in ways that felt new and fresh and to watch his career over the ensuing multiple decades, I think. And at this moment, when the Underground Railroad came out in 2026, in 2016, it felt like a coronation sort of event. The awards that it got, the discords that it got. It has become the book that people point to. For Whitehead, though it's not maybe the one you and I would point to. We'll get to that for our Hot takes a little bit later though. We think this book is a masterpiece. So it's very, very easy to be like, whatever. We love this book.

[B]

It's just a hierarchy of Whitehead books is a challenge because they're all excellent in their own.

[A]

And to some degree, the one that we're referring to as the Nickel Boys was his subsequent work that also got turned into a movie. This, as we'll talk about, got the Underground Railroad got turned into a magisterial 10 part Barry Jenkins. You kind of can't believe it exists. Kind of a document which we'll talk about a little bit later. And some of it was our surprise of what Whitehead does in the Nickel Boys because it's a smaller book, it's not fantastical, it's taking a horrible moment from American history, from black American history, but it's so much smaller and contained. Coming off of the kaleidoscopy, kaleidoscopic sort of cabinet of imaginative feats that Whitehead pulls off in the Underground Railroad. We were, we were ready to expect the Underground Railroad when we heard they can see that white was going to do it. And then we were sort of surprised by what Nickel Boy does. And that's one thing to know about Whitehead is what I'm trying to get to here is, is he will try almost. He has tried almost every genre and done it in surprising ways. He likened himself in one interview I read for this show, prep for this show, to what Kubrick did. Like, here's his war one, here's his erotic thriller, here's his sci fi fantasy one. And so he very much thinks of these as being across his personal spectrum of cultural references, imagination, ideas. But this one too, Thunderground Railroad, it's executed brilliantly. And I don't think it can be said enough, Rebecca, that the conceit, the premise is you don't even need an elevator pitch. It's just the elevator open. Like you can open the door and say, what if the Underground Railroad was a real train? And everyone's like, oh, that's interesting. And then what he does from there is then what makes the book. I think the Internet, the reading culture at large knew of Whitehead. He's still not as famous. Some of the great, great bestsellers, he doesn't sell millions of copies or like some other people. But if you follow books of, you know, literary fiction at all, Whitehead is among the first rank of living American authors. We can talk about where he is. What is your sense of where Whiteheads was then and then what has happened the ensuing 10 years I think that

[B]

prior to the Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead was very well respected in the publishing world, in the world of literary fiction. You know, he comes out of the gate with the Intuitionist, which performed very well for a debut novel. There's Apex Hides the Hurt, there's Sag harbor, which is kind of a coming of age story. And we had already seen that he can do a little bit of everything. There's also Zone One, which is a dystopian zombie novel, but not exactly. And that's the real thing about Whitehead, is that the pitch is always strong. But then the way that he delivers on what that blurb is is going to be surprising, unexpected, and even more imaginative than the synopsis makes it sound. So what if the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad? Fascinating. But the way that he explores that and just the ability to take on such difficult subject matter. There's nothing more difficult, I don't think, in American literature than to write about slavery. To write about it in such a head on and unflinching way. And it's a fine line to walk to address the violence without tipping into trauma porn or tipping into it being gratuitous. It's a really hard balance to find. And he.

[A]

Or just so off putting you put the book down. Right.

[B]

To write about it in a way that is still engaging and where people will hang with you for 300 pages of whatever you're trying to say. And the way that he executed this was just so brilliant that it did feel like a real coronation or a leveling up of someone who was already known to be a wonderful writer. But into okay, now you are in the highest echelons of American literature. Before we go any further, Jeff, and we get into the synopsis, I want to remind folks, especially as we are cruising towards this show's one year anniversary in September. September, we are working our way towards a thousand ratings and reviews on Apple podcasts. We're so thankful for everybody who has already left a rating or a review. It makes the Apple algorithm happy, helps new people find their way to the show. If you're listening there, please give a rating or review or Spotify your podcaster of choice. But we would love to crack that number.

[A]

We did for the fall. Kind of a mini drive challenge for I don't remember if it was 150 or 200 ratings reviews. We blew past that where I think we that's why we did the Christmas Carol episode. Okay, if we get to this by X date, we'll record this bonus episode. Shoot us an email at 02 well read bookriot.com what would be a fun sort of goal target? We hit our thing. We get a thousand ratings on Apple podcasts in the US, I should say. I know depending on what jurisdiction, it may show up a little bit differently. What would be fun to do? I would also say a whole nother book is going to be kind of a tough ask. We're already kind of, we're putting all the coal into the boiler that we can to do a weekly episode at this point. But maybe if there's a short story we had a lot of fun doing Bartleby, something shorter or a poem or something like that. That would be interesting. But what would get you to rate that thing? Take that five seconds, hit the five stars there. You could go ahead and do it. Maybe you don't even need an inducement, you just need a reminder. But that really helps us out as well. If you want extra content, you can Join our patreon patreon.com joytowellred we did an Odyssey. Read along. This is coming out after the Odyssey is already out. I'll be so curious about how happy or sad we are about that right now. The Greeks make an appearance in the notes and I've got some notes. The ancient Greeks are always welcome and they have some interesting inclusions in Underground Railroad. But today's Office Hours, what we call it, we're going to be doing a more in depth look at some of the specific characters. We're going to mention characters here, but a real deep dive into the book is hard to get to. All the specific characters talked about, ones that stuck out, ones we're not sure what to do with, the ones that maybe get overshadowed when you think about Korra and Caesar and Ridgeway and some of the first ranked characters in this book and there are many of them. But please join us over there. All right, Rebecca, this is what you were made to do, is to give us a synopsis of a fabulous story. A short book. I don't think we said this a relatively short book. 300 pages that moves between multiple decades in a character's life. Multiple states in the American South a little. And then we get flashbacks and forwards and other documents here. But on one level, it's a pretty simple story, right, Rebecca?

[B]

Yeah, it is a pretty simple story. It's about a girl named cora. She is 15 years old at the time the story begins. She is enslaved on a plantation in Georgia and despite being in this large community of other enslaved people, she's functionally Alone in that world. Her mother ran away years ago. Cora has been labeled like she's kind of been labeled as one of, like, the crazy women in her community. And exiled to live in one cabin with other women who are also outsiders or have been rejected. She has experienced rape pretty recently as she came of age and a real public humiliation very recently when the book opens. And then a man named Caesar, also enslaved on this plantation, approaches her. They don't know each other very well, but he says he's planning to run away and he wants her to come with him. And even though she doesn't know him very well, she agrees. And with the help of local people that they find out are secretly conductors on the literal underground railroad, the two make their getaway and they travel through the south in this speculative and fabulous construction where an actual steam engine is running under the earth in the south. The whole time, they're hunted by this infamous slave catcher named Ridgeway. So there's a real sort of cat and mouse element to the story. And as Cora is fleeing in pursuit of freedom, she stops. Along the way in several states, they spend some time in South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana. And in each of those places, the world is familiar, but it's sideways from what we know of reality and sideways from what we see in history books. For example, in South Carolina, slavery doesn't exist and the community has committed to uplifting black people. Or at least that's what it appears like at first. In North Carolina, they've just outlawed black people altogether. And so you get Whitehead imagining other ways that the south has responded to trying to manage these communities of black people who have been enslaved. It's heartbreaking and harrowing. It's vivid in its depictions of the horrific realities of slavery and slavery's legacy. This podcast is supported by Quince. The best pieces you'll wear this summer are the ones that you'll want to wear on repeat. They're comfortable, versatile, and they're right for almost every occasion. That's what I go to Quince for. They make elevated essentials using premium materials like European linen, organic cotton, and washable silk without the traditional retail markup. My favorite Quince piece this summer is actually a set. Actually, it's two sets. I have their European linen long sleeve shirt and matching shorts in two different colors. I live in them. You can wear the pieces together for an easy, easy, put together travel look, or split them up and wear them as separates. The shirt works over a tank on cooler evenings. The shorts go with just about everything, and together they are the perfect mix and match items when you're packing. Quince's 100% European linen pants, dresses and tops are lightweight, they're effortless to style and they start at just $32. Their denim is soft and comfortable, their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering when the evening things cool down, and their beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry adds that subtle finishing touch that makes even a simple outfit like these linen sets that I love feel really intentional. Everything at Quint is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories to cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for exceptional quality, not the brand markups. And it's not just apparel. You can also find elevated essentials for your home, including bedding and bath, kitchen and furniture at Quint's. Make your summer wardrobe feel easier when you go to quince.comwellred for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now available for our friends in Canada too. That's Q U-I-N C E.com Wellred for free shipping and 365 day returns quints.com Wellred. This podcast is supported by Bol and Branch when your life demands your full attention, or maybe your hormones have other plans for your sleep, you need every advantage you can get. Bolen Branch's organic cotton sheets, breathable blankets and temperature regulating comforters. Let me say it again, temperature regulating comforters are built to actually support rest, not just look good on your bed. I'm at a point where I can't afford a bad night's sleep before a big day and my old bedding was not helping me. It ran hot and it never felt like it was on my side. Switching to bowl and Branch made a real difference. The sheets are noticeably softer, they regulate temperature so much better and I added the comforter so the whole bed feels like it's working for me instead of against me. It's the kind of upgrade you wish you'd made so much sooner. Sleep cooler this summer with bowl and Branch during their annual summer event. For a limited time you can get 20% off [e-mail] wellred with the code well read. That's bolandbranch b o l l a n d branch.com well read code well read to take 20% off bolandbranch.com well read code well read. Some exclusions apply and it is one of the all time great American novels. Capital G A and I'm pretty comfortable

[A]

putting up on the first rank. Like, we've never really done that exercise. And maybe that's a Patreon. Maybe that could be our challenge episode, frankly, to get to a thousand. Well, or we could do a little homework of like, give us some constraint of like. I'm one of those people that do not believe there is a great American novel, but I think the idea of a great American novel is useful. What are we talking about? What? You know, what, why. Why it's impossible and why is it alluring at the same time? You know, I don't think we. I'm going to have to check my math. I think Whitehead is the youngest writer that we've talked about on Zero to, well, read. I can't imagine there's anybody else younger at this point. Maybe Stephanie Meyer is younger. We did do Twilight, but for sort of.

