The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

18:59Rebecca Schinsky:Like, boy, that was pretty bad. Like, there are ideas here that are new and worth engaging with on their own terms. Yes.

19:06Jeff O'Neal:And I think absurd is the word to hold on to, that creativity is a subject here and Whitehead uses it and uses 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 imagine new ways out of the world that they're in because the world they're in has been so tightly defined.

19:49Jeff O'Neal: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.

20:37Jeff O'Neal:And there's something about the surprise that Whitehead delivers and that you don't know what is going to happen, what it's going to be like when Cora 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.

21:07Rebecca Schinsky:And he himself had a sense that he 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, it 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.

21:39Rebecca Schinsky: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 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 and sort of political and psychologically true without sort of being factually true all the time.

22:24Rebecca Schinsky:And that's what fiction is about, Rebecca. Like, what else do we want from fiction than to do something like that?

22:28Jeff O'Neal: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 a mature writer. It's Whitehead's sixth novel. He had already had award nominations. He had a literary reputation, as we were talking about earlier.

22:43Rebecca Schinsky:He's 14 years past as MacArthur. That's a decade and a half in the rearview mirror.

22:46Jeff O'Neal:The dude was declared a genius a decade and a half before this happened.

22:49Rebecca Schinsky:Still, he's like, you know, I'm not ready yet.

22:51Jeff O'Neal: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 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.

23:33Jeff O'Neal: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.

23:42Rebecca Schinsky:What's your top five Booth Tarkington books, Rebecca?

23:46Jeff O'Neal:I was really afraid you were going to ask me something about Booth Tarkington. I googled no things. I could not name you a Booth Tarkington novel.

23:54Rebecca Schinsky: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 grew up. Remember, art is hard, Rebecca, and unforgiving. I don't know what else to say about that.

24:11Jeff O'Neal: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.

24:19Rebecca Schinsky:But this one has, and it was the book of the year. And I believe it will. It got the double New York Times review, which is very rare. Michiko Kakutani was still reviewing there. Katherine 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 2016, 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.

24:46Jeff O'Neal:I could not find a best of list from 2016 that didn't have this on. It would be a real zag.

24:52Rebecca Schinsky:And maybe I'd like to see someone's justification, but that would be quite wild at the same time.

24:56Jeff O'Neal:It didn't win all the awards, but it won most of them. 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. 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, 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.

25:44Jeff O'Neal:Number seven on The New York Times top 100 books of the century so far.

25:50Rebecca Schinsky: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 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 Voice, 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 in grad school a long time ago, comparing him to Gene Toomer.

26:31Rebecca Schinsky: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 belie the unruliness of his imagination and the books they write. These are weird books, Rebecca. They are. The intuition is a weird idea. John Heredges 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.

27:07Rebecca Schinsky: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. It's just a positive rather than negative.

27:27Jeff O'Neal:That it goes down so easy is just a mark of how good he is. 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.

28:13Jeff O'Neal: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 like he delights in language he delights in really thinking about things and pulling apart threads that are 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 whatever the mode is like are we being silly okay are we being serious okay do we need to like add some personable color to this guy who has been fencing stolen goods in Harlem for 30 years and make you like him.

28:54Jeff O'Neal: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.

29:04Rebecca Schinsky:There's some authors we've talked about that if you gave me a paragraph, I could probably identify them. You know, 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. Yes, that's a great point. 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 to 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.

29:49Rebecca Schinsky:Ishiguro 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 the super agent Julie Bear. It doesn't really matter. But like this is the firmament we're talking about, the highest echelons of American letters that sort of combines commercial and critical and artistic success all in one. Life goals, I guess. Do we still do hashtag life goals? I don't know if we do that.

30:22Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. Well, and for folks 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. Yes. 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 the top 10 most interesting people working in publishing today, as we talked about on the Book Riot podcast a couple of years ago.

31:02Jeff O'Neal:But he's a fascinating guy and also kind of a cipher because Colson Whitehead, he used to be one of the great tweeters. But Colson Whitehead is not out there giving a billion interviews.

