The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

The captain staggered his purchases, rather than find himself with cargo of singular culture and disposition. Who knew what brand of mutiny his captives might cook up if they shared a common tongue.

In America the quirk was that people were things.

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.

Cursing herself for her small-mindedness even as she was powerless before it.

By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without.

whenever white men put off punishment some theater was bound to be involved—Caesar

bosses had increased their scrutiny and would be extra vigilant on the full moon, the white beacon that so often agitated the slave with a mind to run.

He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them.

maybe she will keep it a garden. An anchor in the vicious waters of the plantation to prevent her from being carried away. Until she chose to be carried away.

He embraced the runaways with desperate affection. Cora couldn’t help but shrink away. Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom?

“Who built it?” “Who builds anything in this country?”

In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor—if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

Playing their music as freemen and not chattel was probably still a cherished novelty. To attack the melody without the burden of providing one of the sole comforts of their slave village. To practice their art with liberty and joy.

nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal.

Somewhere, years ago, she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.

She wondered why there were only two kinds of weather: hardship in the morning, and tribulation at night.

scattered among the seeds were those of violence and death, and that crop grew fast. The whites were right to be afraid. One day the system would collapse in blood. An insurrection of one. She smiled for a moment, before the facts of her latest cell reasserted themselves. Scrabbling in the walls like a rat. Whether in the fields or underground or in an attic room, America remained her warden.

Resentment was the hinge of her personality.

She had never learned history proper, but sometimes one’s eyes are teacher enough.

She thought, If the world will not stir itself to punish the wicked. No one stopped her.

She was meticulous in her posture, a walking spear, in the manner of those who’d been made to bend and will bend no more.

Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

Some might have lived in that space happily, rising alone. Lander wanted to make room for others. People were wonderful company sometimes.

That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can’t control it, they destroy it.

for justice may be slow and invisible, but it always renders its true verdict in the end.

“We can’t save everyone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth. Nothing’s going to grow in this mean cold, but we can still have flowers.

“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all.

We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together.”

The conflict in Europe was terrible and violent, she told her sailor, but she took exception to the name. The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.

The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.