[B]

Wasn't Louisa May Alcott pretty young for.

[A]

No, I mean, right now, like, who's alive? Like. Yes, got it. Yes, fair point. Yes. I didn't think about it in quite those terms. Who knows how old Homer was? Maybe he didn't exist. Homer also appears weirdly in the Underground Railroad. So it's always hard to know because, like, as we get. You hear, you've heard us do on the show, the historical importance. Things that come earlier get higher historical importance scores, but things that come later have the totality of what's come before sort of in its data set to process and use. Whitehead has read slave narratives. He's read Frederick Douglass. He's also read Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing. He's read Jesmyn Ward, he's read Toni Morrison. So what he is thinking about how he can add to thinking, understanding and the remembrance of American slavery, but do and then add to it sort of to convict, to contribute a verse to the ongoing lament of memory and sadness that goes on. And I think because he's interested so in the imagination and playing, it adds something that some of these other ones don't want to do, aren't interested in doing, but also didn't have themselves as reference to do. So they could say, okay, we have Alex Haley's roots. We have some accounts. I don't need necessarily just to tell it like it was so that people don't forget. I can add imagination. I can add literary ness to get people to think about, understand, and encounter this afresh, to keep the memory from being misremembered, from being forgotten, or I think most maybe most importantly, misconstrued as history goes on. So that's One of the reasons it's so important here, because, as you have down in these notes, like the experience and practice of American chattel slavery is sort of combined, I would say, with the displacement and genocide of native peoples in America. Sort of the twin origin stories that need to go along with the Powdered Whig guys right in Santa Maria's. They're right there. They're on the same boats, sort of literally and figuratively. And that Whitehead can make this story, which is now, at the time of writing in 2016, 150, 175 years old, out of the time of living memory to bring it into the present and show that it's still relevant, to show that this history still matters and is a space of invention and agency for black people, I think is really fascinating. I kept thinking about Mel Brooks producers. Mel brooks just turned 100 the other day, right. And so one thing he said about the producers is like, well, the Nazis are. I can't do anything to the Nazis. They're all. Well, those Nazis are gone. Unfortunately, Palpatine returned, I guess, to quote a Internet meme here. But what I do have is to engage with them and make fun of them and show them for their absurdity and diabolical nature that they are. And I think one reason that Whitehead's choice to hold up a fun house mirror sort of to the actual practice of chattel slavery, at least for me, it saw. I saw it with something like fresh eyes, Rebecca. I don't know how to say it. Like, it made me engage with these terrible, absurd notions anew and get to me engage with them in a way that's just not passive, like, boy, that was pretty bad. Like, there are ideas here that are. That are new and worth engaging with on their own terms.

[B]

Yes. And I think absurd is the word to hold onto that. Creativity is a subject here, and Whitehead uses it and uses the like, the creative, absurd things that white slave owners come up with to highlight exactly how cruel and awful the situation was, those practices were. And then he's also showing us other expressions of creativity through the ingenuity of the conductors of the railroad, through the bravery that Cora and Caesar and the other people she encounters have to exhibit. They have to find this level of creativity and. And imagine new ways out of the world that they're in, because the world they're in has been so tightly defined. But slavery wasn't stagnant, and it wasn't one thing. Racism is not just one thing. Any way that black people who were enslaved found to resist Slave owners found another way to try to hold them back. You want to run away? We'll make it illegal to cross state lines. And on and on and on. So, like, all of it is absurd. And there's something about making a metaphor like the Underground Railroad literal that allows us to engage with the other literal absurdities of the practices in a way that feels grounded and powerful and also somehow tempers it. We were talking at the top of the show about how this can be a really difficult subject to spend three or four hundred pages with. And there's something about the surprise that Whitehead delivers and that you don't know what is going to happen, what it's gonna be like when Korra lands in each new state. That it's entertaining while also being a book that wrestles with the most difficult elements of American history. And that it's entertaining without softening the difficult elements is such a magic trick that I think is really what makes Whitehead one of the best in the game.

[A]

And he himself had a sense that he'd had this idea for a while before actually putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard or whatever, but didn't think he was ready, had some other things he was working on, and he knew it was going to require a lot of research. And maybe he knew that. I don't know if maturity is the right word, but he had some other art to make before he felt like he had the tools at his disposal. And finally, he kind of didn't get out of his way. He found himself writing in this voice that was repetitive. He's like, okay, I need to deal with this thing. And he did a whole bunch of research. It was a different kind of a book for that regard. That I think then leads into the nickel boys. Like, oh, I understand how to use research to turn into my kind of a novel. At the same time, he was listening to and reading slave narratives that were put on tape during the Federal Writers project in the 1930s. He was reading Frederick Douglass. He's reading, you know, the stories of Harriet Tubman. He immersed himself into this and used that as the source material for a story, as the grounding. But also then it gave him, I think, a foundation to build his own imaginative scaffolding upon. Like, okay, it's grounded in reality, and I'm not going to do something that it's emotionally true. It's sort of political and psychologically true without sort of being factually true all the time. And that's what fiction is about. Rebecca. Like, what else do we want from fiction than to do something like that.

[B]

Yes. Yeah. And this is. I'm glad you used the word maturity, because I think this is a novel that has to come from. From a mature writer. It's Whitehead's sixth novel. He had already had award nominations. He had a literary reputation.

[A]

As we were talking about, 14 years passed as MacArthur. Like, that's a decade and a half in the rear view.

[B]

Yeah. The dude was declared a genius a decade and a half before this happened,

[A]

and still, it's like, you know, I'm not ready yet.

[B]

Yeah. But he was also in his early 30s when he gets the MacArthur genius grant, and he did have the original idea for the book in 2000, but he knew, as you were saying, it would take a lot of research. He just knew that he couldn't spend time in that space yet. And I think that was the right choice. You need to have sea legs and to really know what you're doing and have your fiction skills, like, really in your hands for this. And, of course he does. It goes on, as I said, to win the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. It's one of only eight novels to achieve that. It's good trivia and even rarer. He is one of only four authors to win the Pulitzer twice and the only black author to win the Pulitzer twice. The other three are Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike. So just really in the highest ranks.

[A]

What's your top five Booth Tarkington books?

[B]

Rebecca, I was really afraid you were gonna ask me something about Booth Tarkington. I Googled no things. I could not name you a Booth Tarkington novel.

[A]

I mean, his most famous book is the Magnificent Ambersons. Again, I just know that from being a nerd a million years ago. No one knows this. This is the thing I'm saying to the listener out there, like, just because you win two Pulitzers doesn't mean you remembered. Art is hard, Rebecca, and unforgiving. I don't know what else to say about that.

[B]

I invite you to just go 30 years back and look at Pulitzer and National Book Award winners for a sense of how few books really stand the test of time.

[A]

But this one has, and it was the book of the year, and I believe got the double New York Times review, which is very rare. Machiko Kakutani was still reviewing there. Kathryn Schultz wrote in the New Yorker a blurb from Barack Obama, which is unusual. And then if this wasn't on your best of list in 2020, assuming it wasn't a genre or some other kind of specialty list. I really don't know what you were doing. I think you were not doing the right things.

[B]

I could not find a best of list from 2016 that didn't have this on.

[A]

It would be a real zag and maybe I'd like to see someone's justification, but that would be quite wild.

[B]

At the same time, it didn't win all the awards, but it won't most of them or it was not. It was at least nominated for most of them. And this happens every now and then. We get a novel that is just so obviously capital G great that it just runs the table. It happened with James. It happened with Demon, Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver's novel. Like every once in a while, once or twice a decade maybe that happens. And it was underground railroad in 2016. It comes out in August of 2016. And of course that we're in the middle of presidential primaries and Donald Trump goes on to win that election and race. The conversation in America around race really took a hard turn after that election, which complicates and deepens the reading of this book and its legacy as well, I think. Number seven on the New York Times top 100 books of the century so far.