31:14Rebecca Schinsky:And why would you?

31:15Jeff O'Neal:Right. You don't have to when you're Colson Whitehead. There are authors at this level who are 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 picking his shots at this point. 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 some 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.

31:59Jeff O'Neal:But anytime you're talking about that list, there's a little magic and some mystery about folks.

32:04Rebecca Schinsky: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 of them on my shelf. So in there from day one. And 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. Yeah, it's close to the line. I didn't really have any doubt that it was going to be anything other than great it was.

32:37Rebecca Schinsky: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.

33:04Jeff O'Neal:Which is an anomaly for him.

33:05Rebecca Schinsky: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 kind of themes and, you know, character and place and concerns that Whitehead is wanting to get into?

33:18Jeff O'Neal:For me, from page one, it's like with Ishiguro, 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 going to 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 riveted to my seat when I'm reading this book. that for being about subject matter that is as painful as this is about, I didn't want to put it down and get away from it.

34:00Jeff O'Neal: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. The versions of the southern states that Cora visits, they're topsy-turvy, but everything that happens there is grounded in real historical fact.

34:40Jeff O'Neal: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.

35:03Rebecca Schinsky:One character here is, don't go to that bar because you're going to get something. Right.

35:07Jeff O'Neal:In North Carolina, she spends months hiding in the attic because Black people are illegal in the state.

35:15Rebecca Schinsky:Like shoot on sight situation. Like you just can't be there.

35:17Jeff O'Neal: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 from Bridgeway, 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.

35:57Jeff O'Neal:And that that reality exists where 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 Cora'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 Ridgway, 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.

36:39Jeff O'Neal: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.

36:55Rebecca Schinsky: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 Piccaro, 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 Huckaberry Finn.

37:26Rebecca Schinsky:It's an addition that really goes back to the satirical before. It doesn't really matter except to say that 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 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 and making sense, I think, is not a terrible way to think about what this book is doing.

38:03Rebecca Schinsky:To make sense of it, to understand it, to read it correctly is to make sense. This connects us to Boise and double consciousness at the same time. But that Cora 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 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's what carries her through to survive long enough to survive. And spoiler, she does survive, right?

38:40Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, that's something that's worth saying here. 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, that's also what happens in picaresque novels. Like the character doesn't sort of die in tragedy at the end. I guess it was Don Quixote technically considered a picaresque. I can't remember at this point. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

39:04Jeff O'Neal:We wonder about that later.

39:06Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I think this point you're making - So that structure is going to be interesting to help. And that, I think then for a reader, and I hadn't re-read 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 tour 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 going to further the plot.

39:41Rebecca Schinsky:And that can be difficult for some kind of readers to recognize and sort of dwell in at the same time.

39:45Jeff O'Neal: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's right. 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.

40:24Jeff O'Neal: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 White It even puts it on the page. He says, 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.

41:09Jeff O'Neal:And I think, As you said, 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 literarily challenging, where you're sometimes like, what the hell is going on? Where are we? And I think that that balance of 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.

41:42Rebecca Schinsky: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 at 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 know. 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 slave holder that could be done to a person, like literally could be done that wasn't done to a slave at some point.

42:27Rebecca Schinsky: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 or it was a different thing. But 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. Yes.

42:55Jeff O'Neal: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 Cora 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.

43:40Jeff O'Neal:And I mean, that's a fascinating thing. Like, 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 that. Anne 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.

44:23Jeff O'Neal:It's all true to the spirit of the practice of chattel slavery.

44:27Rebecca Schinsky: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 i and not just because of it's a cool conceit because he is more interested yes in looking at resistance allyship escape freedom creativity of the oppressed and it didn't it never occurred to me till i was doing my you know 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 an imaginative description of this thing, which is I mean, it's weird how it is both really applicable and not, because the railroad, as we understand it, is fixed, industrial, mechanical, super visible, capital intensive.

45:27Rebecca Schinsky:But the Underground Railroad we get here and the one that was real was flexible, contingent. 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 once you 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 as it gets out they then can get fed back into the system like i think the the real like if there's an emotional cathartic moment is is what Cora is rescued at this moment by essentially a vigilante band of black people who have hazard their own well-being to come to 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 her 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?

