Viewers know the beats, the environments, and the language well enough to say that some version of everything depicted in a slave narrative is true enough. Resist the Impulse to Label ‘The Underground Railroad’ As Trauma Porn The format shifts- autobiography, fiction, film, television-but the setting is always vaguely familiar.
Slavery has been a topic of the American artistic canon for as long as a canon has existed.
#UNDERGROUND RAILROAD STORY ANSWERR SERIES#
The series and its source text, written by the two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient Colson Whitehead, are links in a chain that reaches back to the birth of the peculiar institution itself. It is a tale concerned not with what will or could happen in worlds like these, but more vitally, what does. The Underground Railroad is a slave epic fashioned entirely around the minds, emotions, and desires of its characters. From the very onset of the series, Jenkins has little interest relying solely on the appeal of mystery or the techniques of modern horror. Her fate is one of a select few revelations hidden within the show, which follows Cora as she attempts to flee slavery on a network of underground trains that operate throughout a fictional and timeless American South. She got stopped and was never heard from again.Ĭonsidering the rest of The Underground Railroad’s opening sequence-the premiere begins with a prologue of images and moments, accompanied by Nicholas Britell’s throbbing score, which combine to unveil the vitals of the narrative-it’s ironic that the facts of Mabel’s exodus don’t come to light until the last chapter in the series. She did run but not from Cora-and she would’ve come back, even tried to, but couldn’t. The truth is, of course, far more gutting. As the story goes Mabel fled the Randall plantation when her daughter was little, not a thought as to the fate of her own child alone in the bowels of Georgia. The matriarch had appeared via wordless flashback a few moments earlier and is effectively gone (but always felt) until another extended remembrance in the final episode of the Barry Jenkins–directed miniseries. She’s looking dead through the screen and her eyes are filled to the brim with anger and exhaustion and, most of all, hurt.Ĭora’s referring to her mother, Mabel. She stands in front of a pond, its water brown and steaming, framed by tree branches, their form barren and sinewy. “The first and last thing my mother gave me was apologies,” rues the runaway Cora Randall (Thuso Mbedu) in her first words on Amazon’s The Underground Railroad.
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