Note: Text has been edited for clarity and will not match video exactly.
Audible: How did the idea for come 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?