[A]

Whitehead, himself a creature of New York, born in 1969, grew up in New York. His folks were executives and he did the thing that I think makes it felt has always made him feel modern contemporary to me is he's reading comics in Stephen King. Like everyone who sort of was born after Stephen King's book were in public libraries. He's a person of genre. Went to Harvard, studied English and Comparative literature, got a job writing for the Village Boy, started writing fiction. I don't know if he wrote any fiction in college. I never have found out about them. I wrote a paper about Colson Whitehead and grad school a long time ago comparing him to Gene Toomer, who he used this phrase of Gene Toomer that I want to enter just into the chat here a little bit. He saw in Gene Toomer someone who was unruly like me is the phrase he used. And that sort of creative unruliness I think is an interesting way of Whitehead is amenable and a personable person, which I think can belief the unruliness of his imagination and the books that he writes. These are weird books, Rebecca, is what I'm saying they are. The intuition is a weird idea. John Amerdean is a weird idea. Apex Hide the Hurts, which is about a town who sort of allows itself to be renamed after a brand for money is a weird idea, like. And yet there's something about the execution that makes them readable. I don't know. There's a weird duality to the Whitehead reading experience where it seems approachable. You feel like you know what's going on, but you start really looking. I was like, this is some weird ass crap I'm dealing with right here. And for me, that's a wonderful experience. That's a positive rather than negative.

[B]

That it goes down so easy is just a mark of how good he is. Like. As we are recording this, I'm reading the final book in his Harlem crime trilogy, Cool Machine, which will have been out for a few weeks by the time this show airs. And Colson Whitehead doing Harlem crime novels that move through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. This is not picking up any other crime novel. Reading Colson Whitehead is not like reading anybody else. And it's even slippery to talk about his writing voice, because the voice of each novel, or in this case this series, is so distinct. His ability to spin a fully realized narrative voice that feels singular from everything else in his body of work every time. And they're all just phenomenal. And you can tell, I think, even in how difficult the books can be sometimes and how strange they can be, that he's having a great time. He delights in language. He delights in really thinking about things and pulling apart threads that we're either scared to pull apart or that might seem silly to pull apart. Like, Colson Whitehead will just go there with you in whatever the mode is. Are we being silly? Okay. Are we being serious? Okay. Do we need to add some personable color to this guy who has been fencing stolen goods in Harlem for 30 years and make you like him? He finds a way to do it. It's just so creative. He has so many channels. Colson Whitehead truly contains multitudes. I think that's what makes him so fun and exciting to read.

[A]

There's some authors we've talked about that if you gave me a paragraph, I could probably identify them. Rushdie, I think, comes to mind. Pynchon comes to mind. I think Alcott comes to mind in that regard as well. But Ishiguro and Whitehead are unlike that for me, where I may not know from the paragraph, but I would know from five or six pages. Some of it's the confidence, some of it is just the interest in the kinds of stories they're telling and the way in which they're telling them. You feel them, their personality and their ability sort of accrue over multiple pages rather than being embedded in individual sentence like a Tom Robbins or a Walt Whitman or like some of the great quote unquote, stylists that you recognize after a few sentences. Ishigo and Whitehead are great stylists, but it is not. They're sort of chameleons, right? They sort of build to fit what the book is wanting to do in the story they're trying to do. At the same time, not for nothing, a member of our greatest literary power couple with it doesn't really matter, but like, this is the firman that we're talking about, the highest echelons of American letters that, you know, sort of combines commercial and critical. An artistic success all in one. Life goals, I guess, is. Do we still do life goals? I don't know if we do that.

[B]

Yeah. Well. And for folks who over or who heard our episode with Laura McGrath about interpreter of Maladies, we talked some about literary agents and the role that they have played in American fiction. Whitehead's agent, Nicole Aragi, is one of the legendary agents in contemporary American fiction. She's been his agent for his entire career. And then through the magic of the New York publishing world, he's also, as you said, married to Julie Bearer, who is one of the newer generation of power literary agents. Also on my list of like the top 10 most interesting people working in publishing today, as we talked about on the Book Riot podcast a couple of years ago. But just he's a fascinating guy and also kind of a cipher because Colson Whitehead, like, he used to be one of the great tweeters, but Colson Whitehead is not out there giving a billion interviews.

[A]

And why would you.

[B]

Right? You don't have to. When you're Colson Whitehead, there are authors at this level who are like, really out there in the PR machine. They seem to enjoy it or they're invested in it for some reason. But he seems to be really like, picking his shots at this point. Like, there was just a big New Yorker profile of him around Cool Machine. I think we'll get a few more of those. He's working on another novel that he's not ready to talk about yet, so we will continue to see him, but that he is both really fascinating, but also we don't know that much about him. I think also plays into this reputation and a little bit of mystique around him, which I think is important when you are in the contention for I think he's the greatest living American novelist. But anytime you're talking about that list, there's A little magic and some mystery about folks.

[A]

Yeah. Our first exposure to this book. We both. You read it before it came out. I bought it first day in hardcover and started reading it immediately. I've read the complete Whitehead, I think in order. I think in order. I think I read them as they come out. I have all them on my shelf so in there from day one. We were doing this together when we heard about the book and we were kind of like with James and Percival Everett, like really excited about the conceit. And I was very confident it was going to be really good.

[B]

Yeah, it's cool. Sidhwan.

[A]

I didn't really have any doubt that it was going to be anything other than great. It was so clearly about American slavery. We've talked about the plot. What is it about in addition to that? Or how is it. What does it want to say, Rebecca? What's it dealing with? What are we going to get? What do you get as a reader coming out of encountering Colson Whitehead's take on American slavery? I doubt he'll write another slavery book. Maybe he will. He doesn't tend to return unless he writes a trilogy about the same characters over the course of several years.

[B]

Is an anomaly for him.

[A]

What's it like to. What's the reading experiences like this and then building out of that. What are the ideas we're getting? What are we. What kind of themes and, you know, character and place and concerns that Whitehead is wanting to get into.

[B]

For me, from page one, it's like with Ishiguru, you feel that you're in good hands, that the world is fully realized and that I might not know where we're going, but he knows where we're going and we're gonna get there. And it's going to be a satisfying experience. Maybe difficult, certainly difficult in this case, but it will be worthwhile. This book is vivid in all the ways. The emotions are vivid, the scenes between characters are vivid. The good ones and the really bad ones. I feel like riveted to my seat when I'm reading this book. That for being about subject matter that is as painful as this is about you, I didn't want to like put it down and get away from it. He really knows how to temper it. And I think that has something to do with the fact that the book is grounded in realism, despite the surreal elements that it's not a full magic realism experience. Like when you're reading 100 Years of Solitude and all kinds of wild things happen in the world. Mostly this world is the way the world was in the 1800s. And the surreal elements serve to make the real horrors even more real. Which is an incredible feat to pull off. Like the versions of the Southern states that Cora visits, they're topsy turvy, but everything that happens there is grounded in real historical fact. When she's in South Carolina, she finds out that wrapped in a project that the local people call Negro Uplift is actually an attempt to force black women to be sterilized. They are doing non consensual experimentation on especially black men injecting syphilis into their blood to do research.

[A]

One character here is, don't go to that bar because you're gonna get something.

[B]

Yeah, right. In North Carolina, she spends months hiding in the attic because black people are like illegal in the streets.

[A]

Like shoot on sight situation. Like, you just can't be there.

[B]

Yeah, you just can't be there. And then in that town, every Friday, there's a party to end the week where everybody gathers together in the town square and they hang. Anyone black who has come into the town and anyone white who has been found to be abetting them. She encounters in Indiana, free blacks who are living with runaway slaves and who are working in consort with white abolitionists. In Tennessee, she runs into people who help her escape from a slave catcher who's from Ridgeway who's been after her the whole time. And all of these are things that happened to real people every day in the American south during slavery. And that that reality exists where like also there just happens to be a literal railroad running under the earth in the story. The structure, I think, also helps in this book that you move between Korah's present day journey. There's a chapter in South Carolina, a chapter in North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, in between. Those are interstitial chapters that give us like 10 page, ish character studies on Ridgeway, the slave catcher, on a person named Stevens, who is a grave robber. At the end of the book, we get Caesar, who was Cora's partner in running away from the plantation, and also more of the story from Cora's mother, Mabel. And it's that sort of, like you said, kaleidoscopic earlier. And I think it's that sort of panning out, zooming in, panning out, zooming in, that lets us see the whole world. But the particular individual experiences these people have inside of it.

[A]

The structure too. I mean, I don't know how much Whitehead himself was thinking about this or that it was a structure that's available to him, but it's Essentially a version of a picaresque novel. This is a tradition going back to the 16th century in Spain. The Picaro. It doesn't really matter what the origin is, but it's where you have a series of events that are loosely connected around a central character, usually from a lower class who is surviving by their wits. Now, originally, and subsequently, it's more of a comic structure. Think Voltaire's Candide or the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A tradition that really goes back to the Satiricon before. It doesn't really matter except to say that it's an artist. It's a literary form that has a particular use in which you are trying to explore an idea or a social practice or a social milieu in a way that's not just telling a story where there's a beginning, middle and the end, and the characters are sort of in their own little world. This is a basically flinging a character without much protection except what's between their ears and those they come across to survive, which is another way of making sense. Survival in making sense, I think, is not a terrible way to think about what this book is doing. To make sense of it, to understand it, to read it correctly, is to make sense this connection to Boise and double consciousness at the same time. But that Korra is a kind of picaro, a kind of rogue or rascal. She is marked as different and having different abilities from the beginning that Caesar sees. Like she stands up to attackers with an axe. And the idea that sort of was read between her behind her eyes by this brute was, you may get me, but you are going to pay the price. And that is what Caesar sees and that what carries her through to survive long enough to survive. And spoiler, she does survive. Right. I mean, that's something that's worth saying here. That it's not easy and there's a lot of pain and death and torture and all of the worst things that fall under the banner of slavery. But in most in peak. And that's also what happens in picaresque novels. Like the character doesn't sort of desert die in tragedy at the end. I guess it was Don Quixote, technically considered a picaresque. I can't remember at this point. Anyway, doesn't matter.

