There has been a lot of discussion in pop culture circles about the depictions of Black pain in recent films and TV shows; I’ll engage that debate more fully later.
On the surface, it’s a story about an orphan slave, Cora Randall , who uses the underground railroad to escape a brutal, 19th century-era Georgia plantation.
The reality: Cora flees a plantation where a recaptured slave is burned alive during a party held by the plantation owner — a punishment all the slaves watch as a horrifying lesson/deterrent.
But when Cora and another slave — the blue-eyed, stalwart Caesar — make it to the underground railroad, they find it actually is a railroad: a winding set of tracks deep beneath the earth used to ferry Black people away from the horrors of the slave-owning South.
But Cora also works in a museum that seems like a living zoo, where white people gather to watch her recreate her past life as a slave picking cotton inside a glass-windowed display case.
Later, Cora is smuggled to a North Carolina community where lynched Black people hang from trees lining both sides of the road into town, as a sign that they are not tolerated.
Affable The Good Place alum, William Jackson Harper, gives the performance of his career as Royal, a free man with whom she builds a complicated, loving relationship.
Jenkins, best-known for the Oscar-winning film Moonlight, is a director who makes Black folks look beautiful, even in the midst of crushing hardship and pain.
Which means viewers must sit in the pain of traumatic moments, waiting for Jenkins to fully reveal the awfulness you know is coming.
The ways in which Black joy and peace can feel like the briefest of respites from a seemingly eternal struggle.
That’s why, in addition to feeling sorrow and disgust in watching those horrors realized onscreen, I also felt anger.
This version of The Underground Railroad reaches us at a time when we are most prepared for its message, but severely challenged by its delivery system.
Another wound, repeatedly ripped open.
Because when Cora finally reaches a community led by free Black people, the Indiana winery called the Valentine Farm, we viewers understand why the director brought us through hell to find this oasis.
There are problems here: great gobs of time spent telling the white slave hunter Ridgeway’s story — and because he’s the most loquacious character, he often tells us his story again, even after the series shows it.
And some of the messaging is delivered with the subtlety of a steamroller, as when a Black character at Valentine Farm declares: “America, too is a delusion.
Still, that line sums up the enduring, transformative message of Jenkins’ epic masterpiece.