Charles Cole answers “The first skyscraper came about in the...”

Paul Tucker asked this question about The Underground Railroad:

The first skyscraper came about in the 1880's. How come the one in this book comes before the Civil War? Paul

Charles Cole Colson Whitehead gave a partial answer to this question in an NPR interview with Terry Gross, Aug. 8, 2016 (http://www.npr.org/2016/11/18/5025580...),…moreColson Whitehead gave a partial answer to this question in an NPR interview with Terry Gross, Aug. 8, 2016 (http://www.npr.org/2016/11/18/5025580...), as he described the structure of his novel:
"And I thought, well, what if every state our hero went through - as he or she ranNorth - was a different state of American possibility? So Georgia has one sort of take on America and North Carolina [sic] - sort of like "Gulliver's Travels." The book is rebooting every time the person goes to a different state."

The “different state of American possibility” described in the South Carolina chapters is the era of “negro uplift” by paternalistic whites. Historically, this experiment wasn’t tried in the South until after Reformation, and to signal to readers that we’ve jumped ahead in time, Whitehead tells us about the marvelous skyscraper, the Griffin Building, and also describes Ceasar’s job on a factory conveyor belt (p. 103), although conveyor belts weren’t used in manufacturing until 1913, in Henry Ford’s factory.

And how did the white paternalism Whitehead describes help the former slaves? Sam, the white station agent who enthusiastically welcomed Cora to S.C., “was fond of his birthplace and an advocate of South Carolina’s evolution on matters of race. He didn’t know how the experiment would turn out . . . .” (P. 104) With the benefit of hindsight, Whitehead knows. The free medical care in his fictional, benevolent South Carolina includes forced sterilization of “[c]olored women who have already birthed more than two children,” (p. 113). Indeed, Cora briefly witnesses a woman who escaped the procedure but was caught. (p. 105.) Of course, this is not mere conjecture by the author; compulsory sterilization was common in the U.S. from the 1890’s until WWII, and was declared lawful by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell in1937.

Whitehead’s South Carolina may also include nonconsensual medical experiments: The first doctor who examined Cora takes a blood sample, explaining “Blood tells us a lot, . . . [a]bout diseases. How they spread. Blood research is the frontier.” (p. 101) This may be an allusion to the infamous “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” a U.S. Public Health Service medical experiment conducted from 1932 to 1972, in which African Americans infected with syphilis were given “free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance,” (Wikipedia, “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment”), but “None of the men infected were ever told they had the disease, and none were treated with penicillin even after the antibiotic became proven for the treatment of syphilis. . . . According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for ‘bad blood’, a local term for various illnesses that include syphilis, anemia, and fatigue.” (Id.) By the way, penicillin was known to be an effective cure 25 years before the experiment was ended.

Why the time shift? Why didn’t Colson Whitehead write a more conventional historical novel? I think it’s too easy for readers of a story set entirely in the early 1800’s to think “Oh, the brutality of slavery was just terrible -- thank goodness it’s not like that today.” In Gulliver’s Travels style, Whitehead takes us to a fictional but realistic time and place where former slaves are treated with seeming kindness but are in fact mistreated.
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The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead (Goodreads Author)

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