Jenkins’ ‘Underground Railroad,’ Balances Beautiful Images With Brutality

What images convey the brutality of slavery but also the beauty of being alive? Cora is a young woman escaped from slavery on a railroad that runs underground.

An enslaved man is being burned alive as punishment while behind him, white people are holding a garden party.

It was important to me, again, if we’re going to recreate these images, what new are we saying about them? What are we revealing about them that hasn’t been revealed before? My relationship with these images was, you know, learning about the Jim Crow South and learning about the lynchings of African Americans and always seeing the aftermath of these moments where the white perpetrators of these atrocities are looking directly at the camera.

The same way the audience has – is watching this thing, the man who’s being aggrieved is also seeing these horrific faces of the brutalizers who are staring at him in the spectacle.

And in the state of Georgia and the period during the condition of American slavery, there were horrific things occurring all the time.

JENKINS: It wasn’t incumbent upon me to take that beauty, to remove that beauty in pursuit of some verisimilitude or gravitas or truth.

KING: I thought it was very difficult to tell how old she was.

That’s just through this feeling, you know, channeling, you know, where this woman is in her journey.

KING: So toward the end – I’m not going to give anything away – but there’s this very idyllic period of communion and safety, and people are happy.

I think so much of the show for me is about parenting and about showing the wonderful job that my ancestors did in this parenting because I believe my ancestors, in order for me to exist, for MLK, for Barack Obama, for every damn thing, this had to have been one of the greatest acts of collective parenting the world has ever seen – has ever seen.

KING: So we were talking about how we were reminded of our families and their old pictures and their old stories and also that there are old stories that we can’t know about them and, you know, why some of us look the way we look because of slavery.

And it began to bring me so much joy to celebrate and honor them, you know, for the things they’ve done so that I could stand in this cotton field on this plantation to manifest language, to create images in their image.

And it felt so beautiful and so whole and so fulfilling that I realized, this is what the show is about.

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