Childhood notion about Underground Railroad turns into best-selling novel

Q: I just finished reading Colson Whitehead’s book “The Underground Railroad.” In the book he describes actual underground locomotives as being part of the system. Is this accurate or was he taking literary license?

A: Do you remember how you felt when you realized that Santa Claus was just a fairy tale? Surprised? Disappointed? Sad? Well, that describes how Colson Whitehead felt when he learned what the “Underground Railroad” really was.

In his childhood mind, he pictured an actual subway running underneath the earth through which actual trains ferried Southern slaves to the North, he told Terry Gross on National Public Radio last summer. So when he found out in school that the term meant nothing more than a complex maze of secret, above-ground routes linked together by safe houses, he felt “a bit upset.”

But just like adults who carry on the Santa myth to younger generations, Whitehead never forgot his naive mental image of a system that helped tens of thousands of enslaved blacks find freedom. Now he has turned that fanciful idea of a literal train into a historical novel that became a New York Times best seller last year.

For those unfamiliar, the book tells the story of a 15-year-old slave named Cora who runs away from a Georgia plantation and fights her way north. So, in Whitehead’s book, she hops on that freedom train, which stops frequently to give readers a picture of the different responses various states had to slavery.

Now 47, Whitehead said the idea for the story had been floating around in his head for more than 15 years even as he kept drawing praise and prizes after his first novel, “The Intuitionist,” was named best first novel of the year in 1999.

“I was finishing up a long book called ‘John Henry Days,’ which had a lot of research,” Whitehead told Gross. “And I was just sort of, you know, getting up from a nap or something and thought, you know, what if the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad? And so the book took off from that childhood notion.”

After that, he read countless slave narratives from the 18th and 19th centuries to learn what Cora and others might have experienced — the accounts of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs along with the numerous tales that the Works Progress Administration collected in the 1930s. The result was a novel that earned him a National Book Award for Fiction last year not to mention a slot in Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 and praise from former President Barack Obama, who selected it as one of five books on his 2016 summer reading list.

So, yes, as a historical novelist Whitehead can take the liberty of mixing in the fantasy of a real choo-choo in hopes of exposing readers who might not be tempted to buy a strictly historical account to an otherwise very real depiction of slavery. The imaginative combination left New York Times reviewer Juan Gabriel Vásquez calling it a “brave and necessary work.”

Q: I think I’ve heard that in the Civil War draftees were allowed to buy substitutes to fight for them. Can you tell me how this worked, how much they might have paid and how much this would be in today’s dollars?

J.M., of Waterloo

A: Remember how many called Vietnam a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight? They charged that draft laws allowed the middle and upper classes to find sanctuary in college or other exemptions while the less fortunate found themselves being shipped off to Southeast Asia.

But as you’ve heard, such practices have had a very long history. On March 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Civil War Military Draft Act (aka The Enrollment Act) as a means of providing new recruits for the depleted Union Army. Replacing the Militia Act of 1862, it required every male citizen and all immigrants who had applied for citizenship between the ages of 20 and 45 to enroll for conscription. Federal agents then set a quota of new troops that were due from each congressional district.

But what sounded like a fair plan soon caused major unrest because drafted citizens could escape service by hiring a substitute or paying a $300 commutation fee. Historians say the provisions were added as the law was being legislated to attract support from pacifists, those opposed to a draft — and the rich. But soon after it became law, it drew angry opposition. Not only did it place much of the fighting burden on the less well-off, but many substitutes also found they could make a good living by agreeing to fight, taking the cash and then immediately deserting, only to do it again and again. Even if they didn’t desert, substitutes often were reported as inferior fighters by their commanders.

The law led directly to the New York Draft Riots of July 13-16, 1863, which resulted in an estimated 120 deaths and 2,000 injuries. In 1864, an amendment limited the length of a man’s exemption by fee to one year; after that, he would have to serve or find a substitute. In 1865, another amendment threatened involuntary loss of citizenship for not serving, but this is now regarded as unconstitutional.

As far as the value of that $300 today, I’ve found inflation estimates running the gamut from about $2,000 to $6,000.

Today’s trivia

Who is often regarded as the father of chewing gum? (No, it wasn’t William Wrigley.)

Answer to Saturday’s trivia: Father may have known best, but it was Jane Wyatt who became the first person in TV history to win three consecutive Emmy Awards for her role as Amanda Grayson from 1958-1960 on “Father Knows Best.” Dick Van Dyke became the first male to do so from 1964-1966 followed immediately by Bill Cosby (“I Spy” 1966-1968), Don Adams (“Get Smart” 1967-1969) and Barbara Bain (“Mission: Impossible” 1967-1969).

This story was originally published January 21, 2017 at 8:00 AM.