Mary Ann Shadd Cary

I was reading The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. In a blurb on the back cover, Oprah Whinfrey urges people to buy a second copy for a friend “because you are definitely going to want to talk about it.” Someone asked me to be that friend.

This fantasy fiction details real atrocities committed against African Americans over the past two hundred years in the fictional life of a woman named Cora, born a slave. There is no fiction in these burnings, beatings, and other bald unwarrantable usurpations Whitehead describes, though they are unlikely to have all been experienced by one person, and did not occur as described since some events are expanded in scale or compressed in time, and some happened in the following century. (Those alterations and inventions do not make the suffering any more disturbing, but considerably less so. I kept wondering why it was necessary to exaggerate an already abominable history? My friend tells me she can set history aside, but I never can. She’s right about that.)

And then there is the literal manifestation of railroad tracks and engines underground. Sometimes they went the wrong way. I liked that a lot. Such is real life. Sometimes.

Cora jumps on the underground railroad without knowing its destination, just desperate to escape. There was no telling. From Georgia, her first ride takes her to South Carolina.

Late in the novel, Cora begins working on a side branch of the underground railroad—no engines here, only a hand-driven cart through a narrow tunnel headed north from Indiana. There’s more. But step aside for a moment.

There was a real woman in Indiana working for the Underground Railroad during the first half of the nineteenth century. She was born a free person in the slave state of Delaware in 1823. She traveled all over, and she would eventually marry and raise two children. Her husband died four years after their marriage, and like many woman in my family, she supported herself and her family. Her home in the last years of her life in Washington DC has been designated a National Historic Landmark. She is easy to research.

“Mary Ann Shadd Cary (October 9, 1823 – June 5, 1893) was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first Black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada.

“Shadd Cary was an abolitionist who became the first female African-American newspaper editor in North America when she edited The Provincial Freeman in 1853.

“During the Civil War, at the behest of the abolitionist Martin Delany, she served as a recruiting officer to enlist black volunteers for the Union Army in the state of Indiana. After the Civil War, she taught in black schools in Wilmington, before moving to Washington, D.C., where she taught in public schools and attended Howard University School of Law. She graduated as a lawyer at the age of 60 in 1883, becoming only the second black woman in the United States to earn a law degree. She wrote for the newspapers National Era and The People’s Advocate and in 1880, organized the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise.

“Shadd Cary joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, working alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for women’s suffrage, testifying before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, and becoming the first African-American woman to vote in a national election.”—Wikipedia

A nineteenth century map of the Underground Railroad.

I felt held at a slight distance from Cora. This impression was underscored as I read accounts of real women living in slavery in Mother Is a Verb by Sarah Knott. This well-documented nonfiction about mothering, speaks from the author’s personal experience as a new mother and from first-person accounts of real women from hundreds of years past. Two pages about slave labor in the fields created a greater intimacy than I found in The Underground Railroad. I felt at once that I was reading truth, and I never quite felt that in the novel. (Perhaps arguing with his mucking about with history.)

Nevertheless . . . Whitehead is a wonderful writer, and I waited to fall under his spell; he certainly casts one.

“Before the book the only thing to read was what came written on a bag of rice. The name of the firm that manufactured their chains, imprinted in the metal like the promise of pain” (235).

Their chains do not belong to them.

The Emily Howland photo album containing the previously unknown portrait of Harriet Tubman, (above: detail, ca. 1868) was unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. (NMAAHC, Library of Congress)