The Underground Railroad: The Wound and the Remedy

Jenkins breaks from this tradition by bringing the corroded nature of whiteness into the light while also maintaining Black subjectivity and tenderness as the show’s guiding principles. One pivotal scene in the first chapter depicts a feast being shared among a group of white people. As they sit around a table and gorge themselves amid an awe-inspiring verdant expanse of Georgia fields, the proximity and low angle of the camera render their faces large and grotesque. They watch expectantly as an enslaved man named Big Anthony (Elijah Everett)—who has just tried to run to freedom, only to be returned to the plantation by Ridgeway—is tied to a wooden frame and brutally whipped until pieces of his flesh drape from his body. The white people’s chatter and the music playing in the background are silenced by the plantation master, Terrance Randall (Ben Walker), who draws the crowd’s attention to Big Anthony’s cruel fate by quoting Bible verses, and orders enslaved people tending the fields to come and witness the depraved spectacle. After the dying man’s body is set aflame, we see the proceedings from his perspective. Blinking eyes open and close, and we see flickering flames and bystanders whose figures are made hazy by the smoke. But the horror of the scene—the most visually gruesome in the series—is not offered with fearful coyness or as torture porn that lavishes more attention on the brutalized body than on the victim’s soul. Rather than inviting us to merely bear witness to physical violence, Jenkins and Laxton allow us to contemplate the interiority of the man enduring this torment.

One element in the scene speaks to the complicated nature of the series as a whole: its beauty. Like much else in The Underground Railroad, this moment elicits awe—through Laxton’s symmetrical compositions, the expressive faces of the enslaved characters, and the lustrous color palette. When the series was released in 2021, it was met with wide acclaim for its operatic sweep, which lends it an air of importance. But while recognizing the gravity of its subject matter, major publications (and their predominantly white critics) often framed the show as a history lesson rather than as the complex sensory experience it is. At the same time, many of my Black colleagues seemed apprehensive about its mixture of horror and visual pleasure. Yet I was reminded of something that Toni Morrison once said about the “absolute necessity” of beauty: “I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence. It’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for.” Do our ancestors not deserve beauty as much as we do? Did they not suffuse their existence with it in every hard-won way they could? Are their stories important only because of the suffering they contain? Among the many things that distinguish Jenkins’s Underground Railroad is its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.

This is an extraordinary achievement, partly because the responsibility of the slavery epic can seem like an impossible weight to bear. How can a work of cinema induce the healing of centuries-old wounds that define our social institutions here in the United States, wounds that the nation’s people and government have long neglected to address? Movies about slavery have fostered such a misleading view of their subject, and so frequently devolve into prurient displays of trauma, that some people believe there should be fewer of them or that we have enough of them already. But these views are misguided. For better or worse, Americans get a lot of their understanding of history from film and television, and these mediums can narrow or widen the aperture for the futures that we imagine for ourselves. This is why it is crucial that the emotional worlds presented in on-screen slavery stories be expansive and rich, just like the lives of the people who endured this violent period of American history.

The discontent surrounding the genre is rooted in the fact that it has historically been caught between two poles. On one end of the spectrum lies a quest for realism (exemplified by the Oscar-winning 2013 film 12 Years a Slave) that focuses so much on physical violence that it tends to sacrifice the interiority of its characters, particularly Black women. On the other end stands the monumental example of Gone with the Wind (1939), which made a myth out of an Old South that never was. By combining the most seductive elements of the Hollywood dream machine with a racist vision that emboldened real-life white supremacists, that blockbuster etched anti-Black stereotypes more deeply into American culture. It is notable that the most potent of its archetypes—the loving but stern mammy (Hattie McDaniel) and the manic pickaninny (Butterfly McQueen)—strip Black women of their womanhood.

Whereas the enslaved characters in Gone with the Wind have a downcast look in their eyes, the gaze of Black folks in The Underground Railroad is penetrating, yearning, and angry as hell, sometimes all at once. When I first reviewed the series upon its release, I found Cora to be a cipher defined solely by her psychic scars. After subsequent viewings, though, I noticed how her embittered, combative demeanor gives way to attempts at tenderness. We see a glimpse of this in the series’ first chapter, after Randall clubs a young Black boy in the face for not being able to recite the Declaration of Independence. Cora throws herself on the child’s crumpled body to protect him from further violence, which only results in both being whipped.

As fragile and fleeting as they are, Cora’s relationships are a continual source of solace in the series. One of the most important bonds she forms is the one she shares with Caesar. After making it to South Carolina with the help of the railroad and the caring people they meet along its route, the pair take on new identities and wear fine clothing that accentuates their beauty. The community they have landed in is run by seemingly forthright, liberal white people who teach Black folks to read, help them with their work, and show them how to present themselves in polite society. But the cracks begin to show as respectability turns deadly. These white liberals are just as dangerous as the masters Cora and Caesar left behind in Georgia, and it is soon revealed that they are slowly poisoning the Black men and sterilizing the Black women they claim to be nurturing. Cora and Caesar are torn from each other’s lives as Ridgeway encircles them, and the trauma of their separation reverberates in later chapters. In one of the series’ most heartbreaking scenes, Cora dreams of walking through the gleaming, amber-lit passageways of the railroad, where she sees Caesar amid a sea of people—the transitory denizens of this underground world. The lovers dance to a lilting string arrangement that echoes a moment from earlier in the series, and Caesar cradles Cora in his arms as she softly cries. In this dream, they have crossed the border of death. What could have been and what will never be are briefly brought into the realm of experience.

While the show criticizes the hollow rhetoric and deadly actions of white liberals, The Underground Railroad also takes aim at their Black counterparts. Late in the series, Cora reaches a farm in Indiana run by John (Peter De Jersey) and Gloria Valentine (Amber Gray), a light-skinned Black couple of genteel comportment. In the chapters that chronicle Cora’s time there, Jenkins explores the tensions that form between Black people of different complexions, and between the more and less educated members of the community. For some on the Valentines’ farm, Cora represents a danger that must be expelled. It is the liberal, upstanding dark-skinned freedman Mingo (Chukwudi Iwuji) who ends up betraying her and bringing a violent fate upon his own people. This devastating turn illustrates the lengths to which whiteness will go to compel Black folks into seeing how it sees and valuing what it values.

Jenkins does not flinch from such thorny realities. But he always returns to the idea of the gaze as a portal to the joys, passions, and contradictions that define Black life. In The Gaze (2021), an experimental project that Jenkins shot on the set of The Underground Railroad, the director gathers meticulous tracking shots that (like several tableaux in the series itself) show characters staring directly into Laxton’s camera. This is portraiture in languid motion. From lead actors like Aaron Pierre to background performers, the cast is incandescent with curiosity and confrontation, as Britell’s score hums and swells and the scenic backdrops evoke the flow of memory. The Gaze distills the ethos of the whole series into fifty-two minutes of wordless splendor.

In Jenkins’s eyes, each scar, gesture, and movement is its own story. He understands that the body keeps its own record. At once a slavery epic that reconstitutes the visual and sonic grammar of its genre and a cinematic masterpiece that functions as both wound and remedy, The Underground Railroad shows how the Black body bears memories and histories that America chooses to forget but, ultimately, can never escape.