MAKING TRACKS

BARRY JENKINS’ ADAPTATION OF PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING NOVEL THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD PROVIDES AN ILLUMINATING NEW PERSPECTIVE ON A HARROWING PART OF US HISTORY. TOTAL FILM SPEAKS TO DIRECTOR JENKINS AND STARS THUSO MBEDU AND JOEL EDGERTON ABOUT THE YEAR’S MOST REVOLUTIONARY TV SERIES.

- LEILA LATIF

When Moonlight director Barry Jenkins first heard about the Underground Railroad he imagined an actual train. “Yeah,” Jenkins laughs, “as a child, I felt Black people were capable of anything! That they were capable of building trains beneath the feet of the institutions of white supremacy.”

Of course, the reality was that the “railroad” was a series of routes, safe houses, and guides that would help enslaved people escape north to freedom. But when Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad was published in 2016 and told the story of Cora, a young woman who escapes from a plantation in Georgia on a literal underground railroad, this fantastical element connected with Jenkins.

“By taking the Underground Railroad, giving it a literal representation and trains running underground, Colson opens up this Pandora’s Box,” he says. “We are speaking to something authentic, but it’s not a history report.”

Feeling he couldn’t do Whitehead’s novel justice at feature-film length, Jenkins decided instead to make it into a series, tell Cora’s story over 10 hours, and to direct every single episode. The resulting show is filled with some harrowing scenes grounded in the brutal reality enslaved people faced, but there is also Jenkins’ signature radical beauty and exquisite romance. The light sprinkling of the fantastical ties those two elements together. As Jenkins puts it, “By invoking just a light touch of fantasy, it freed us from the burden of making a show that is entirely about just the horrors of American slavery.”