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Instruments of Subjugation and Escape: Blues Trains and the Neo-Slave Narrative in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

When describing the music and dancing that accompanies Jockey’s birthday parties on the Randall plantation in Georgia, the narrator of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, states, "There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum makes instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude of the song” (28). This passage is particularly important when looking at the relationship between subjects and objects. While the “human players” are typically seen as actors, or subjects, the “instruments” are usually viewed as objects to be acted upon. However, this passage presents a reversal of the subject / object binary, in that the “human players” become instruments through their interactions with musical instruments. In a sense, players become objects by playing, or acting upon, their instruments.

These fiddles, drums, and banjos that assist in the creation of musical sound at Jockey’s birthday parties, these objects that are being both acted upon and acting on human players in this passage, are things. Bill Brown, in his 2003 book, A Sense of Things, examines “how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies” (4). Brown is interested in how subjects create meaning through the use of objects. Like Brown points out, there is meaning created when human players use / play the musical instruments, a meaning that ultimately separates itself from both the instruments and the human players. This separation of sound, when looking at it from the hierarchy inherent in the plantation slave system, becomes the plantation head, the master, while the human players and instruments are in servitude to this sound, this song. 

Cora, a slave on the Randall plantation, is wary of this oppressive sound. The narrator states, “She was wary of how sometimes when the music tugged, you might suddenly be next to a man and you didn’t know what he might do. All the bodies in motion, given license. To pull on you, take both of your hands, even if they were doing it with a nice thought” (28). Cora is wary of the physical reaction that musical sound invokes in her and the other slaves, a tug and pull of not only a body in motion, but also a subjugated body, a body not in control of itself. In this novel, then, music, which is typically seen as a mode of escape or transcendence for antebellum slaves, becomes a metaphor for the slave system under which they live, a metaphor that allows us to see the futility of escape for Whitehead’s slaves.

Much like the musical instruments that fail to provide a symbolic escape for slaves in this novel, trains are also unable to be an instrument of escape for Cora. In Whitehead’s re-imagining of the historical underground railroad, it is more than a network of stations and people, but is instead an actual train that runs underground. When Cora and her partner, Caesar, who has arranged for Cora to escape with him, first see a train of the underground railroad, the narrator states, “They hushed, and the rumbling became a sound. Lumbly led them to the edge of the platform [...] The main body consisted of a large black box topped by the engineer’s cabin. Below that, pistons and large cylinders engaged in a relentless dance with the ten wheels, two sets of small ones in front of three behind. The locomotive pulled one single car, a dilapidated boxcar missing numerous planks in its walls” (69). In this passage, the train is described in terms of the sounds it creates, but also its ability to create a dance of the wheels, pistons, and cylinders. Therefore, we get a dancing train, a train reminiscent of the blues train in Houston Baker’s 1984 book, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, in which he states,

the dominant blues syntagm in America is an instrumental imitation of train-  wheels-over-track-junctures. This sound is the “sign,” as it were, of the blues, and it combines an intriguing melange of phonics: rattling gondolas, clattering flatbeds, quilling whistles, clanging bells, rumbling boxcars, and other railroad sounds. A blues text may thus announce itself by the onomatopoeia of the train’s whistle sounded on the indrawn breath of a harmonica or a train’s bell tinkled on the high keys of an upright piano. The blues stanzas may then roll through an extended meditative repertoire with a steady train-wheels-over-track-junctures guitar back beat as a traditional, syntagmatic complement. If desire and absence are driving conditions of blues performance, the amelioration of such conditions is implied by the onomatopoeic training of blues voice and instrument. Only a trained voice can sing the blues. (8)

As Baker points out, a blues performance is driven not only by the themes of desire and absence, but also in the imitation of the train sounds that imply an escape that either takes you to or away from somewhere and/or someone. This imitation of the railroad’s “train-wheels-over-track” is at the heart of the blues, according to Baker.

Cora, after being re-captured in North Carolina by the slave-catcher, Ridgeway, ends up in Tennessee. After a confrontation with local, free African Americans, Cora attacks Ridgeway. The narrator states, “Cora jumped on Ridgeway’s back and strangled him with her chains, twisting them tight against his flesh. Her scream came from deep inside her, a train whistle echoing in a tunnel” (226). In this passage, we see Cora not only imitating the sound of a train whistle, but also see her embodying the train sound from “deep inside her,” becoming, symbolically, the instrument of escape. Caesar wanted Cora to join him in escaping not because she was a “rabbit’s foot to carry with you on the voyage but the locomotive itself. He couldn’t do it without her” (234). 

Cora is captured by Ridgeway again after an ambush on the Valentine farm in Indiana. Ridgeway wants Cora to take him to the tunnel of the underground railroad. As she does this, Cora “hesitated on the top step” (302). The narrator states, “On Randall, on Valentine, Cora never joined the dancing circles. She shrank from the spinning bodies, afraid of another person so close, so uncontrolled. Men had put a fear in her, those years ago. Tonight, she told herself. Tonight I will hold him close, as if in a slow dance. As if it were just the two of them in the lonesome world, bound to each other until the end of the song” (302). There in the tunnel of the underground railroad, Cora takes control of the song, rather than being a servant to the song. She jumps onto a handcar and pumps, discovering “a rhythm, pumping her arms, throwing all of herself into movement. Into northness. Was she traveling through the tunnel or digging it? Each time she brought her arms down on the lever, she drove a pickax into the rock, swung a sledge onto a railroad spike” (303). Cora “decided to go the rest of the way on foot [...] Her fingers danced over valleys, rivers, the peaks of mountains, the contours of a new nation hidden beneath the old [...] She’d find the terminus or die on the tracks” (304). Cora, toward the end of her journey, no longer needs an instrument to ride the rails, instead she has fully transformed into the instrument, the instrument of escape, an instrument that sings and dances like a train, a blues train, as Baker points out, that reaches back to the “hollers, cries, whoops, and moans of black men and women working in fields without recompense” (8). Cora’s blues train is one that represents this desire, this lack, but also a possibility that her labor will be rewarded.