“ The Underground Railroad,” a ten-part limited series out this week from Amazon Prime Video, offers Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’ interpretation of Whitehead’s acclaimed work. In each state the train stops, Whitehead places a new, insidious manifestation of racism before his characters. Darkness pervades this alternative reality, which finds Cora and Caesar, a young man enslaved on the same Georgia plantation as her, using the railroad to find freedom. Set in antebellum America, Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book envisions the Underground Railroad not as a network of abolitionists and safe houses, but as an actual train, with subterranean stations staffed by covert activists snaking north to freedom. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.” Later, toward the end of her harrowing escape from enslavement, the teenager realizes that the conductor’s comment was a “joke … from the start. Peering through the carriage’s slats, Cora sees “only darkness, mile after mile,” Whitehead writes. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” When Cora, the fictional protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, steps onto a boxcar bound for the North, the train’s conductor offers her a wry word of advice: “If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails.

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