Underground Railroad inspires a wave of books, plays, TV – Detroit Free Press

Stuart Miller, Los Angeles Times 11:05 p.m. ET March 18, 2017

Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Rosalee in the TV series Underground. The show on WGN is one of many projects telling the story of how the railroad helped 30,000 to 100,000 (of the millions of enslaved blacks) to escape to Canada.(Photo: Steve Dietl/Sony)

When WGN Americas drama Underground debuted last winter, it seemed like a cultural outlier. Stories from the Underground Railroad had long been relegated to nonfiction or the broad and simplistic brushstrokes of childrens books. Even as stories about the horrors of oppression (12 Years a Slave) and the civil rights movement (42, Selma, All the Way) entered the mainstream, the Underground Railroad remained overlooked.

Lately, however, slaves flight to freedom has became a jumping off point for an array of creative endeavors. A few weeks after Underground, with its soundtrack curated by executive producer John Legend, came Barbara Hamblys mystery novel, Drinking Gourd, and Robert Morgans escape saga, Chasing the North Star. Last summer Ben Winters counterfactual noir novel, Underground Airlines, hit bestseller lists; then came Colson Whiteheads The Underground Railroad, the years National Book Award winner for fiction.

Underground executive producer John Legend also curated the series soundtrack.(Photo: Valerie Macon/AFP-Getty Images)

In the fall, the surreal and subversive Underground Railroad Game opened to rapturous reviews off-Broadway. (The New York Times called it in-all-ways sensational.) Set in the present, the play depicts two teachers, one white and one black, stumbling along the treacherous path of educating children about slavery and racial oppression.

The topic hasnt been explored enough so Im not surprised people are finding new and different angles, says Underground co-creator Joe Pokaski.

The exterior of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitors Center in Church Creek, Md.(Photo: Brian Witte/Associated Press)

This month brings a new season of Underground, the opening of the National Park Services Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center in Cambridge, Md., and Through Darkness to Light, a photographic essay of the Underground Railroad by Jeanine Michna-Bales. The Underground River, a novel by Martha Conway, hits in June, and Viola Davis is developing a Tubman film for HBO.

Academy Award winner Viola Davis is developing a series on the Underground Railroad for HBO.(Photo: Paul Buck/EPA)

The Underground Railroad came at a time when our country was so polarized that there was no understanding on either side so the fascination with it now might be because were back in that situation, says Michna-Bales, adding that the movement also blurred lines, bringing together white and black, and people from different religions and socioeconomic groups, while also giving women previously unheard of roles in public life. Her pictures aim to provide a first-person perspective on what a slave would have seen on the long and dangerous journey north.

Many more slaves actually attempted escape without the aid of the Underground Railroad, at least initially. The phrase Underground Railroad first appeared around 1839 but slaves had, naturally, been trying to escape since the implementation of this horrific institution. Many initially tried for Mexico or the Caribbean. Historians estimate that the railroad helped 30,000 to 100,000 (of the millions of enslaved blacks) to escape to Canada. But for the most part the railroad really ventured only about 100 miles into the South, so the first season of the TV series and Morgans novel also explore the experience of slaves running without outside help.

Underground co-creator Misha Green puts all these new works in the larger context of publishers and producers recognizing the value artistically and commercially in stories about minorities, from the Roots remake to Oscar best-picture winner Moonlight. She points particularly to ones with characters seizing control of their own narrative, whether thats Straight Outta Compton or Hidden Figures. Indeed, last year also begat a movie (Birth of a Nation) and a play (Nathan Alan Davis Nat Turner in Jerusalem) about Turners slave uprising.

Author Morgan, a professor at Cornell University, says the trends roots stretch back decades.

Fiction is the way we learn about others, he says, pointing to waves of groups laying down their markers, from Southern writers in the 1930s to Jewish writers in the decades after World War II. The original Roots was the building block and writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and August Wilson then paved the way, he says, so that these Underground Railroad stories are a natural evolution.

I think its a good thing any time people are interested in history, says Eric Foner, a leading scholar of 19th century America, whose 2015 book, Gateway to Freedom, focused on the Underground Railroad. Foner understands artists taking liberties with the facts, and he admires Whiteheads fantastical creation of an actual railroad that runs underground. Its fantasy but Whitehead also gives a kaleidoscope of black history. Its very informed.

Most of the current projects began a few years ago, so Green says the zeitgeist partially reflects the rise of the tea party and birther movement followed by the spate of police shootings and the birth of Black Lives Matter.

These stories, like police brutality, have always existed but now the public might finally be primed and open to step outside its own orthodoxy and turn its gaze to them, adds Underground Railroad Game co-writer and costar Jennifer Kidwell.

Even as these stories make history more accessible to mainstream audiences, theyre refusing to whitewash the grim realities, striving instead to demolish the traditional narrative. This is not your grandfathers history that helps paint a rosier picture of historical atrocities, says Scott Sheppard, co-writer and costar of Underground Railroad Game, which will tour to as-yet-undetermined destinations in late 2017 and 2018.

We often use narratives as balms to sooth our concerns and fears about where we are now, Sheppard adds. The number of escaped slaves is minuscule compared to the systematic destruction of the millions of lives throughout slaverys history, so we want to remove that layer of romanticism and make everyone question their beliefs and values in as destabilizing a way as possible.

Underground may be slickly produced adventure TV yet one main character after another gets recaptured or killed. In Drinking Gourd, protagonist Benjamin January, a thoughtful and well-educated free black man, reflects on how he has come to hate virtually every white person, especially after learning the white abolitionist he encounters rapes the girls he helps to freedom. Whiteheads and Winters novels are even darker.

Underground Airlines takes place in the present but imagines a world that had no Civil War, where slavery was only gradually abolished and where it still thrives in four Southern states. Im hoping the book is a reminder of the presence of the past in our lives, says Winters, who connects a nation built on slavery to the institutionalized racism that persisted through Reconstruction and Jim Crow and that continues today. My alternative history isnt alternative enough.

Underground Railroad Game also ties the sins of Americas past squarely to the present day.

Our play explores the myths of the white savior and of romanticized American history, Kidwell says. We just happened to set it against the Underground Railroad.

That is a recurring theme in interviews with the writers, especially those who are white.

Its important that these stories are not, Oh, these nice white people are helping these poor black slaves get away and are instead about free blacks and slaves taking agency, Hambly says.

In Winters novel, the idea of whites as nobles rescuing the helpless is derisively called the Mockingbird mentality, in reference to Harper Lees Atticus Finch.

We are not just telling a black story, Winters says. Slavery is a story about white America; its about the role that people who looked like me played and still play in oppressing people who look different. The effects of and resistance to that oppression and the lasting legacy are a foundation of who we are as a people.

Although these works were all conceived before Donald Trumps election, the current climate will influence the audiences perceptions. I reread my own book in November and it read differently, says Conway, whose book is about a Northern white woman dipping her toe in the water of activism. Its about how people change and how she went from being a bystander to a participant.

They will resonate differently, says musician Legend, who not only served as music curator and executive producer on Underground but also plays Frederick Douglass this season. We have a president who doesnt know anything about American history or black history, and people are starting to realize how important it is to understand our history so we can fight back.

Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2n9Nv8n

See original here:

Underground Railroad inspires a wave of books, plays, TV - Detroit Free Press