The Underground Railroad: 03 - North Carolina
Amazon StudiosThe image sharpens. What was once a vivid tapestry of emotional broad strokes predominantly conveying tone and atmosphere is slowly gaining contrast. Details emerge in the picture painted by the filmmaker. And it starts to resemble something more profoundly unsettling than a tonal odyssey of despair: a Bosch-esque hellscape whose horror is rooted in disturbing familiarity.
To this end, the third chapter of The Underground Railroad tangibly shifts its own pace and approach to the way the story is told. Following Cora’s narrow escape from Ridgeway, a feat Caesar was not successful in, she follows further up north in search for freedom, completely unaware of the horrors that await her. As she is quickly brought up to speed by one of the railroad operatives, Martin (Damon Herriman), Cora is confronted with a distinct possibility she might lose her life because North Carolina – as depicted in the series – has adopted strict racial purity laws and that she will be murdered if found by the bible-thumping, book-burning locals. What is more, Ridgeway and his turncoat companion, like bloodhounds, are tirelessly searching for her as well.
Without a shadow of a doubt, this is a pivotal episode of the series that deliberately drags the narrative further into the realm of elevated reality-adjacent dystopia emboldened by abundance of visual symbolism. Even though not much happens in terms of plot development – Cora spends most of her time couped up in a cellar together with Grace (Mychal-Bella Bowman) whom Martin and his wife (Lily Rabe) have harboured for a much longer while – this chapter has quite a lot to say through the themes it is tackling. The allegorical symmetry to The Holocaust the story has assumed in the previous episode becomes more defined and immediately noticeable. After all, it does not take much to see the predicament Cora and Grace are in as not too dissimilar to that of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. In fact, the character of Grace is essentially an avatar for Anne Frank.
Provocative as such comparison may seem, it bears a lot of weight and also helps to re-contextualize quite a lot more of the thematic content carried within the episode, as well as the series as a whole. It is not an accident that the community Martin belongs to burns ‘impure’ books and insists that racial purity is somehow enshrined in scripture. It is also not just an artistic choice for the film to open with an imagery of what is called The Freedom Trail, a never-ending road adorned with hanging bodies of murdered black men, women and children. The language, tone and characterizations of this fictitious community is purposefully engineered as a hybrid between strictly conservative Christian fundamentalists, who base their racial superiority in religiosity, and Nazi Germany with its legally-codified racial purity laws, collective punishment and authoritarian leadership.
Up to this point in the show, the filmmakers were hiding behind a veil of thematic subtlety and only jabbed occasionally by hinting at certain nuances, which could have been interpreted in a number of ways, or understood directly as elements of the universe paralleling historical record of racial persecution in America. The third chapter of the series dispenses with thematic ambiguity and delivers a punch powerful enough to convince the viewers the storytellers are after sending a strong message to anyone unwilling to see the gravity of what happened in America in the past and, crucially, some of the core principles the country was founded upon, i.e. the idea of supremacy of white settlers over everybody else and permanent subjugation thereof.
This notion has been repeatedly touched upon in the previous chapters, mostly in passing, when the origins of the railroad were mentioned or when Cora and Caesar were politely reminded by the people of Griffin not to step out of line. Not only is America in the series a deeply segregated universe, which of course is rooted in historical record, but the way it deviates from agreed upon history and enters the realm of elevated fantasy seems purposeful. It is as though The Underground Railroad was attempting to use the symmetry with The Holocaust iconography to make a fundamental observation that American history of slavery and racial tensions should be discussed through a similar lens. What is more, a crucial moment in the episode – where Ethel discusses the fact the Irish had become the subjugated caste of servants in the absence of outlawed and murdered African Americans – suggests that America’s problems run much deeper. As this story is now revealing in a powerful combination of punches involving both gruesome violence and easily glossed over nuance, America’s problems are just about rooted in race as they are in its unrepentant addiction to hierarchical dominance; which potentially indicates that Cora will have to come to terms with a possibility that the freedom of The Freedom Trail might be the only salvation she’ll be granted.
