OPINION:
UNDERGROUND AIRLINES
Ben H. Winters
Mulholland Books / Little, Brown, $26, 327 pages
’’If you would write a great novel, choose a great subject,” an old aphorism declares. If you would write a great “what-if,” choose an unspeakable alternative to historical fact. Thus “Underground Airlines” presumes that the Civil War never happened and slavery survives in America now.
“It was all here,” the narrator says, describing iconic images on a monument: “The whole story of Old Abe’s assassination — the martyrdom that saved the nation, the murder that remade the country. Here he was, hands raised in humble farewell to the adoring crowd around his train car, the president-elect leaving Springfield for Washington … eyes wide as he fell backwards from the fatal shot.”
“What emerged from that fraught session of Congress in the spring of 1861” was a grand compromise: “The new Confederate government was suspended, then abandoned [in return for] six amendments and four resolutions, preserving slavery where it was, preventing its extension elsewhere, balancing northern sentiment and southern interest, northern principles and southern economic welfare.”
Otherwise, Ben H. Winter’s chilling dystopia features familiar things in our new time. Cell phones, GPS and ATMs all help to perpetuate the “peculiar institution,” which is sustained by federal law. Slavery is the dominant institution in the imagined South, the economic bedrock of the “Hard Four” states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and “Carolina.”
The underground railroad of yore survives only in the novel’s title as, curiously, this network remains a mismatched fleet of land vehicles manned by poorly organized abolitionists. Runaways don’t fly in a single airplane here, and this hints at the author’s gift for the unexpected and his aversion to predictability. His magnetic tale draws the reader from chapter to chapter like a compulsive shopper hunting for bargains in a strip mall.
The story seems simple enough: “Victor” — not his real name — introduces himself, an operative in deep cover, a U.S. marshal, which should identify him as a hero. First twist: Mr. Winters upends the Marshals Service’s historical mission and good purposes. Now its prime duty is to track and capture escaped slaves, then ship them back into bondage. (Having first seen actual marshals in the 1960s when these men in suits enforced new civil rights laws, I was shocked to imagine them as slave catchers.) Yes, “Underground Airlines” proposes unthinkable things.
Victor is black. Having embarked on his cruel career for compelling reasons, he admits being very good at his job. “That’s the problem with doing the devil’s work. It can be pretty satisfying now and again.” Perversely, he takes great pride in it. But then a lot in this book is perverse. Stalking a runaway, he becomes the protector of a young white woman and her mixed-race son.
Given an initially classic central plot — man goes on mission — this story becomes serpentine, then labyrinthine, through cunning twists of plot and, more so, through the convincing ways in which Mr. Winters’ America has evolved. Grim surprises arise logically from his ghastly premise. Absent the Civil War, Dixie held sway in Washington; the Dred Scott legacy thrives into the new millennium.
Given this ungodly assumption, many of the book’s particulars are as cruel as the whole story is compelling. Ascribe part of its merit to the fascinating nature of horror stories per se, as masters from Mary Shelley to Stephen King have proved. The book’s worst elements seem logical consequences of the springboard idea: So, the Civil War never happened.
One convincing aspect of this brutal new world is the snarled web of legislated policies, bureaucratic sequelae and government-speak. PBL, shortened to PB or “peebee,” stands for “Persons Bound in Labor.” The base of each chattel’s throat is tattooed with its owner’s brand, and each one’s location is tracked in real time in a mega-database. Each PB’s complexion is specified according to color-coded arrays in the Marshals’ handbook. Victor’s skin is “moderate charcoal, brass highlights, #41;” another’s is “late-summer honey, warm tone, #76.”
Some decent people oppose slavery; the verisimilitude would vanish without them. Between long passages in dark slums and sewers, idylls appear, as driving thru Tennessee, “We passed red barns and green fields and acres of swaying corn. The sky was all porcelain blue and gentle white clouds, the curve of heaven like painted pottery.”
Convincingly, the fact of slavery has earned Southern states domestic boycotts and international embargoes. But whenever a promising challenge arises in Congress, “The Southern Regional Lobbying Association would send in their K Street shock troops, white papers in hand, and the floors of Congress would ring with the old refrains of popular sovereignty and imperishable tradition. Nothing would change.”
Perversely too, Mr. Winters achieves what Pat Barker’s novel of the London Blitz, “Noonday,” called — perhaps ironically — “the most basic human task.” This is “to shield the present from the deforming weight of the past.” Mr. Winters has twisted the past to show us how lucky we are that Lincoln lived as long as he did, that the Civil War was waged, that emancipation happened. One can hardly read this chilling novel without pausing to consider how the gentle angels of our nation depend on rights we assume to be obligatory and on truths we presume to be self-evident. May they assure a stronger reality than this brilliant dark fiction.
• Philip Kopper, publisher of Posterity Press in Bethesda, writes about history and culture. His revised museum history, “America’s National Gallery of Art,” appears this fall.
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