Note: Text has been edited for clarity and will not match video exactly.
Audible: How did the idea for The Underground Railroadcome about?
Colson Whitehead: I was sitting on my couch about sixteen years ago and maybe heard a reference to the Underground Railroad on the TV. I was like, “Oh it’s so funny, when you’re a kid that’s how you envision it. You envision a literal underground railroad like a subway.”
It was really just: What if it actually was a literal underground railroad? Then that’s sort of like a premise, not much of a plot there. Then I came up with a Gulliver’s Travels-type structure where each state our protagonist goes through would be a different state of American possibilities.
The more I would talk about this Underground Railroad idea with my wife or my agent, the more enthusiasm I got. I would say, “Oh, it’s going to be so hard.” Then they’d say, “It sounds really good, though.” I felt that if I waited I might be a better writer. Sometimes, you feel like you have a good idea, but you’re not sure if you can do it justice. Then it just seemed like maybe the hard thing is the thing that you should be doing. If you don’t know you can do it, why not try it?
A: Why did you choose to make your protagonist female?
CW: Really, to challenge myself. I had a female protagonist before, but it seemed I’d had a string of male protagonists, so really just to vary it. I hadn’t explored a mother-daughter relationship before, so it seemed a good opportunity to try something new.
It is a very different state of horror being a woman under slavery than a man. Once you hit puberty, you’re supposed to make more slaves and you have no agency over who you marry or what’s going to happen to your children.
A: What does Cora’s “three feet of dirt” represent?
CW: In the opening chapter, we get an overview of the plantation experience. Cora is on a plantation in Georgia. Her grandmother has staked out a little garden where she grows vegetables. It’s handed down to Cora’s mother and then to Cora once Cora’s mother disappears. You have nothing. All you have is the clothes on your back, basically, but Cora has this one gift of a garden on the plantation.
It’s the one thing that she can fight for, the one thing she can call her own. In the midst of a complete lack of agency, she has power and a place to be creative on the plantation.
“They’re enduring trauma every minute of their lives. They are going to be fighting for every single scrap of dignity that they could have, any kind of advantage to get them through.”
A: What does it mean for Cora to escape the plantation?
CW: Cora has never left the plantation before she makes the brave decision to run. These different states that she’s in — South Carolina or Tennessee — she is getting more and more agency. She’s becoming more of a person in the world and has become more active.
The farther she gets from her original plantation, the more she enters into herself, her Cora-ness. So that’s part of the trajectory of the book and her life.
A: Why is there so much animosity within the slave community?
CW: In terms of the plantation, I guess in pop culture there is an idea that you have 80 slaves living together. They’re helping each other out. Maybe there is like an Uncle Tom or a turncoat, but they’re all in it together. It seems from my idea of human psychology and how people act, if you have 80 people, eight people are saints. Eight people are terrible and the rest migrate in between different bits of behavior.
We talk about PTSD. They’re actually not “post-” anything. They’re enduring trauma every minute of their lives. They’re not going to be on their best behavior. They are going to be fighting for every single scrap of dignity that they could have, any kind of advantage to get them through.
A: Do you believe that human beings ultimately turn on one another?
CW: There is a chapter where there is a white supremacist state where black people are outlawed. If you harbor a slave, you will be punished, too. People are informing on each other in a way that I find in Nazi Germany or severe socialist states where people are informing on each other so as not to be put in prison themselves or be punished.
We’d like to think that if we were put in those situations, we would be our best selves, but if your family is being threatened, or your livelihood, maybe you do turn in the teacher who is teaching students inflammatory rhetoric against the state. Who knows what we’d do in those situations?
A: How did you approach blending history with fantasy?
CW: Once I had made the choice to make the Railroad a literal railroad, I’m already leaving the historical record. My philosophy was: I’m not going to stick to the facts, but I’ll stick to the truth. The truth is that we like to demonize the other. Part of entering into the American Dream is entering the middle class. When you’re an immigrant, you want to assimilate into the larger culture.