[B]

We wonder about that later. Yeah, I mean, this.

[A]

So that structure is going to be interesting to help, like you're good and that I think then for a reader. And I hadn't reread this since, so I then. I didn't know at the time it was going to be like that. But since I knew it afterwards, I could then really focus on the scenes like these moments, rather than trying to figure out what was going to happen next and spend a little bit of time at the Museum of Natural Wonders or at these sort of hanging minstrel shows or at the Valentine Ranch at the end. And, like, what's important in those moments is that moment, not necessarily how it's gonna further the plot. And that can be difficult for some kind of readers to recognize and sort of dwell in at the same time.

[B]

Yeah, I like this point that you were circling around a second ago, that the thing that makes Cora an outcast and that puts her life in danger on the plantation is like, it's a bug on the plantation, but it's a feature when she's on the run, that she's scrappy and creative and really brave and willing to do the things that you're told. Your life is in danger if you do them, but she's willing to take the risk and she can live with the threat. Just incredible courage from this character that resulted in being punished when she's on the plantation, but is exactly the thing that she needs to go on this journey that she's alone on for most of. She and Caesar make it to South Carolina together. It's their first stop. And then things happen there that they're told, like, ridgeway's coming, you need to leave. And she and Caesar are then separated. And it's in that exploration and that kaleidoscoping that Whitehead even puts it on the page. He says, like. Or the narrator of the book says, describing, quote, the travesties so routine and familiar that they were a kind of weather. And the ones so imaginative in their monstrousness that the mind refused to accommodate them. That he's able to help us through this process. Look head on at the brutalities of slavery. To be unflinching, but as I was saying at the top, to never be tipping into it being gratuitous. And I think, as you said, like, it's a pretty straightforward story. So it's emotionally difficult, but the narrative is easy to follow. We always know where we are. We always know what's happening. It's not like, say, a beloved, where it's emotionally difficult and literally challenging, where you're. You're sometimes like, what the hell is going on? Where are we? And I think that that balance of like, the. The language itself is accessible, the writing is accessible, the story is easy to read, makes it a little bit more approachable for the subject matter.

[A]

One thing I realized while reading this the second time, and maybe I had this reaction the first time I don't remember, is there is nothing Whitehead could make up about what slavery did that I wouldn't believe is the least possible. And that I think is one thing the book is trying to remind you of, is that basically slavery is the worst thing that's American chattel. Slavery is like the worst thing that's ever happened. I don't straight up genocide, a slow, more painful genocide, you take your pick of this. But there's really nothing that you could imagine a slave catcher, a demonic slaveholder that could be done to a person, like, literally could be done that wasn't done to a slave at some point. And I think there's something too, to that effect of like, I had to stop and like, wait, was this a real thing? And normally it'd be like it would come later. It was a different thing, but it was. It's in this zone where I think one thing Whitehead is doing is saying this is how unbelievably bad this was, is that you will believe almost any atrocity because almost every atrocity was occurred. And things that are beyond my and your imagination also occurred.

[B]

Yes. And that it starts, of course, with greed. It starts with a desire to profit off of stolen labor. And he uses language that points back to the economic groundings of slavery throughout. Like Cora's grandmother is described as being part of a bulk purchase as another asset liquidated by order of the magistrate. Like this language of business and economics grounds it throughout. But that it's not just that for some people. One of the two brothers that runs the plantation Korah is enslaved on at the start of the book, delights in the cruelty of it, gets off on it. In an interesting inversion. The other brother, we find out, is a masochist and goes to town to see a dominatrix. And I mean, that's a fascinating thing. It's a one liner in the book that that's a thing he goes and experiences. Like, you could unpack that for a long time. And Whitehead is. Yeah, he's doing. Ann Patchett's blurb for the book. Talks about how it blends the fanciful and the horrific, the deeply emotional and the coolly intellectual. And I think that that's also what we're talking about here, that it is so horrific and there were people who delighted in how horrific they could make it that you can believe just about anything. And so it doesn't matter if Whitehead invented the specific terrible thing that's being done on the page or if that's something he read about in a history book, it's all true to the spirit of the practice of chattel slavery.

[A]

And even with that having been said, and he goes to great pains to say this is what it was like, this is what this political, emotional, economic, spiritual deformity was. But the title of the book is the Underground Railroad. And not just because if it's a cool conceit, because he is more interested in looking at resistance, allyship, escape, freedom, creativity of the oppressed. And it never occurred to me until I was doing my final look at my notes this morning that the Underground Railroad was a metaphor at the time. They had no subways, right? This was a imaginative description of this thing, which is flex. I mean, it's weird how it is both really applicable and not because the railroad as we understand it, it is fixed, industrial, mechanical, super visible, capital intensive. But the Underground Railroad we get here, and the one that was, that was real, was flexible, contingent. It was not a sub. It was not subject to law. It was a subject just to interpersonal relationships. Like, it's interesting to see the way the railroad has broken down in various places and then reconstituted and rerouted always. Ones, you know, might get quashed in one place, but it pops up somewhere else. There's like no set. There's no Grand Central station for the slavery sort of apparatus to go burn down. Like, it's all these weird little nodes. And at the same time it's this, you know, people who have just a little bit more agency trying to help people with a little bit less. And then once those people that had less energy gets out, they then can get fed back into the system. Like, I think the real, like if there's an emotional cathartic moment is when Cora is rescued at this moment by essentially a vigilante band of black people who have hazarded their own well being to come. Just sort of get black people out of North Carolina. And she sees for the first time a black person with a gun. Like it was an image too big for a mind to hold, a new thing in the world. And then at that moment we sort of get the sense that she's now going to participate in the structure on the other side as well as she can. And that what are tools that are available? How does resistance to oppression work? What strategy they are? And what's funny is that it's just the opposite of slavery. It's whatever slavery is, the resistance to it is just the opposite. It's communal. It's not economic, it's spiritual. It's not codified by any religion. It's human to human. And you're using your gut morality and then do what you can with what you have.

[B]

Yeah. And that, like, slavery is the ultimate expression of stinginess and greed, and generosity is the thing. A generosity of spirit and a literal generosity drives the resistance work of the Underground Railroad.

[A]

Creativity and sacrifice, the two most interesting things in the world. To me, that's all there is.

[B]

Yeah, there are. There are a couple examples in the book of, like, formerly enslaved people who get out, and then they don't want to help anybody else. Like, basically, they shut the door behind them, pull the ladder up behind them. They're not engaged in the work, and they're not embedded in these communities. They're not welcomed into the newly formed society, because that's not the rule of the game. Like, they're trying to create something new. It's not, you know, just wanting to recreate the same type of society as the one that their oppressors have created. And there is this, like. One of the things I think Whitehead does really well in the book is show the sharp contrast between this performance of civil society, of white people alongside the atrocities that they commit. It reminded me of the movie Zone of Interest, where in the movie, and I guess in the Martin Amos book it's based on, which I have not read.

[A]

Neither am I.

[B]

You see the, like, the men who built one of the biggest concentration camps living in a really nice house right outside the camp and having people over for dinner and, like, figuring out what to plant in their garden. And there are moments like that in the underground Railroad where, like, the plantation owner has people over for lunch, and everyone is just sitting out on the patio drinking their iced tea and having a lovely afternoon while horrific things are being done to the enslaved people on the plantation, and they're just going about their day. And that contrast of, you're performing civil society, but this is what you're doing to people. Whitehead, there are moments in the book where he does stray into just saying the thing, and he's good enough that he can get away with just saying the thing, but for the most part, he's just creating moments like that. Images that say everything without it needing to be spelled out for the reader.

[A]

I just want to dwell for a minute on what else the literalization of the underground Railroad allows Whitehead to do. We're just coming off a discussion of a book which I won't name, in which there's A great conceit. And it's sort of left there where Whitehead really sees it. Well, this is a cool tool. What can I do with this idea? And so we talk about how it relates to. It's a metaphor of movement. So it allows Cora to move around different locations that she would really never have had access to this kind of geographical exploration even if she had run up and then brought back down. It's like you're not moving side to side. And this thing allows to. It's almost like the Wonka Vader. It moves sideways and backways and four way. Like there's an element. It can go anywhere. But it's very kind of rattly. At the same time. It also removes Whitehead from having to be a historical fiction book that's just sort of trying to portray the reality of the history. It's narrativizing or putting into fiction. It can be a book about ideas and representations, imagination and creativity. Sort of authorizes a little level of invention of its own on his part. If there's like we. We're on the ride for. This isn't quite what happened. But we're using these new elements to just see these different things from a different perspective so that we get a more holistic. We get sort of a soulfully stereo vision. Our soul sees in stereo even if our little literal historical eyes do not. And it does connect it directly to Huck Finn and Moby Dick and Don Quixote, the other. These collections of stories that explore a world that's much bigger than Korra's own experience would have without having to do a bunch of like moving around in characters. That's something like Morrison does in Song of Solomon, where she gets to move around by moving in and out of characters. Whitehead is very restrained in terms of point of view. There's a version of this that the temptation would be to have a bunch of different point of views. We get a little of that Rebecca, but it's like two pages on Nethel, two pages in Caesar's and then we're kind of out and back to Korah's story, which I thought showed remarkable sort of restraint. My last point kind of on this is I used to work at this place called Kuinfo in which people could call in. This is pre Internet or like the burgeoning Internet and they could ask whatever question. It grew out of a crisis hotline in the 1970s where there's a bunch of fires and riots where it just needed somewhere you could get the truth. Actually it sort of sounds like A Colson Whitehead conceit. Anyway, that's a difference, right?