46:44Rebecca Schinsky: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 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. Yeah.

47:08Jeff O'Neal:And that 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.

47:22Rebecca Schinsky:Creativity and sacrifice, the two most interesting things in the world to me. That's all there is.

47:26Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, there are a couple examples in the book of formerly enslaved people who get out and then they don't want to help anybody else. 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.

48:12Rebecca Schinsky: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, you see the men who built one of the biggest concentration camps living in a really nice house right outside

48:28Jeff O'Neal:the camp and having people over for dinner and figuring out what to plant in their garden. And there are moments like that in the Underground Railroad where 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.

49:06Jeff O'Neal: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.

49:17Rebecca Schinsky: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 says, 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.

49:49Rebecca Schinsky:And this thing allows to, it's almost like the wonk of Adrude moves sideways and backways and four-way. Like there's an element that 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'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.

50:35Rebecca Schinsky: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, all these collections of stories that explore a world that's much bigger than Cora's own experience would have without having to do a bunch of 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. White 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 Ethel, two pages in Caesars, and then we're kind of out and back to Korra's story, which I thought showed remarkable sort of restraint.

51:14Rebecca Schinsky:Good energy in. Good energy out.

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52:13Rebecca Schinsky:So my last point kind of on this is I used to work at this place called KU Info in which people could call in. This is pre-internet or it's 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 different sort of thing.

52:33Jeff O'Neal:Colleges should bring this back.

52:35Rebecca Schinsky:They really should. 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 it 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, I mean, if you know that unicorns aren't real, it seems silly.

53:02Rebecca Schinsky:But when you look at it, what's less likely, a unicorn or a giraffe, right? You know, it's like they seem equally likely. Like a moose, 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. 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.

53:46Rebecca Schinsky:But there's something else to be done about feeling like in the pit of your stomach, what the logic of this world was really like.

53:54Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, like, wait, you want to object to the idea that a train could run underground. 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 to a whole other continent and steal people and bring them back.

54:13Rebecca Schinsky:And then breed them and then torture them until they died.

54:17Jeff O'Neal:If that's believable, then anything is believable.

54:20Rebecca Schinsky:And that's something else here. I guess it'll go into straight thoughts. It's like the logic absurdity, right? That this is true and symbolic logic, that if you can prove an untrue thing, you can prove anything. It's been a long time since I've said symbolic, so 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, in the propaganda, propaganda even in our u.s constitution debate about property and all these things the three fifths compromises this absurd compromise it's absurd only becomes it comes out of this 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 believes all its heart that is their right to take the land to kill indians make war and slave their brothers.

55:16Rebecca Schinsky: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, we have to wrestle with that and say 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?

55:57Rebecca Schinsky: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 child 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've lost your soul and your mind to make something like this happen.

56:28Jeff O'Neal:Especially when you're outnumbered. Like, that is something that Whitehead really hammers on at different points in the book. 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 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. And Cora even has this realization near the end of the book, looking around and realizing how many of them there are, how big they are, and that there's power in that.

57:05Jeff O'Neal: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 get killed. They're panicked.

57:16Rebecca Schinsky:They may not be. They're sort of panicked every day, genteely panicked.

57:19Jeff O'Neal: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. 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, you don't have to invent anything to tell a horror story about America.

57:54Jeff O'Neal: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. Ridgway is this really Dickensian villain. He's even just like a really tall, big guy, recognizable. Joel Edgerton plays him in the adaptation, and 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.

58:29Rebecca Schinsky:And just in up the depth that I think one thing Whitehead doesn't want to do is let the, especially the oppressive slaveholding characters off hook by being sort of flat. Like, they get their own little backstories and they get their, 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 straight thoughts, Rebecca?

58:50Jeff O'Neal: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.

59:08Rebecca Schinsky:What a euphemism. One of the most diabolical euphemisms of all time. Let's rate that. Someone else can do the rating, but that's got to be way up there.

