You Have To Wonder

And he’s very good at it.  He crafts names and personalities for whoever he’s talking to, and he usually manages to find a lever that will pry out the information he wants.

The file on the man he’s looking for, Jackdaw, is incomplete, though.  It says things like “The subject is known to have intended to removed himself to Indianapolis,” with no explanation of who passed that information on or how they knew it.   Victor is pretty sure that the Marshal Service is hiding something from him.

Victor is a terrific character.  He’s an escaped slave himself, someone who knows exactly what it means to be sent back into slavery.  You want to hate him for what he’s doing, but you find out that he has a compelling reason to do it.  He pretends he doesn’t care, and yet painful memories continue to surface.  He meets a white woman named Martha and her black son Lionel when Martha tries to steal food from the complimentary breakfast in his hotel, and he befriends them even though he knows it’s stupid and unsafe to do so.

Victor follows the trail to a cell of the Underground Airlines, to a white supremacists’ trailer court, and then finally, with Martha, back to the Hard Four.  In the south he’s able to hide precisely because of his blackness; when he poses as Martha’s slave no one gives him a second thought.  Winters knows how to ratchet up the tension, and these scenes in the south are some of the most suspenseful in the novel.

The world is a lot like ours, maybe too much like it for all the things that have changed, or not changed enough.  The back cover even boasts about this world’s “smartphones, social networking, Happy Meals.”  There are some unsettling differences, though, mostly about slavery, like the torturous laws that allow it to continue into the twenty-first century.  Victor comes from a farm that looks like a southern plantation, but when he goes back to the Hard Four we see a mechanized factory, Garments of the Greater South, that’s all chilly efficiency.  The Persons Bound to Labor — slaves — wear ID bracelets or carry travel passes, and they work underground and out of sight, moved along by subway cars while they sing “Every day in all I do/ GGSI, my heart is true.”  There are hints of the brute force that underlies this smooth operation: when guards board the subway car looking for Victor, shackles drop automatically from the ceiling, and the PBL put them on just as automatically.  The company uses up-to-date torture methods like waterboarding.

Maybe this part isn’t all that different either.  It’s scarily easy to believe in a United States where slavery still exists.  “It is remarkable, when you consider it, all the complicated works we construct to avoid anything that might disturb us or cause us pain,” says Victor.  “The bulwarks and baffles we build up, the moats and the mazes."

Oddly, I just read an article about Ishmael Reed in the New Yorker.  In one of Reed’s novels, Flight to Canada,“Raven Quickskill, a runaway slave, escapes to Saskatchewan aboard a jumbo jet.”  There isn’t a literal “underground airline” in Underground Airlines, but it’s still a weird parallel.   And then there’s the conjunction of Raven/ Jackdaw.  The article goes on: “[Reed argues] that the literary ‘establishment’ prefers Black fiction set in bygone eras: ‘That’s why they love slavery so much.’”  I get the feeling that he would hate Underground Airlines.  And Winters is white, so there’s that.

Well, I liked it.  But I’m white too, so there’s that.  It's certainly possible I missed some things.