embodied epiphanies

The Underground Railroad, a ten-part limited series out this week from Amazon Prime Video, offers Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’ interpretation of Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed work.

Featuring South African actress Thuso Mbedu as Cora, Aaron Pierre as Caesar and Joel Edgerton as the slave catcher Ridgeway, the adaptation arrives amid a national reckoning on systemic injustice, as well as a renewed debate over cultural depictions of violence against Black bodies.

Available on Amazon Prime Video

Jenkins—like Whitehead in the series’ source material—adopts an unflinching approach to the portrayal of slavery. As writer Camonghne Felix details in Vanity Fair, Jenkins refuses to allow Black trauma [to] be the guiding vehicle of this story. Instead, his narrative is one of Black victory.

Cora’s journey to freedom is laden with implicit references to touchstones in post-emancipation history, from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study of the mid-20th century to white mobs’ attacks on prosperous Black communities like Wilmington, North Carolina (targeted in 1898), and Tulsa, Oklahoma (razed in 1921).

This “chronological jumble,” says Spencer Crew, former president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and emeritus director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, serves as a reminder that the “end of slavery does not bring about the end of racism and racial attacks.

These issues continue to survive in different forms, with parallel impacts upon the African American community. The new Amazon adaptation emphasizes the psychological toll of slavery instead of simply depicting the physical abuse endured by enslaved individuals.

Caesar & Cora characters (Kyle Kaplan / Amazon Studios)

“How are they beating it back? How are they making themselves whole?” ~ Barry Jenkins, Director