59:16Jeff O'Neal:Let's just write it into the foundational documents of our country that we're working around this peculiar institution that's important to the South. And so here are the compromises that we're going to make about who gets rights and when they get them and what that looks like. And you have it in the notes here that it was that term was first used by a Southern senator in 1830. And then it influences, you know, 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.

1:00:08Jeff O'Neal: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 up.

1:00:28Rebecca Schinsky:I had 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 needs to come out a little bit. And I was then noticing Korra going into and out of hell throughout the rest of the book.

1:01:06Rebecca Schinsky:She would have these moments of liberation and 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 don't want to do too much more else.

1:01:24Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:01:34Rebecca Schinsky:A really long coughle, yeah.

1:01:35Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, into the South. But the line, let us descend, I believe comes from Homer, from going into, we're going into the underworld.

1:01:44Rebecca Schinsky:And the Odyssey, I believe. Let's see. This thought, you know, I said we coming just the other day. It might even be 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, 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 Whitehead among our first draft picks at the same time there.

1:02:22Jeff O'Neal:It's Whitehead, Everett, Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan.

1:02:28Rebecca Schinsky:I had Jennifer Egan. And I had thought Jennifer Egan at the same time, too. Who else is on that list? Maybe Emily St. John Mandel. Yeah, maybe. I'd have to think about it a little bit more than that. She's a little more speculative than the rest of me. I think Ted Chiang 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.

1:02:48Jeff O'Neal:Yes, but who can take that, something like, what if the Underground Railroad, but literal?

1:02:53Rebecca Schinsky:And say the next most, make the non-obvious joke. This is funny. Josh Gad, my family and I during COVID watched this series on Disney Plus about the making of Frozen of all things because my daughter was the right age. Where is this going? I know. I'm going to 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 Gad voiced Olaf in 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?

1:03:26Rebecca Schinsky:And 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 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 railroad that was subterranean. I just found that to be interesting at the same time. I think Ridgway joins the demon pantheon of pursuers. 100%. They have 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.

1:04:01Rebecca Schinsky:Javert from Les Miserables and then sort of Anakin Skywalker slash Darth Vader hunting Jedi. And then he also knows that these become poetic characters like Ahab gets these great soliloquies. Anton Chigurh, like if the rule brought you here, what good is the rule? And Whitehead doesn't want to give Ridgway 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 a storyteller, like that's the figure. He's writing them down, but then they just sort of get lost to history.

1:04:34Rebecca Schinsky:So he really wants to turn the knife into Ridgway, even as you realize he's made one of the great figures of panic. You don't want Ridgway on you.

1:04:43Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, and I think it's meaningful that Ridgway 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 you, like Cora, as a reader, fall into some complacency. We go to a new place and he doesn't show up for a while. Ridgway jump scare. Yeah, 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. I think I thought he was dead, too.

1:05:16Rebecca Schinsky:I thought maybe Ridgway was dead and there's this scuffle.

1:05:19Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, 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, because there's a lesser version of this book that would alternate chapters between Cora and wherever Ridgway was pursuing her.

1:05:41Rebecca Schinsky:Like demon Detective Sherlock Holmes on the pursuit somewhere else.

1:05:46Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, but that Whitehead knows we need the 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. 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.

1:06:25Jeff O'Neal:And they will pursue you forever, even to their own terrible ends, which Ridgway 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, Ridgway is still in the game. It's not like it doesn't feel like they're on parallel tracks or on a collision course.

1:06:46Rebecca Schinsky:And he embodies the necessary singular focus of the American South in slavery times to have the goal of enforcing slavery be 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. 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 the flaw in the imperative.

1:07:27Rebecca Schinsky:If you accept it, then you have to let everybody 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 depression and confinement.

1:07:43Jeff O'Neal:And all of that gets complicated by the reveal that he inherited a slave and freed that person because he didn't see the point. Which, again, when we talk about the Constitution, it's all messy.

1:07:55Rebecca Schinsky:You know, some of them argued against it. 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 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 quote.