[B]

Colleges should bring this back.

[A]

They really should bring. We really do need this. It's true. And so one thing that would. It started out where you could ask questions about the university, but grew out to be. You could ask a question about anything. We would entertain and do our best to answer any question. And one thing that happened, it became kind of an intellectual sin eater where people could ask things that they didn't want to ask other places didn't know how to look up. And one of the famous ones like, so wait, unicorns weren't real. Right. And giraffes are. Which when you think, I mean, if you know that unicorns aren't real, it seems silly. But when you look at it, is what says less likely a unicorn or a giraffe? Right. You know, it's like they seem equally likely like a moose is its antlers are crazier than unicorns and it's more likely anyway. But something similar happens when he brings in this untrue thing, the underground Railroad. It helps us see the reality with different. It's like, can you believe American chattel slavery existed? Look at what this was and how comparative to this fanciful, near magical object, it seems more unbelievable than this thing that manifestly didn't exist. It's just another way of using art to get us to feel something that's hard to feel when we're going through our sort of normal lives and watching a Ken Burns documentary or something, which have their own uses. But there's something else to be done about feeling like in the pit of your stomach, what it would like. The logic of this world was really

[B]

like, yeah, like, wait, you want to object to the idea that a train could run underground, but you can. But you can totally buy without question this truth that people wanted easy labor for their crops and so they just thought that they had a right to go. Go to a whole other continent and steal people and bring them back and

[A]

then torture them until they died. Yeah.

[B]

If that's believable, then anything.

[A]

And that's something else here. I guess that'll go into straight thoughts, like the logic. Absurdity, right? That this is true in symbolic logic, that if you can prove an untrue thing, you can prove anything. It's been a long time since I'd said symbolic. That's one thing I remember. But that's kind of what happened in slavery, that they took this untrue premise that it was okay to enslave other humans and do Whatever you want with your own property out of that, any atrocity was authorized. If that's true, and you see this played out in the law, in the discourse and the propaganda, Even in our US Constitution debate about property and all these things, the 3 5th is compromise. Is this absurd compromise? It's absurd only because it comes out of his absurd conclusion here. But then, yet here we are. And this is even a quote, this place must be a delusion too. Yet here we are. America too is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes with all its heart that is their right to take the land, to kill Indians, make war enslave their brothers. The nation shouldn't exist if there's any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft and cruelty. Yet here we are. But this is also what fiction does. It says, what if an untrue thing were true? And then looks through the possibilities of that American chattel slavery is this. I'm sure there are other moments probably, you know, people are better historians than I am, that every expression of that absurd logic happened in some way or another. And that's just something that's true. And Whitehead, and we have to wrestle with that in, say, a Holocaust similar way at the same time. But we do then get this dramatic irony where we know that this system is going to collapse, right? And we see the seeds of its destruction in the amount of effort that oppression takes. That was one of my straight thoughts here. It's like this was something that was brought home into andor which I don't really want to compare Star wars to American chattel slavery, but it was also manifestly about resistance and oppression. Look at how much effort it takes to keep something like this going. Look at how much violence, look at how much manpower. Look how much of someone's soul. Like, talk about a Faustian bargain, right? Like you lost your soul and your mind to make something like this, especially

[B]

when you're outnumbered like that is something that Whitehead really hammers on at different points in the book. That is that the white slave owners are terrified because they know that the black enslaved people outnumber them and that if they are able to have enough space and enough like, idea of freedom to communicate with each other, they would be capable of overthrowing the whole system and that it could and probably would be quite violent.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And Cora even has this realization near the end of the book, looking, looking around and realizing how many of them there are, how big they are, and that there's power in that and oppression by this small minority who want to maintain their power desperately. Not just because it's in their economic interest, but because they're going to.

[A]

They're panicked. They may not be. They're sort of panicked every day. Genteel.

[B]

They know that. Yeah. That what they're doing is awful and indefensible on some level. They know it. And so they know what will be coming for them if the people they're enslaving have a way to fight back. That made me think. One of my stray thoughts throughout, especially knowing that Whitehead grew up on Stephen King, is that this, in some ways, is a horror novel.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

The Nickel Boys is really straightforwardly a horror novel. But it's interesting to see him take the things that are horrific and play with elements of genre from reality to say, like, you don't have to invent anything to tell a horror story about America. We have it right here. And he does it in his character naming, too. Like, right up there with Dickens in character naming. Like, you know, a slave catcher named Ketchum. K E T C H U M Ridgeway is this really Dickensian villain. He's even just like a really tall, big guy, recognizable. Joel Edgerton plays him in the adaptation. And, like, it's convincing and terrifying. Just so much going on there. And I think that those interstitial chapters about those characters really give us a meaningful break that we need from the scary parts of the book.

[A]

And just enough the depth that I think one thing Whitehead doesn't want to do is let the. Especially the oppressive slaveholding characters off the hook by being sort of flat. Like, they get their own little backstories and they get their. They. They are not. They are human. And that's more terrifying than if they're just demons or something else like that. Let's see, what else do you have on your stray thoughts?

[B]

Rebecca? I thought so much while reading this, and the phrase the peculiar institution comes up in the book. That's the phrase that the framers of the Constitution used in the United States Constitution, instead of referring to slavery. And I just can't stop thinking about that word choice. Peculiar institution.

[A]

What of euphemism? One of the most diabolical euphemisms of all time. Let's rate that someone else can do a rating, but that's not the way of it.

[B]

Let's just write it into the foundational documents of our country that we are. We're working around this peculiar institution that's important to the South. And so here are the compromises that we're gonna make about who gets rights and when they get them and what that looks like. And you have it in the notes here, that term was first used by a Southern senator in 1830. And then it influences history books. And by 1956 we were having to remind people that slavery was bad and that the peculiar institution comes out, but just the euphemizing. And that Whitehead is able to hold that like the euphemisms. And especially in the Museum of Natural Wonders, which is where Cora is assigned to work in South Carolina where she performs the life of a slave on a farm. But it is not a reality based life of a slave. It's a white people propaganda version of like this wasn't actually that bad that Whitehead holds all of those things next to each other, the euphemisms and the reality. And he just lets us see for ourselves what those were really covering.

[A]

And up had through a few straight thoughts I had remembered, and I don't know why, that Korah itself derives from the Greek word for Persephone, which is the daughter of Demeter. And if you remember, your Greek myth was stolen by Hades, literally hell stolen and wed by Hades and has to spend half of the year in hell. And that's what gets winter. So if we're sort of like laying metaphor on metaphor here, the original sin of the Greek world that structures our seasons, literally structures our seasons, is the capture of. Unwilling capture of a woman who then dates to come out a little bit. And I was then noticing Cora going into and out of hell. Throughout the rest of the book. She would have these moments of liberation and then brought back in. And that's a different way of understanding America's relationship with race than a sort of linear narrative towards the Civil War. And then we sort of fixed it. Right. I think there's something there. I didn't. I don't want to do too much more.

[B]

One of my read alikes for this is Let us Descend by Jesmyn Ward, which is a depiction of enslaved people on a very long walk, I think from Virginia.

[A]

A really long coffle.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Into the South. But the line let us descend, I believe comes from Homer, from going into.

[A]

We're going into the underworld and the Odyssey, I believe. Yeah, yeah. Let's see this thought. You know, we're coming. I said we coming just the other day. It might even have been just yesterday that we were talking about a book with another instantly appealing conceit to much different results. I was thinking, what authors would you trust with an obviously. Perhaps too obviously interesting. I wrote the wrong word here. Premise or conceit. And then that got me said. Giving 10 authors the same conceit and then having like a 5th century Athenian story off. I think we could draft. I think we would be fighting for White Hook among our first draft picks.

[B]

At the same time there's. It's Whitehead, Everett Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan.

[A]

I had Jennifer Egan. I had thought Jennifer Egan at the same time too.

[B]

Who else is on that list?

[A]

Maybe Emily St. John Mandel. I'd have to think about it a little bit more than that.

[B]

She's a little more speculative.

[A]

Is interesting to think about in that regard. Or Charles Yu. People we haven't talked about in this but we know from other situations.

[B]

Yes, but who can take that something like what if the Underground Railroad, but

[A]

literal and say the next most. The least make the non obvious joke. This is funny. Josh Gad. My family and I during COVID watched this series on Disney about the making of Frozen of all things, because my daughter was the right aide.

[B]

Where is this going?

