It feels fitting to listen to Les Miserables while writing this. Two stories of an unjust, relentless pursuit. Underground Airlines is set in an alternate United States where slavery was never truly abolished. While most states have made slavery illegal, the Hard Four have not. It should come as little surprise to the reader who the Hard Four are: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and a unified Carolina. The story follows Victor, a professional tracker set to find the location of the runaway slave Jackdaw. In doing so, Victor infiltrates an Underground Airline operation, and finds much more than he bargained for.
““It is a strange kind of fire, the fire of self-righteousness, which gives us such pleasure by its warmth but does so little to banish the darkness.””
EXPLOITATION IN WRITING (SPOILERS)
Underground Airlines is an uncomfortable story, well worth the read. I dislike first person perspective, so it was good enough to make me stick with it. The commentary on the white saviour complex is beautifully done. The underground airline within the book is primarily run by black men and women, with white men as the smokescreen (and the ones who take the credit) — an interesting and quite meta commentary as the book is written by a white man.
The plot itself doesn’t come to a tidy end. We don’t know whether or not the information that Victor finds — the genetic modification of embryos into ‘nonpersons’ — is stopped. What we are left with is a Victor free of his slave catching work now working within the underground airlines. More importantly, we are left with an uncomfortable question: what level of human exploitation is acceptable? At what point do we become comfortable with human suffering? There are lines we have drawn in the sand regarding work day hours, week lengths, days off, and minimum wages. But many of these have corporate workarounds. Workarounds that we all know about (hiring part-time only, punishing workers for not meeting ridiculous time quotas with fewer & fewer shifts, unofficial no-bathroom-break policies, etc), yet do very little about.
I hope that reading this book with inspire you to put a little less fuel on self-righteous fires, and a little more on supporting real change.
4/5 stars
L.J
SUGGESTED READ
Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
