by Andrew Hedglin
I was mesmerized by the idea since I saw the cover on the front of the July Indie Next flyer: Underground Airlines in plain text over the half-obscured face of a black man. It encapsulated the concept of the novel so succinctly: slavery in the modern age, the Underground Railroad in the time of jet airliners.
Of course, just because a book has a cool concept does not mean that it is automatically a successful story. It has to be executed well. To show how a system works, you have to find the right human story within the system, and I think Ben Winters has chosen well.
The story is laid out as a classic detective story: a tortured detective with a woman problem is working a regular case when he discovers a conspiracy that goes…all the way…to the top. Here, our detective is Victor (a man of many identities), a former slave forced to work as a bounty hunter for the U.S. Marshals hunting other escaped slaves. He lives with the visage of freedom but struggles with the “duty” he is bound to and the evil it entails.
The woman is Martha, a white mother at his hotel alone with a bi-racial child. After Victor’s mild-mannered persona Jim shows her kindness, she gradually draws him into her quest for answers about the child’s father.
The case Victor is hunting is Jackdaw, an escaped slave from Garments of the Greater South, that draws an unusual amount of heat from his boss at the Marshal service. Victor searches for the truth as he infiltrates a cell of the Airlines in Indianapolis. (The Airlines remain as much a metaphor as the Railroad was, however.) He matches wits against an alternatively idealistic and pragmatic young priest, an undercover cop, and a West African enforcer; everybody uses each other to achieve their own goals.
While the three-dimensional characters are intriguing, the setting is the real show-stealer here: an alternative America that diverged a hundred years before when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated just prior to taking office. Slavery remains legal in a few states called the Hard Four: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Carolina. While most of the country disapproves of the practice, it finds itself ensnared in a series of compromises as it tries to summon the political will to do anything about it. It’s fascinating to see how history bends, changing in some ways and remaining the same in others. For instance, the unstoppable forces of James Brown and Michael Jackson cannot seem to be contained in any version of history.
Now, there is a caveat that feels important to mention: Winters, the author, is a white dude. I don’t know if it feels like cultural appropriation to tell such a story as a white person from a black person’s point of view. This book helped me consider not only the legacy of slavery in this country but also the issue of exploitative labor worldwide–all while removing the distancing factors of geography and history. But as fresh as some of these ideas seemed to me upon first meeting them, they are not new, and writers of colors are writing about them and have been writing about them, and I encourage you to read them as well.
Overall, though, Underground Airlines works as both a story and an idea. It keeps you turning pages and thinking at the same time. It’s a great end-of-summer read that mixes the escapism of summer with serious considerations of our time—as it was, as it might be, and as it is.
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