1:08:21Jeff O'Neal:We have. The Goodreads quote, the number one here is one you cited earlier. Oh, I read this before. I'm sorry. And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. It goes on from there. Don't look at the Goodreads Q &A page for this book. I didn't. 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. It's specficulum. You want to weep for humanity, you can go to the Goodreads Q &A for this book.

1:08:58Jeff O'Neal:But a lot of quotes. We have a ton here just to pick a few. In America, the quirk was that people were things. When black blood was money, the savvy businessman 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 physically underground for quite a while and 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.

1:09:40Jeff O'Neal:Like there's Whitehead popping back up to be like, hey, guys, remember, I'm the best.

1:09:45Rebecca Schinsky: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. 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 have an insurrection. Cora has an insurrection in her soul even before she runs, right? That's the seed. It's necessary but not sufficient. But it is necessary to have a larger insurrection. Also, we get a few glimpses of Cora'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 going to murder us all and whatever.

1:10:29Rebecca Schinsky:She says,

1:11:01Rebecca Schinsky: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 slash 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.

1:11:37Rebecca Schinsky: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 Cora selected one patron per hour to Evil Eye while she's performing this this where can she find a little bit of resistance yeah and she sort of keeps that flame going at the same time the business I'm gonna have to skip down there uh 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 and manifest destiny at the same time.

1:12:27Rebecca Schinsky: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 trying to pay homage to those people who resisted, those people who kept alive the possibility that some other world was possible.

1:13:13Rebecca Schinsky:And it should be said, I think, here, that the people who helped Cora, 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're not the stars of the show. But I think in this moment, Cor is seeing that this is a larger 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 we might remember the Kings and the Susan B.

1:13:48Rebecca Schinsky:Anthonys, but there's a lot of people who are beaten and jailed and killed that 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.

1:13:59Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, there's an enslaved person on the plantation with Cora 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.

1:14:47Jeff O'Neal: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 topsy-turvy versions of the South 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? Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling, and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

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1:15:38Jeff O'Neal: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 stop reckoning with.

1:15:54Rebecca Schinsky:And that's built upon sort of stealing another person's labor and free on 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 little fluffs of kind of nothing, right? Just raw material that gets sent off to what God knows where and turns into something completely disembodied. And he found it satisfying to see where he stood in the process and this led to this. And then Cora, before she escaped the first plantation, I guess that's the only plantation she's on during this time.

1:16:34Rebecca Schinsky:But 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 of generations. Maybe three by three, Rebecca. It's like it's not very big.

1:16:52Jeff O'Neal:It's small, yeah.

1:16:53Rebecca Schinsky:But there, she says, Cora got on her knees and planted anew. It was her inheritance. in the thin moonlight, her head throbbing. Korra praised her tiny garden. Weeds, weevils, the ragged footprints of critters. She had 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 going to go, what I can do is tend my garden.

1:17:23Rebecca Schinsky:Like, that's the thing that I know that makes sense to me. And I'm curious to know if Whitehead was thinking about Ken Dean in Cora's garden there. Oh, yeah.

1:17:31Jeff O'Neal:It also made me wonder if he was thinking some about Sula. Because there's this, early in the book, when Cora's 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 about the fact that enslaved people didn't know when they were born and what their birthdays were. And, you know, they don't have access to, like, 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.

1:18:10Jeff O'Neal:And whether that's an intentional reference or not, it comes back to the thing we say here all the time. This is 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.

1:18:22Rebecca Schinsky: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.

1:18:47Jeff O'Neal: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. Yeah.

1:18:57Rebecca Schinsky: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 no? Who am I and who are my people? Boy, howdy, Rebecca.

1:19:15Jeff O'Neal:Almost all of them.

1:19:17Rebecca Schinsky: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.

1:19:27Jeff O'Neal: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 temptation to limit someone's free will and the consequences of doing so, both for them but also for you. Like, 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.

1:20:03Rebecca Schinsky:Yes.

1:20:04Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:20:17Rebecca Schinsky:I don't know. 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 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. It does just blow her mind. That's right, 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 of the same.

1:20:56Rebecca Schinsky: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 us who believe in the power of the arts, 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.

1:21:21Jeff O'Neal:It's a great lead into the next question.

