Speculative Fiction, Underground Railroad, and the Emotional Truths

From Gene Seymour's Alt That’s Fit to Print The dangers and rewards of speculative fiction pointing out the good points.

Such tendencies worry me somewhat when it comes to—and I realize how ridiculous this sounds—the reception of alternative histories. I am thinking principally of Colson Whitehead’s award-winning The Underground Railroad (2016), which has recently been adapted into a miniseries streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Whitehead blends the grim realities of the antebellum slave trade into an audacious fantasia that transforms what was, historically, a metaphorical “railroad” transporting escaped Black slaves to freedom into an actual subterranean network of tracks and trains. The author tells the story with such deadpan authority that I found myself worrying that some readers with no knowledge of the actual facts would come away believing that Whitehead’s fiction and historical records were one and the same. I thought such worries were idle until I came across a reviewer who described Whitehead’s novel as “a mostly straightforward and realistic account of a slave’s escape.” That “mostly” modifier may be enough to buy him the benefit of the doubt, but . . . really, man? “Straightforward”? “Realistic”? You really think there were tracks and trains hauling runaways northward, and that there were actually skyscrapers in South Carolina in the early to mid nineteenth century, along with quacks conducting quasi-eugenics experiments?

Still, like so much speculative fiction, Whitehead’s story, for all its reality-tweaking, offers up emotional truths—truths that might not come across as powerfully in a less-imaginative narrative. He also captures the physical reality of the slave system, and cogently lays out the white-supremacist mythology that propped it up. These elements are as unavoidable in his Underground Railroad as the details in the recollections of those who escaped north through the network of safe houses and hideouts that marked the actual Railroad’s trail. There are many ways to pull a fast one on the gullible. But one of the dividends of alternate history, when it’s rendered well, is how it can illuminate actual things and events that happened in the past and quite often linger on in the present. To be drawn into such stories doesn’t mean you’re being taken. Sometimes, they wise you up.

I would apply this to Philp Roth's The Plot Against America and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The thing is the capturing of emotional truths.