I didn’t want to just talk about black people. I wanted to talk about Irish immigrants, and Italian immigrants, and Jewish immigrants. Every generation, there is a new set of people trying to come to America and make it.
“We’re constantly trying to make a better version of our country, a better version of ourselves. That’s a hard enterprise whether you’re talking about the individual or the larger nation.”
A: Is the “American Dream” possible to achieve?
CW: Sure, if you play by the rules, that’s what we are told to believe will happen. But if you’re a person of color, if you’re a woman in different periods over history, you don’t have the rights to achieve what you want to achieve with your life.
A: What research did you do for the novel?
CW: There are a few good overviews of the Underground Railroad. The one I used first and [that] provided the best background for me was called Bound for Canaan by Fergus Bordewich. In terms of day-to-day slave life, I went to the big memoirs: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs. Harriet Jacobswas a woman who ran away from her master and spent seven years in an attic waiting for passage out of her city.
In the 1930s, the government — trying to put people back to work — decided, why not help some writers, and [hired writers through the WPA to] interview former slaves. They were people who were 80 or 90 years old, who were kids or teenagers when the Civil War happened.
There are hundreds and hundreds of [interviews]. Some of them are just three paragraphs. Some are ten pages. They provide mundane stories about farming. Some are about living in the house. Some are working in the fields. That provided me with a lot of the physical details about what they ate and introduced me to the variety of life on the plantations.
A: Why did you choose to include actual runaway slave ads?
CW: Slavery was a huge operation planned down to the smallest detail. If your slave runs away, you place an ad in the newspaper with identifying characteristics the same way you would put a poster for your lost pet like in a laundromat or something.
As a fiction writer, I like making things up. I like being a ventriloquist sometimes and doing different people’s voices, but I couldn’t compete with the language of the slave ads. They say so much about the slave and also the master — and the whole business of slavery.
“Writing the book is a journey and an inquiry. Hopefully, when I get to the last page, I have done it in such a way that the reader is taken along on my investigations.”
A: Were aspects of the novel informed by recent events?
CW: People do ask me this two years after the Ferguson unrest and the rise of Black Lives Matter — was I influenced by current events? I’ve been aware of police brutality since I hit puberty and my dad was like, “You’re a target whenever you leave the house.”
I think if the book is good, it could’ve come out three years ago and people would respond to it. Then hopefully, ten years from now, people are reading it and have a different template for their responses.
We do have these periodic conversations about what are we going to do about race relations. Usually it’s short-lived and then we go back to the usual silence.
A: Are you optimistic about the future of race relations in America?
CW: In hoping there is a better world for my kids, I have to be a little more optimistic than I have been previously. I think the progress we make is very slow.
We’re constantly trying to make a better version of our country, a better version of ourselves. That’s a hard enterprise whether you’re talking about the individual or the larger nation. The fact that I’m here and I work for a big publisher and my books get distributed and I can choose what clothes I wear means I’m not in a state of slavery. That has improved. We have an African-American president. I certainly didn’t think that would happen when I was a kid.
A: What impact do you want your writing to have?
CW: In writing these books, I’m trying to figure out things about myself and about the world. Writing the book is a journey and an inquiry. Hopefully, when I get to the last page, I have done it in such a way that the reader is taken along on my investigations, if you do it right.
Whenever you attack a subject — whether it’s war, slavery, domestic relationships — people smarter and more talented than you have done it before. All you can do is hopefully add something to the literature.
A: What advice would you give budding writers?
CW: I would just say keep writing and failing. Then the next story will be a little bit better. The third story will be even better still. Then they’ll have a relapse and get worse. That’s part of finding their voice.
If you only write about 18-year-olds from New Jersey who are much like you, why not write about a nineteen-year-old from New York who is a different sex? Try that on, and keep expanding a repertoire of characters and voices and see what fits you. If you’re afraid of not writing in a first person, write in the third person and keep testing yourself.