[A]

I know, I'm kind of trying. Just hold on. I'm going to try to land this. I'm going to try to de ice this plane that's sort of shuddering through the atmosphere. But he said because he was helping write the Olaf stuff, Josh Gadd voiced Olaf and those. And he was always looking for the non obvious joke, which as someone who always reaches for the obvious joke, I'm like, wait, you can do that? That's something that one could do. And I think that in the book we were talking about the other day, it kind of went for the, the, the, the most. The first version of that, like the first obvious version of that kind of a thing where this is not the obvious version of what if the Underground Railroad were an actual like railroad that was subterranean. I just found that to be interesting. At the same time, I think Ridgway joins the demon pantheon of pursuers. Ahab, the judge from Blood Meridian. I mean Cormac McCarthy is writing a version of the guy, he who pursues you. There's a grad school paper for somewhere. Javert from Les Miserables. And then sort of Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader hunting Jedi. And then he also knows that these become poetic characters. Like Ahab gets these great soliloquies. Anton Chigur like if the rule brought you here, what good is the rule? And Whitehead doesn't want to give Ridgeway any shine like that. So he has him do these like mini bullshit soliloquies that mean nothing and sort of dies and his little help. Meet sycophant, psychologically tortured Homer, who is the storyteller. Like, that's the figure. He's writing them down. But then they just sort of get lost to history. So he really wants to turn the knife into Ridgeway. Even as you realize he's made one of the great figures of panic. You don't want Ridgeway on you.

[B]

Yeah. And I think it's meaningful that Ridgeway gets just less screen time than Javert or Darth Vader or any of these other villains that we're talking about. And it serves both a really good fictional purpose that, like, you, like Korra as a reader, fall into some complacency. Like, we go to a new place and he doesn't show up for a while.

[A]

Ridgeway jump scare. Yeah.

[B]

Like, she settles into life in South Carolina. And then even after she has to flee and she ends up hiding in an attic for months in North Carolina.

[A]

I thought he was dead, too. I thought maybe Ridgway was dead. And there's this settles into this. Yeah.

[B]

Like, new form of complacency or some kind of comfort that then, like, just as we have kind of forgotten that he exists, he pops back up. He's not looming the whole time. And I think that that's one of the things that makes the book work so well. Cause there's a lesser version of this book that would alternate chapters. Korra and wherever Ridgeway was pursuing her. And, like, that would have been demon

[A]

detective Sherlock Holmes on the pursuit somewhere else.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. But that whitehead knows we need this slave catcher in the story. And he can exist as a boogeyman, mostly offstage. But that he can even fall out of our consciousness as readers makes it, oh, right. This is what the experience would have been like for this character. That and for real people living in this time, that if you've run away successfully, you're terrified for quite a while. And then at some point, you start to feel a little bit safer. And after that, you feel a little bit safer and that there's danger in reaching that point of safety because these guys can't let go of the fact that somebody got away from them and they will pursue you forever, even to their own terrible ends, which Ridgeway does. One of the Randall brothers from the plantation Cora was on has a similar experience. But I really noticed that in this reading that I would be like, oh, right, Ridgeway is still in the game. It's not like it doesn't feel like they're on parallel tracks or on a

[A]

collision course and he embodies the necessary singular focus of the American south in slavery times. To have the goal of enforcing slavery being the thing they have to focus on the most. He says, I am the name of punishment, dogging every fugitive step and every thought of running away way for every slave I bring home, 20 others abandon their full moon schemes. I am a notion of order, the slave that disappears. It's a notion too of hope undoing what I do. So the slave, the next plantation over gets an idea that it can run too. If we allow that, we accept the flaw in the imperative. And I refuse. So that's that. The flaw in the imperative. If you accept it, then you have to like let everybody go go. And his refusal is indicative of the larger systemic refusal to let this thing go. And then all of the logical ramifications of that are this whole system of terror and oppression and confinement.

[B]

All of that gets complicated by the reveal that he inherited a slave and freed that person because he didn't see the point yet.

[A]

Which again, when we talked about the Constitution, it's all messy. You know, some of them them argued against and they knew it was wrong. And then Franklin was part of the anti abolitionist movement, but he only liberated his own slaves the year before. Like, it's messy. It's not. It's simple in its horror, but it's messy in its particulars along the way. All right, notable quotes. Rebecca, you think Goodreads has done a great job of late? I think we've gone a few in a row where we feel okay about the number one, Goodreads.

[B]

We have the Goodreads quote. The number one here is cited earlier. And America too is a delusion, the grandest one one of all. It goes on from there. Don't look at the Goodreads Q and A page for this book. Don't. I didn't go there on purpose. I somehow arrived there and it is full of people being like, I don't know, guys, I just didn't really believe that there could be a railroad underground. And then other people explaining, this is not historical fiction. It is speculative.

[A]

It's spectacular.

[B]

Yeah, you want to weep for humanity, you can go to the Goodreads Q and A for this book. But a lot of quotes. We have a ton here. Just to pick a few.

[A]

Yeah, pick a few.

[B]

In America, the quirk was that people were things. When black blood was money, the savvy businessmen knew to open the vein. Who built it? Who builds anything in this country? A plantation was a plantation. One might think one's misfortune distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality. And then there is also, just like some beautiful language. Cora comes out of being underground, like, physically underground for quite a while. And it says she gulped the air like water. The night sky, the best meal she ever had. The stars made succulent and ripe after her time below. Like, there's Whitehead popping back up to be like, hey, guys, remember, I'm the best.

[A]

I've got a few again, I'm just going to do a couple of, like, Whitehead in a phrase or in a subordinate clause or in a prepositional phrase. White. This I, I, I wrote down early and I think I underlined it in my book. This idea of an insurrection of one. It's an interesting. You can, you can have an insurrection. Korah has an insurrection in her soul even before she runs, right? That's the seed. That's the necess. It's necessary, but not sufficient. But it is necessary to have a larger insurrection.

[B]

Also.

[A]

We get, we get a few glimpses of Korah's idea of the good life. I'm going to spoil one of these things about what the good life is. And it runs counter to the Southern panicked ideation of what black people might want, which is, they're gonna murder us all. And, you know, whatever she says, her Northern fantasy, those first weeks in the attic was a mere sketch. Glimpses of children in a bright kitchen, always a boy and a girl and a husband in the next room, unseen but loving. As the day stretched, other rooms sprouted off the kitchen. A parlor with simple but tasteful furniture, things she had seen in the white shops of South Carolina. A bedroom, then a bed covered in white sheets that shone in the sun, her children rolling on it. And in the. And half visible at the edges, the husband's body. So it's a very modest dream, right? But a dream nonetheless and sustaining in its own way, as slight as it is describing The. At one point she wanders through the museum and she's described as she strolled back and forth before the glass, a customer of pain. I thought we're not going to get into some of the episodes, but we get a minor digression into sort of body snatchers, surgeons, which I thought, you know, the choice, what he chooses to give us, that's not about slavery directly, I think is always worth spending time on. I think here we get maybe a metaphorization of the project of historical fiction. If you could make a study of the dead, Stephen thought from time to time, you could make a study of the Living and make them testify as no cadaver could. That felt might be the work of historical fiction to some degree. The morbid paradox of body snatching and slavery at the same time. And from then on, Korah selected one patron per hour to Evil Eye. While she's performing this, where can she find a little bit of resistance? And she sort of keeps that flame going at the same time. Time the business. I'm going to have to skip down there. Ridgeway, I think this is Ridgeway. At one point, he's looking for something to do. He says there was no model for the type of man he wanted to become. And there's something about that in American Manifest Destiny. At the same time, that one version of not having a model, of not having a moral code of ethics or sort of inherited philosophy, is that it can be perverted. It can turn into lawlessness or a perverted version of a rigid legal system. And then lastly, I just want to do the Underground Railroad description, the tunnel, the tracks, the desperate souls who found salvation in the coordination of its stations and timetables. This was a marvel to be proud of. She wondered if those who had built this thing had ever received their proper reward. It feels to me like Whitehead is there, there trying to pay homage to those people who resisted, those people who culted, kept alive the possibility that some other world was possible. And it should be said, I think here that the people who help Korra, they almost all end up dead. The white people who end up maybe one, I think, survives at the end, but they get theirs. And in a way, they are not the stars of the show. But I think in this moment, Korah is seeing that this is a large host of humanity that's trying to participate. And that's true of any massive liberation effort. Right. It's true of sort of World War II or the Civil War or the civil rights movements or women's suffrage. Like usually there are bodies on the line to more or less, and those we might remember, the kings and the Susan B. Anthony's, but there's a lot of people who are beaten and jailed and killed. That's Times gets lost. And the only thing you can remember is that they were forgotten and sort of do a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier kind of a move at the same time. Time.

[B]

Yeah, There's a enslaved person on the plantation with Korah who recites a version of the Declaration of Independence over and over. And this struck me near the end of the book. Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country. Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness like her. And, you know, we talked on our episode about the Constitution that you can't reckon with what this country is, what it was founded on, what it's trying to be, why we are the way we are, without looking directly at slavery and looking at the gaps between the ideals that our founding documents put forth for what the country is supposedly trying to be and what it's supposed to be, making room for people to pursue and what the realities look like. And that, of course, hearing those words, all men are created equal. And then living the life of an enslaved person and traveling through even these top topsy turvy versions of the south would. Would make a person question that and would make you wonder, is this real? Is it possible? Are we pursuing something that we can never reach? How do we do it? Just like the biggest questions about American life and society have been like, the ones that are the biggest today have been the biggest ones for as long as the country has existed and I think will always be the biggest ones. This is something that we can never see, stop reckoning with and not to

[A]

be said, I mean, and that's built upon sort of stealing another person's labor and for your own accords. And representations of labor are quite interesting. When Caesar has his very limited time free, he works on a factory line, and he finds it very interesting because he can see the direct labor turn into something. Whereas picking cotton, you sort of pick all these like, you know, little fluffs of kind of nothing, right? Just like raw material that gets sent off to God knows where and turns into something completely disembodied. And he found it satisfying to. To see, like, where he stood in the process. And this led to this. And then Korah before she escaped the first plantation. I guess that's the only plantation she's on during this time. Her inheritance, the things she only has, that brings out the axe in her, literally, is when someone tries to build a doghouse on this little scrap of a plot of land that her mother had cultivated, or actually her grandmother has been inherited through a couple generations, maybe three by three. REBECCA it's like, it's not very big.

