Appearing at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 11, Colson Whitehead described the long gestation of his 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad” to an audience at the University of Arizona.
In fourth grade, when he first heard about the underground railroad, “I envisioned a literal subway beneath the earth” that escaped slaves could ride to freedom, he recalled. Later, 17 years ago, that vision formed the idea for the allegorical novel, but it wasn’t until about three years ago that Whitehead felt up to completing it and doing it justice, he said.
He turned to other novels about slavery as part of his research, including “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones and “Middle Passage” by Charles Johnson, but about 10 pages into each, he found, “I’m really screwed,” he remembered, laughing. “Those people are really good. I’ll just try to do my own thing.”
“His own thing” turned out to be enough to earn Whitehead the National Book Award in November and, on Monday, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “The Underground Railroad,” which is also an Oprah Book Club best-seller.
Making his own way wasn’t new to the author; asked at the Tucson event about his mentors, he shared that “no teacher ever took an interest in me” — that as a skinny, quiet, unnoticed black kid, he found his mentors indirectly, by reading the books, and the comic books, of writers he liked.
Asked by a Tucson audience member if it was difficult for him to channel the voice of a 19th-century female, the escaped 15-year-old slave named Cora who is the novel’s protagonist, Whitehead answered, “It’s always hard if you’re doing it right.”
One reason it was so difficult is that in the book, Cora has reached the age when she will be abused as a sexual commodity if she remains a slave, adding another layer of horror that he thought important to remember.
Asked about the impact of slavery on his own family, Whitehead noted he was 8 years old when “Roots” came on TV and he realized it was “our family history.”
Now, as a father in his 40s, he finds the legacy of people being kidnapped in Africa and sold to plantations, of families being split up at auction, of Cora being part of a sale of “88 human souls for 60 crates of rum and gunpowder,” is a deeper horror, “less abstract,” he said.
“I can trace a line through Virginia,” but then most of his family history is lost in fog, he said, wondering aloud: Did they live and die as slaves in Alabama? Florida?