1:21:23Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Are we sure this is about art and writing, Rebecca?

1:21:26Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:22:07Jeff O'Neal: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. Yes, it's about art and writing.

1:22:21Rebecca Schinsky:There's no greater recognition of the power of knowledge and education than 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 Cora sort of ends up in. It's towards the end. And Cora spends her time reading a history of romance. I'm going to read directly here. And Molly turning the pages of a fairy tale. A team's or stop 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.

1:23:06Rebecca Schinsky:That must be a big pile of black powder then. When some of the grateful residents proposed building in 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 a 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 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.

1:23:40Rebecca Schinsky:With boundaries, where it's not in the house, you're also separate from the house.

1:23:44Jeff O'Neal:Right after that is a moment that says Cora had never been the first person to open a book before. And that'll give you goosebumps every time.

1:23:52Rebecca Schinsky:That'll give you goosebumps. Rebecca, could you watch the most of the gist from watching The Signal Adaptation? And there is one here. There is one. Barry Jenkins' 10-episode, nearly unlimited budget for Amazon in 2021.

1:24:04Jeff O'Neal:Yes, you can absolutely get the gist. 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. White had put them on the page. And so Barry Jenkins put them on the screen. And it took me like 10 weeks to watch these 10 episodes.

1:24:39Rebecca Schinsky:I've only watched the first episode. I keep meaning to go back, but it's...

1:24:43Jeff O'Neal:It's astonishing.

1:24:43Rebecca Schinsky:I'm going to watch it by myself at night. I mean, I know it's astonishing. I just got to get there someday.

1:24:48Jeff O'Neal: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 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.

1:25:24Rebecca Schinsky:Trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes, and et cetera. I have one here that the sequence in which Cora stuck in the attic for a long time and could only watch people every now and again is based on 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 reel 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.

1:25:54Jeff O'Neal:I mean, you name checked 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 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.

1:26:30Jeff O'Neal:So this has been in Whitehead's consciousness some version of this idea for his entire life, really.

1:26:34Rebecca Schinsky:I think that's not an uncommon realization as we've gotten farther. I mean, the subway is 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 20th 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 about 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.

1:27:07Rebecca Schinsky:I don't know if that is encouraging or discouraging to people who want to write books.

1:27:11Jeff O'Neal:And he's never published that one. So who knows what it's in there? But even Colson Whitehead got 25 rejections.

1:27:20Rebecca Schinsky:You were 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 going to be the new one. I'm talking the original rest of the movie. Oh, that's right.

1:27:37Jeff O'Neal:Yes, that's right.

1:27:38Rebecca Schinsky:That was shot. Which of them are you picking?

1:27:41Jeff O'Neal:I'm taking Coulson Whitehead. I want the Coulson Whitehead origin story.

1:27:45Rebecca Schinsky: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 take, so I'm out here by myself. Yeah, this resisted hot takes for me. 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 Thundergirl railroad has brand recognition I get that um 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 and the museum and some of these other things that aren't on the marquee, right?

1:28:50Rebecca Schinsky:They're sort of supporting actors in this. I think it's a really smart artistic choice on

1:28:55Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:29:02Rebecca Schinsky:Yes. Read-alikes and books inspired by this one, et cetera.

1:29:06Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:29:29Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. Which other zero-to-while-read 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. Sure. It's a picaresque of its own kind with 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?

1:29:49Jeff O'Neal:Whitehead talks about this, that in the writing of Underground Railroad, he went back and reread 100 Years of Solitude. And he thought about how do you use magic realism or surreal elements to show the world as it really is? And that he's doing something that isn't as fantastical as what Marquez does in 100 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. Yes. 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 Ridgway, is trying to get somebody to give up who they're working with.

1:30:35Jeff O'Neal: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. Right. And it really rang true for me in that moment.

1:30:50Rebecca Schinsky: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. We have all of these different moments. You know, if this was 200 pages longer, it might start to feel like Midnight's Children are 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?

1:31:18Jeff O'Neal: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 people.

1:31:54Jeff O'Neal: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 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.

