‘The Underground Railroad’ blends truth and magical realism

Amazon Prime’s ‘The Underground Railroad’ showcases the ongoing struggle for freedom.

Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’ Amazon Prime series The Underground Railroad, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, is a 10-part mind-bending, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking saga of love and death and freedom rooted in the hard reality of American slavery.

By now, even people who have never even heard of Whitehead’s novel must know the premise. In this alternate universe, the secret network that helps people escape slavery in the American South is not a network of church basements but a real steel tracks and tunnels railroad propelled by courage, ingenuity, and subterranean steam engines.

From that starting point, the story launches 16-year-old Cora onto a mythic journey in which historical research and poetic imagination collide to create both a hyperrealist depiction of the slave system at work and metaphoric scenes and action that dramatize the variants of white supremacy in the rest of American history.

 

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