[B]

It's small, yeah.

[A]

But there, she says, Korah got on her knees and planted anew. It was her inheritance. In the thin moonlight, her head throbbing, Korah praised her tiny garden. Weeds, weevils, the ragged footprints of critters. She'd neglected her land since the feast time to return to it. So, like you think of that versus a plantation. It's small, it's personal. It's for your own consumption. Doesn't get anybody else's way. And then go all the way back to Candide. Right. The end of Candide, if you remember, is Voltaire or the main character. Candide eventually says, I'm just gonna go. What I can do is tend my garden. Like, that's the thing that I know that makes sense to me. And I'm curious to know if Whitehead was thinking about Candine in Korah's garden there.

[B]

Oh, yeah. It also made me wonder if he was thinking some about sula. Cause there's this. When early in the book, when Korra is still on the original plantation, they're having a party for another person's birthday. And it says, like, he only had his birthday once or twice a year. Which is both. Both about the fact that enslaved people didn't know when they were born and what their birthdays were. And they don't have access to. It's January 3rd, and here we go. So Jockey just declares that it's time for his birthday to happen. But it also reminded me of Shadrach and the suicide day parades in sula. And I think that Whitehead is just stewing in great literature. And whether that's an intentional reference or not comes back to the thing we say here all the time of this is one of the reasons to read the great book books is that they draw on each other, but also you start being able to connect them for yourself.

[A]

Yeah, I think we've already covered the Is it for you? Or if not, we've made the case if it's for you. And then all the trigger warnings appear about language, the language used to describe black people and women as well. And then basically every kind of violence is referred to or depicted obliquely or directly in some way. I don't know what else to say about those two things, Rebecca, if anything else.

[B]

Yeah. Just know that that's what you're getting, that Whitehead will look directly at it. Depictions of rape, depictions of violence. The N word is used throughout.

[A]

Yeah. The immortal questions that aren't asked. Which of these are primary here? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? Free will, real or none know? Who am I and who are my people? Boy, howdy, Rebecca.

[B]

Almost all of them.

[A]

Is there one that maybe is surprisingly about? Maybe that's another way. I think it could be about all of these. But is there one that's like, okay, you might not think initially it's about one of these, but I'm not sure.

[B]

I don't think it questions free will, real or no. But it's an exercise in what free will looks like and what the limits of free will can be. The. The temptation to limit someone's free will and the consequences of doing so, both for them, but also for you. Like, it's. Whitehead doesn't have to say on the page, hey, enslaving other people and being cruel to them dehumanizes you too. But he shows us that in the ways that the slave owners are depicted and in the terrible things that they do, it's overtly about what is the good life.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

What do I owe my neighbor? And who counts as my neighbor? And the work that people are willing to do for each other. I think maybe surprisingly about. Well, not surprisingly about what's the deal with good and evil? I don't know.

[A]

How do I know what I know? Because Cora doesn't get to know much about the world that's intentional and structural. And then how, as her world expands, I think she also. The possibilities for her own existence expands. Like she gets little snatches of things. And then like I said about, like seeing a colored. Using the. The term of the book, I should say a colored man with a gun. It made her like the Grinch. His heart grew three sizes. Like her worldview grows three sizes.

[B]

It does just blow her mind.

[A]

Yeah. And much like as we take this imaginative tour, I think it expands our own capacity to feel and think and be sympathetic and empathetic. Because, I mean, like, so the answer is to see more of the world and see more of other people, even if it's fictional. Right. That's the trick, I think, for those of you, of us who believe in the power of the art. Right. And some of that art is in the business of representing or narrativizing or otherwise depicting things that aren't technically factually true. But you can get a bigger life out of encountering things that aren't factually true.

[B]

It's a great lead in to the next question.

[A]

Yeah. Are we sure this is not an art in writing?

[B]

This book is super about art and writing. There's a quote here. Get them off the plantation, and they learn to read. It was a disease. Caesar has learned to read. A previous owner taught him and his family to read. And it says a page here and there in the golden afternoon light sustained him. It's also about language. The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time for simplicity to erase their identities, to smother uprisings that the people who were captured and brought from Africa come from dozens of tribes that have their own languages. And those languages are suppressed over time because the slave owners, of course, don't want people to be able to communicate with each other and plan anything. And it's also really about history. What history is, how it's told and who gets to tell it. Like the Museum of Natural Wonders is just a revelation of propaganda and whitewashing, but yes, it's about art and writing.

[A]

There's no greater recognition of the power of knowledge and education than and the punishment and rules around the education of enslaved people in the American south in like 1840. You don't need anything else there. Also, I think probably if there is a vision of utopia in this book, it is this library at this compound at Tennessee that Korah sort of ends up in. It's towards the end and Cora spends her time reading a history or romance. I'm going to read directly here. And Molly turning the pages of a fairy tale. A teams are stopped them one day as they were about to enter. Master said the only thing more dangerous than a blank with a gun was a blank with a book. There must. That must be a big pile of black powder. Then when some of the grateful residents proposed building an addition to Valentine's house for his books, Gloria suggested a separate structure. That way anyone with a mind to pick up a book can do so at their leisure. It also gave the family more privacy. They were generous. But there was of a lot limit. They put the library next to the smokehouse. The room spelled pleasantly of smoke when Cora sat down in one of the big chairs with Valentine's books and Rebecca, I've got to tell you, a library next to the barbecue. I don't know if what my good place is going to look like if I make it there, but it might be that a barbecue next to a library, right, with boundaries where it's not in the house. You're also separate from the house.

[B]

Right after that is a moment that says Cora had never been the first person to open a book before. And like that'll give you goosebumps every

[A]

time you boob bumps. Rebecca, could you watch the most of it just from watching the signal adaptation? And there is one here.

[B]

There is 1.

[A]

Barry Jenkins's 10 episode nearly unlimited budget for Amazon in 2021?

[B]

Yes, you can absolutely get the gist. Like, Whitehead's writing is such a draw for the book that I think this is a case where. Read the book also. It's strange that the book is easier to deal with, in my experience at least, than the film or than the show. Because it's one thing to picture the things that we are reading about and that Whitehead is writing about. It's another thing to see them vividly portrayed on screen. And they are all on screen. Whitehead put them on the page and so Barry Jenkins put them on the screen. And like, it took me like 10 weeks to watch these 10 episodes.

[A]

I've only watched the first episode. I keep meaning to go back, but it's. It's astounding. I'm watched it by myself at night. I mean, I know it's astonishing. I just gotta get there someday.

[B]

And I just. I mean, there was interesting. When the show came out in 2021, there was interesting press around it and interesting interviews with the cast about how they dealt with the trauma and the pain of portraying, like, how black actors dealt with having to portray lynchings and being whipped and people being burned. Just like really horrific but very true things. So if you can do it, it's a real feat to see on screen, but for a lot of reasons, I would guide people to the book first.

[A]

Triviations, rumors, misattributed quotes and etc. I have one here that this. The sequence in which Cora stuck in the attic for a long time and can only watch people every now and again is based on some. An actual event in Harriet Tubman's life. And I think. I don't know, and I'm sure there's critical studies that have done a little bit more mapping of the real and the rearrangement. But that's one that I did know about. And it's interesting to see him repurpose and put into a collage and in different combinations, the different stories and experiences of people.

[B]

I mean, like, yeah, you name checked, you know, Don Quixote and Moby Dick and some of the other greats that the story sits alongside. The structure was actually inspired by Gulliver's Travels, where this person moves between very different communities and has a standalone experience in each one that adds to their overall understanding of the world. It also is rooted not just in the idea that. That Whitehead had in 2000 to write a book about what if the Underground Railroad was real, but when he was a kid growing up in Manhattan and he was hearing about the Underground Railroad, he was surprised to learn that it wasn't a literal subway. So this has been, in Whitehead's consciousness, some version of this idea for his entire life, really.

[A]

I think that's not an uncommon realization. As we've gotten farther. And the. I mean, the subways, like the early 20th century, like, I think 1915 in Paris, we start to get. I don't remember, but it's like the early 20s century. But when you're. Especially now, if you're like, my kids were born in 2011. And after the difference between 1865 and 1915 starts to collapse, right? Like, maybe there were subways. Like, maybe this is the thing. People think a little bit differently, especially if you're a Manhattan kid. At the same time, you had this note that the novel he wrote before the Intuitionist, his debut novel, was rejected by 25 publishers. I don't know if that is encouraging or discouraging to people who want to write books.

[B]

And he's never published that one, so who knows what it's in there? But even colson Whitehead got 25 rejections.

[A]

You're presented two boxes, and you can only select one of them. One is the manuscript of that novel, and the other has a Blu Ray of the pilot of the Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. That was supposed to be on HBO with Meryl Streep. Well, no, this was the older one. Meryl Streep's gonna be the new one. I'm talking the original WrestleMania.

[B]

Oh, that's right. Yes, that's right.

[A]

That was shot. Which of them are you picking?

[B]

I'm taking Colson Whitehead. I want the Colson Whitehead origin story.