1:32:25Rebecca Schinsky:I might be the first white guy ever to say this, but I have a question more than a comment for my takeaway.

1:32:31Jeff O'Neal:The grand tradition of middle-aged white men.

1:32:33Rebecca Schinsky: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 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 is what proceeded. A final beat, a zero to well-read score. Each one of these gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. Highest, we have five vectors of evaluation here.

1:33:10Rebecca Schinsky:The first of 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?

1:33:24Jeff O'Neal: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 James. Like, Percival Everett was probably going to write that book. But how well kind of surrealist fiction about slavery. How big of an advance he got from Double Time. And the marketing and publicity and all, yes. How well the Underground Railroad did, not just with the literary crowd and book awards, but a lot of book clubs read this book. It was in the conversation, showed that you could sell and sell in serious ways a book that turned some elements of the typical slave narrative upside down or on their head.

1:34:15Jeff O'Neal:So I think in publishing, it's really important. But I guess we probably have to cap at like an eight.

1:34:21Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I think 8 makes sense. You're right. I agree with you about it's new, but 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. Yeah. Right. And I feel like it does around eight. 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.

1:34:59Rebecca Schinsky:punctuated 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 that's just demerit because otherwise I think it's short. It has short chapters. Some of these structural things that make the pages turn exist here in this book.

1:35:18Jeff O'Neal: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.

1:35:29Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I was thinking eight, kind of in the same range for me, similar. The current relevance of Central Quest is always difficult for historical fiction. Nine million. Because, I mean, 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 eight, too. I think we're going to find this sort of, there's a limit there to some degree.

1:35:48Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I think I would go with a 10 because this is about the thing that America is about, but we can compromise eight and a half, nine.

1:35:55Rebecca Schinsky:Book nerd read cred is an interesting one. I have no sense of this. Do you?

1:36:01Jeff O'Neal: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,

1:36:09Rebecca Schinsky:which is a lot of copies.

1:36:11Jeff O'Neal:It has a strong Goodreads rating, but not like a ridiculously huge number around it. But I think the read cred is higher now than it was in 2016 when it was the buzzy book that everybody was picking up. If you are going back to the Underground Railroad now after 10 years and looking at where it sits in American literature, I don't know, seven?

1:36:35Rebecca Schinsky:Another eight? Yeah. I think we're in another eight realm. Do you get more read cred if you pick up Apex Hide the Hurt? If you're like, I want to really get into the Whitehead back catalog. Yes, you do. I think that's interesting. Oh, damn factor.

1:36:52Jeff O'Neal:I mean, for me, when whitehead, whiteheads 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 like, 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.

1:37:21Rebecca Schinsky:I'm not trying to argue against the 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 I'm having just a little resistance to 10 because of the, I don't know whether it gives credit or demerit for 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 visited the goonfire where you've really like i don't know but i feel like underground railroad is like yeah duh that's a cool idea duh but also we've seen how it goes the other way the other way so i don't know james is more of the

1:38:12Jeff O'Neal:books we've talked about, I think James is more surprising. So there are some more O-Damn moments for that. I can come down to like an eight for the O-Damn factor. I'm not going to go.

1:38:22Rebecca Schinsky:Nine is my lowest I'll go. That's all I was going to say. I was willing to compromise. Okay.

1:38:28Jeff O'Neal:We'll go to a nine. So a pretty high score, eight, eight, nine, eight, nine here. One of the highest, I think, that we've had. Yeah.

1:38:35Rebecca Schinsky:And if you haven't got enough of us talking about Underground Railroad or any other books, You can join us for office hours, patreon.com slash zero to well read for guided readalongs and the other membership options. Some of them include the bonus content. We're 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 at zero to well read podcast. We put all the video ones up on YouTube. If you're a video sort of person, you can shoot us an email zero to well read at book rat dot com. We have a mailbag episode coming up.

1:39:04Rebecca Schinsky:We do not care. 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 ZeroToWellRead at BookRiot.com. Thanks so much to Thrift Books 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 once again.

1:39:33Jeff O'Neal:We'll see you next time. Thank you.