Spoilers

Chapter 10 is a kind of valedictory. Ridgeway is dead. Cora is, if not free, then severed from the one tie which continued to bind her to the past.

This episode is about history as much as it’s about the future and in that sense it draws the circle of the show back to its beginning.

Throughout, Cora’s mother, the one who got away, who escaped and was never seen again, has been held up to Cora as a symbol of all kinds of things. For some she’s the hero who escaped, for others the neglectful mother who abandoned her children for her own selfish needs.

Still others have held her absence over Cora as a kind of deus ex machina to explain everything from her resistance to her need to be returned to Randall.

In all of this Mabel occupied the hallowed ground of being absent, of having no voice with which to answer those who would paint her according to their own needs.

Episode 10 takes us back in time to when Cora was a young girl and focusses on the events which led to Mabel running away from the Randall plantation.

Those events? They are mundane in many ways. Nothing more than ordinary life lived under oppression. Mabel acted as a kind of medic to those around her but her attempts to look after those in her care were supervised not just by her owners but by her owners who understood nothing of what she was trying to do.

For her owners, Mabel’s insistence on looking after others is seen as a weakness – motherhood as economic liability. The work of motherhood is seen as worthless, especially when it comes to Black bodies – for whom her White owners show little care or sign they regard them as worth treating at all.

For sure a good capitalist might care their workers are healthy but once they can’t be restored to the status of good labourers, why waste further resources on them? Better to discard them and find a new labour source. Doubly so if they’re your property already because their lack of productivity and need to eat becomes your loss against a future profit of zero.

It is this which sends Mabel running. Not some grand gesture of cruelty but the final overwhelming pressure of the daily grind in the face of endless small acts of cruelty and indifference. Mabel doesn’t run because she’s mistreated in one particular incident – she has no inciting event so favoured by the story tellers in today’s industry. Mabel has a life which, finally, breaks her and from which she must flee or herself become the thing that pressure is trying to create.

Why does she leave Cora behind? Because I think the decision to run is as much a symptom of her already being broken as the running is an effort to avoid being this exact outcome. Cora doesn’t come into her thinking in the moments Mabel turns and walks off the plantation because she is overwhelmed by the disaster of just living under oppression.

One of the conceits of stories written by people who haven’t lived under oppression is that individual incidents that can be located and highlighted as being the cause of our issues. The outsider looking in can then satisfy themselves that if this one thing wasn’t just so, the world would be a better place. It’s thinking that can only come from a place of no lived experience and is, at best, ignorant tourism.

Jenkins lays out the truth – that long term systems of oppression are both silent and invisible to those who wield them but also ubiquitous like the sky above for those living under them. Tackling one incident does nothing to change the system which allowed it to arise in the first place.

As storytelling it’s an example of someone who’s entirely at ease with themselves – there’s no feeling of trying to impress people (and by episode 10 of a series you’d hope that was true!) or even of trying to fit within a ‘traditional’ White western story structure.

The series ends with Cora emerging from the tunnel where she left Ridgeway. It is sunny but she’s in unknown lands once again.

Where does she go from here? Safety remains unguaranteed and I was reminded of the words she said before – perhaps there are only places to run from.

Verdict: This is a quiet episode, not quite an epilogue but certainly a closing of the book. With Cora leading we have completed Gulliver’s Travels and seen the true face of America. It has been a harrowing journey but one in which those so harrowed are no less themselves because of it. Rather they have become more. 10/10

Stewart Hotston