[A]

Maybe if I didn't know the Corrections one was in the offing, I might be tempted by it, but I'm not. I only have one hot take here. You have no hot takes. So I'm out here by myself.

[B]

Yeah, this resisted hot takes for me.

[A]

I think the museum is more interesting than the railroad. So this is this creation of his, in which it's kind of a. What museum of an anthropology museum, like Smithsonian kind of thing where you get these dioramas and some actors. And some actors and then how. And like a discussion of what museums are about. I think it's about history. It's about representation. Again, someone like Whitehead who was thinking also about the Gordian knot of what historical fiction can and can't do, of representing the past, I just found myself going to that more frequently to wonder about and think about what's going on here and the ramifications of how it's put together again. Thundergale Railroad has brand recognition. I get that. And I also. I kind of feel like I understand that metaphor, but I found my own sort of critical interest running to these. The Body Snatchers in the museum and some of these other things that aren't on the marquee. Right. They're sort of supporting actors in this.

[B]

I think it's a really smart artistic choice on his part. Like the Museum of Natural Wonders. Yeah. I don't think that could hold up a whole novel on its own, but it's a really good 40 pages.

[A]

Yes. Read alikes and books inspired by this one. It's.

[B]

I already mentioned Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward, but that feels very close to this. James by Percival Everett, of course, told from the perspective of James in the story of Huck Finn. And then Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs is one, like one of the many slave narratives. But it's the one that Whitehead name checks most frequently in the interviews for this.

[A]

Yeah. Which other Zero to Wild Red titles does it connect to? I guess, obviously we have James there. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Also not unlike this in terms of narrative structure. It's a picaresque of its own. Kind of Janie moving around different places and then sort of coming back. She survives by her wits. I think that's a very interesting model there you have 100 years of solitude. Would you like to say something more about that?

[B]

Whitehead talks about this, that in the writing of Underground Railroad, he went back and reread One Hundred Years of Solitude and he thought about how do you use magic realism or surreal elements to show. Show the world as it really is, and that he's doing something that isn't as fantastical as what Marques does in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but working in that tradition. Obviously this connects to the United States Constitution episode that we did. And I thought about 1984 as well. Of course, there's not only just for dystopian fascism, oppressive regime stuff, but there's a moment where one of the slave owners, I believe, or maybe it's Ridgeway, is trying to get somebody to give up who they're working with. And that betrayal of the person that you're fighting for freedom alongside is the worst thing in 1984. The worst thing is to say, take her instead of me.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And it really rang true for me in that moment.

[A]

I added Midnight's Children just because it also is taking this traumatic historical event and condition, entering into it a speculative element of like these children born at Midnight that have these special powers and that gives Rushdie a particular kind of canvas to paint on where you have all of these different moments. You know, if this was 200 pages longer, it might start to feel like Midnight's Children or 100 Years of Solitude in its own way. Yeah. Cocktail party crib sheets. You have two and I have one. Why don't you go first?

[B]

I mean we've talked about this already. But that slavery is the defining feature of American history. And what Whitehead is doing here is one way of illustrating that when black people today aren't surprised by racist policies and racist actions or violence, when they object to statements like this isn't who we are in America, it's this history that they're calling on. And from the book. In Liberty or Bondage, the African could not be separated from the American. It has always been about greed and about that the ways in which wealthy white society have depended on because they were preying on black black people. Also that those absurd conditions require absurd supports. That white slave owners had to use propaganda to convince themselves that their power and cruelty were fine and to convince themselves of how to maintain it over the population of enslaved people that significantly outnumbered them as. As we were talking about before. That they were terrified of any amount of power that might allow enslaved people to rise up against them. And Whitehead does all of that. And it's just threaded through in such an elegant way.

[A]

I might be the first white guy ever to say this, but I have a question more than a comment for my takeaway.

[B]

Which is the grand tradition of middle aged white men.

[A]

Yeah. What can the imaginary add to our experience and understanding of history? I don't have a good answer to that. But I found myself thinking a lot about that and the limits. Like the uses and limits of the. That where can it. What does it highlight? And where is it additive? But where can it be distortion? Or where can it run away from you? At the same time it seems like it might be a particularly difficult needle to threat. But that's what I was thinking about as what proceeded final beat a zero to well read score. Each one of these gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Highest. We have five vectors of evaluation here. The first of them them is historical importance. Rebecca. This one's interesting because it takes on a grand and important historical subject. But the book itself is relatively new. How are you going to deal with that particular tension?

[B]

Yeah, I think because the book is relatively new we can't really go higher than like an eight. But this is a really important book for 21st century literature. I believe that it will stand the test of time. I think this book opened the door for Jane. Like Percival Everett was probably going to write that book. But how well kind of surrealist fiction

[A]

about slavery got from double and.

[B]

Yeah, well how like how well the

[A]

marketing and publicity and all.

[B]

Yes, like how well the underground Railroad did not just with the literary crowd and book awards, but like a lot of book clubs read this book. It was in the conversation showed that you could could sell and sell in serious ways. A book that turned some elements of the typical slave narrative, you know, upside down or on their head. So in I think in publishing it's really important. But I guess we probably have to cap at like an 8.

[A]

Yeah, I think 8 makes sense. You're right. I agree with you about. It's new but as if we're working with. This is the most known, the most critically acclaimed, the most well esteemed book by one of our few candidates to be the greatest living American novelist. Whatever you can get with a living novelist, it has to sort of ping it out. And I feel like it does around 8. Readability. Also an interesting tension between Whitehead's invention, which is intellectually stimulating. Like it keeps you engaged to see what he's doing. The sentence and paragraphs are not difficult to read, but it's textured and it's complicated in its own way. Punctuation by harrowing scenes of racial and sexual violence. That's a demerit from what we use this readability score from. Because that's a tough hang. That's just true. But maybe like, maybe that's just demerit because otherwise I think it's short. It has short chapters. Like some of these structural things that make the pages turn exist here in this book.

[B]

Yeah, I think for the readability of the language it's a 10. For the readability of the subject matter it's lower. Probably pans out at a seven and a half.

[A]

Yeah, I was thinking eight kind of in the same range. For me similar. The current relevance of Central Question is always difficult for 9 million because on. I mean it's not. It's about slavery, which is relevant and also not relevant at the same in a direct kind of way. So I'm kind of going with an 8 too. I think we're going to find this sort of. Oh yeah, there's a limit there to some degree.

[B]

I think I would go with a 10 because this is about the thing that America is about. But we can compromise wise 8 and

[A]

a half 9 book nerd read cred is an interesting one. I have no sense of this, do you?

[B]

I was looking for how many copies sold and the best number that I could find was like 825,000 in the first year or so, which is a lot of copies. It has a strong Goodreads rating, but not like a ridiculously huge number around it. I think the read cred is higher now than it was in 2016 when it was the buzzy book that everybody was picking up. Like, if you are going back to the Underground railroad now after 10 years and looking at where it sits in American literature.

[A]

I don't know, seven, Another eight? Yeah, I think we're in another eight realm. Do you get more read credit if you pick up Apex Hide the Hurt. If you're like, I want to really get into the Whitehead back catalog.

[B]

Yes, you do.

[A]

I think that's interesting.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, damn factor.

[B]

I mean, for me, when Whitehead Whitehead's at the highest level, it's a 10. And there's enough of that throughout the book. This is an incredible reading experience. It knocked my socks off the first time. This was my first reading since 2016 and I knew what was going to happen. But it doesn't matter that you know what's going to happen. Like how he does it and what the language is is so incredible.

[A]

I'm not trying to argue against a 10. I'm just going to express my truth. And I feel like my soul is holding back. I'm not going to throw my body in front of a 10, don't get me wrong. But that I'm having just a little resistance to 10 because of the. I don't know whether it gives credit or demerit for the. The obviousness of the central metaphor. Like, that's just like it's on the tin. Right. Whereas something like James is like a little bit less obvious. Like it's still. There's like James point of View or Midnight's Children or, you know, one of the. Or Jennifer and Egan. Like the King has a visitor. The Goonfire. You've really like. I don't know, but I'm feeling like Underground Railroad is like, yeah, duh, that's a cool idea. Duh. But also we've seen how it goes the other way. So I don't know.

[B]

James is more of the books we've talked about. I think James is more surprising. So there are some more oh, damn moments for that. I can come down to like an eight for the odam.

[A]

I'm not gonna go. Nine is my lowest. I'll go. That's all I was gonna say.

[B]

I was willing to compromise. Okay, we'll go to a nine. So a pretty high score. 88989 here. One of the highest I think that that we've had.

[A]

Yeah. And if you haven't got enough of us talking about the Underground Railroad or any other books, you can join us for office hours patreon.com Jo Twored for guided read alongs and the other membership options. Some of them include the bonus content. We are going to spend a little more time talking about some of the characters that maybe we didn't give as much shrift as we could have here. You can follow us on socials@02 well read podcast. We put all of the video ones up on YouTube. If you're a video sort of person you can shoot us an email. 0 to well read.com we have a mailbag episode coming coming up. We do not care. You can we hope that people are listening to these immediately. But also years later you can email us about anything you've heard us say. The books, your takes, your read alikes, whatever at any time and they will be considered in due course at 02 well [e-mail] thanks so much to Thriftbooks for sponsoring this season of zero to well Read. Zero to well Read is also a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca thank you you once again.

[B]

We'll see you next time.