Oh Lordy, Miss Scarlett

I’m just finishing up Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.This novel– which won a Pulitzer and the National Book Award – is absolutely brilliant. It’s a type of fiction – magical realism – that I don’t typically enjoy, but in this case the writing is so beautiful and powerful, and the story – and its metaphors – so true, the magical realism is bothering me not.

The story follows a young slave, Cora, as she makes her escape from a plantation in Georgia via the Underground Railroad.

As Whitehead tells Cora’s story, the Underground Railroad is an actual train that runs through tunnels, and many of the stops along the way are similarly imagined. In one place, Cora works in a museum, where freed slaves (which she is passing herself off as) pose behind glass in slavery- and Africa-related tableaus so that the white folks can gawk at them.

Then there’s the town where they hang runaway slaves every Friday night, and leave their bodies hanging on the road into town.

I first began reading the book right around the time of the 2016 election, and found it so harrowing that I had to put it down. It took me well over two years to pick it back up.

It is a compelling (and important) read, speaking not only to the experience of slaves, but to the impact that white supremacy and slavery continue to have on our nation.

There are some people I’m guessing who just won’t like this book, and it won’t be because of the magical realism.

They’re the same people who want their history, their vision of the noble South, prettified and whitewashed.

I read about this a week or so ago in the Washington Post, which had an article on the negative online reviews that have been popping up about Southern plantation tours.

Here’s a smattering of what some of the low-raters had to say:

“It was just not what we expected.”

“I was depressed by the time I left.”

“ … the tour was more of a scolding of the old South.”

“The brief mentions of the former owners were defamatory.”

…“Would not recommend. Tour was all about how hard it was for the slaves.” (Source: WaPo)

“How hard it was for the slave”? Duh?

One reviewer wrote that “the tour guide was so radical about slave treatment that we felt we were being lectured and bashed about the slavery.” After mentioning her non-slave-owning Sicilian heritage, and bitching about her ruined vacation, this woman wrote that she did hope to come back “to see some real plantations that are so much more enjoyable to tour.”

Oh Lordy, Miss Scarlett…

What were they expecting? Southern belles flouncing around in hoop skirts? Noble young men sipping mint juleps and going on about honor? Period furniture shined to a mirror finish? (Shined by whom???)

If people want a cleaned up version of what plantation life – which rested on slavery, thrived on the backs of those treated inhumanely at best – they should just watch Gone With The Wind on pay per view.

Then they’ll be able to see those beautiful women in their beautiful gowns, the noble young men giving their lives for “The Cause,” the kindly house slaves so loyal to Scarlett O’Hara and her ilk. Sure, there’s fire and death and destruction (as those marauding Yankees burned everything down), but – fiddle-dee-dee – they will hear nary a word about slaves being whipped, families being split up and sold off.

Or they can rent The Birth of a Nation, to learn how the noble KKK was founded to save those hoop-skirted maidens from the depredations of you know who.

Seriously, isn’t expecting your plantation tour to be all magnolias and graciousness kind of like going to Auschwitz to admire the barracks where the SS lived?

It’s not as if slavery were incidental to plantation life. It was fundamental.

There are some hard truths out there in hard truth land, and one of them is the abhorrent truth about slavery, and how it continues to impact our nation to this day.

These reviewers don’t need a plantation tour. They need to read The Underground Railroad.