Two slaves decide to break free…

Colson Whitehead’s book The Underground Railroad is a Pulitzer prize winning novel. Many arguments have been had over what it’s about – is it a satire, a brutal and honest presentation of the experience of an entire people or a cynical ploy to retell slavery with maximum savagery? It is even just an exploitative novel looking to use slavery as a mechanism to move the central character, Cora, from episode to episode?

When I first encountered it the year it was published (2016 in the UK) I was blown away. It was both raw, profound and told a slice of American history I didn’t know well beyond what I’d read for myself and told it in a gentle lyrical style which had me sliding through the pages without noticing how quickly I devoured it. Colson’s novel presented a slice of experience alien to me, separated from me by time and distance.

When I heard it was being made into television I couldn’t imagine how you’d tell the story without it being a modern day version of Roots and I felt it couldn’t live up to what Whitehead had achieved on the page.

Then Barry Jenkins was announced as the series director and suddenly I was listening with interest because if the Oscar film, Moonlight, showed me nothing else it was that Jenkins had the same lyrical touch on screen that Whitehead showed in text. I felt like we had a meeting of kindred spirits and since then have been looking forward to this with ever growing anticipation.

If anything slowed me down it was the arrival of Lovecraft Country and Them; two shows whose representation of Blackness in the United States roamed through history with ever an eye on the present. Devastating, hard to watch and celebratory in their own right I wondered how Jenkins would follow in their wake with a story which, in many ways, hit the same beats and walked the same road.

I especially found Them hard to watch – it was emotionally draining, tough and uncompromising. I have wondered just how much Black suffering there is we can put on screen and continue to see it as compelling enough to keep us sitting there watching.

We run the risk of moving from catharsis and round about education of the history of America to being left with little more than pain with no other substance than to ask the same question of us which we’ve already been by challenged before. It is surely right to continue to ask these questions, but the key shortcoming of doing so via entertainment is that our ability to remain interested is shorter and more geared to novelty – for better or worse.

Which is a long-winded way of approaching this first episode of Jenkins’ adaptation, starring Thuso Mbedu as Cora and Aaron Pierre as Caesar, with a sense of weighty expectation and anxiety. Can it live up to the book? Have we moved on since then? Will the inevitable portrayal of suffering be draining to watch?

The thing is many of us have an idea of what plantations were like – from the material we’ve come across, the movies we’ve watched and the stories we’ve heard. Those of us who have any passing factual knowledge of the era probably have a picture in our head of the various characters we might find there – the ambitious but cruel foreman, the housebound slaves who wear real clothes, those confined to the fields and the White people who oversee them.

What more is there to say? Perhaps more futilely the question of the point of the show might also sit there bitterly in the back of one’s mind like a tired jackdaw pecking away at our hope of enjoying it.

Jenkins, like Sam Mendes, has a feel for how people sit within their landscape. The show starts with simply astounding composition – disorienting yet beautiful and haunting images layered on the viewer as if daring us to make sense of what we’re seeing.

Throughout this episode the landscape enfolds itself around the characters, oppressive, claustrophobic, alien and unending all at the same time. If Cora’s owners are grim and capricious, like Greek gods descending from Olympus to shame and cavort and abuse according to their whims, it is the landscape itself which grounds each and every one of them.

At times it felt like the landscape was the deepest reality we could see, with the humans in the show painted on top of it like strange characters whose lives were carrying on with no regard for their own insignificance against the deep time of the world and its own concerns.

It transformed the experiences of Cora and Caesar for me – from something approaching the grim lives of owned people, denied their humanity, into something challenging the nihilism of their situation with the biggest question one can ask – what is the meaning of this?

While White folk quote scripture to justify their slave owning ways, their torture, their enforced rape and brutalisation, the show slaps them into the screen with its own whip – demanding to know what they think it means to be who they are.

Caesar is perhaps the only one who comes close to seeing this cosmic joke, enlightened as he is by a copy of Gulliver’s Travels which he carries with him in secret lest he have his eyes torn out if it was known he could read.

For me there’s no mistake in this novel being his companion. It was a best seller in the wildly different context of a British society in which slavery is outlawed and in which British people are so stable on their home soil they wonder at the carnage they visit upon one another. It is the coda for the series – a travelogue in which the hero sees wonders and weirdness but whose main feature is to reflect back on the traveller and their interiority rather than the oddness of the world which is taken almost as a given.

Gulliver might wonder at the strange peoples he finds but it’s with the sigh of someone who’s already met them at home and had hoped for something more.

Of course, I have read the book, but the series captures this idea of Cora leaving home to explore the True Face of America but with the nagging suspicion she already knows what she’s going to see because she’s seen it all before.

The other crucial difference between this and shows like Them or Lovecraft Country (or even Jordan Peele’s US) is that Cora is not yet a person who understands either herself or the world. There is a clear sketch of who she wants to be but it’s a person whose only experience to this point is of two square miles of countryside in which she’s nothing but someone else’s property. The show frames her self knowledge as a way of setting out of the journey she’s about to embark upon – less seeing the face of America and more learning who she is when given the space to unfurl and find the edges of her own self. In this way despite her being acted upon she has a sense of humanity beginning to blossom into whatever rare flower it might become.

As an opening episode it is devastating; powerful and kind in the midst of cruelty. I want to follow Cora on her journey. I want to see her become. I want to witness her struggles and her growth.

Verdict: Unlike anything covering this territory before it The Underground Railroad has a heart, a deep well of humanity woven through every careful and beautiful shot. 9/10

Stewart Hotston