I think originally Martha was just a vehicle to show what Victor is like – kind, since he got food for her and her son. And then Winters needed her to do other things to move the plot along, like seduce the guy in the plantation business while Victor searched his office. She was really just a tool to advance the plot. Not a very fleshed out character, though.
Btw, Whitehead’s comments on the museum:
@mathmom: http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040
@Mary13 Thanks for the link. I had no idea about Oregon.
As long as I’ve still got the NPR interview on the brain, I’ll quote it one more time, because Colson Whitehead’s comments below tie in with what Victor experiences in Underground Airlines. Whether it is 1850 or 2017, whether in an alternate world or the real one, a black person will still be stopped and questioned without cause.
Whitehead goes on to talk about his own experience with racial profiling—being detained by police as a possible suspect for a crime simply because he was black. It’s the kind of treatment that black characters in the world of Underground Airlines are subjected to. But in terms of a genuine, personal experience, it’s Colson Whitehead’s story, not Ben Winters’. I wonder what Whitehead would think about Underground Airlines and how he would answer the question, “Should a white man have even attempted to write this book?”
I finally read the excellent article @Mathmom linked earlier. It’s definitely worth reading. Here’s the link, reposted.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/the-perilous-lure-of-the-underground-railroad
I don’t know, but I do know NPR interviewed Whitehead and Winters together. (NPR must have seen we paired the books for a reading duo. 
) I planned to listen to the interview before I posted it, but the time seems right at the moment. So I’ll just get to it along with anyone else interested.
http://nhpr.org/post/conversation-colson-whitehead-ben-winters#stream/0
I’m going to confine my comments to Underground Airlines, because my thoughts on The Underground Railroad have already been expressed by the speedy commenters above. (I wasn’t a fan.) I’ll also avoid the canned discussion questions–they always make me feel like I’m stuck in a midterm exam in a high school lit class. As I’m pressed for time these days, I’ll just make a few points:
What I thought was most striking and successful about Underground Airlines was the power with which the author brought home the nightmare of living out one’s life in slavery. It’s one thing to read about the horrors of antebellum plantation life 160 years later, when 21st century white Americans can’t really identify with the daily lives of even the most privileged and wealthy whites. It’s quite something else to contemplate a class of human beings spending their lifetimes in wretched servitude while most inhabitants of the United States are living lives in a time, place and manner nearly indistinguishable from the reader’s own world. Winters asks us to imagine slavery persisting to this day, and paints an incredibly vivid picture of what that would mean.
As a lover of history, I appreciated that the author chose an alternative history that was possible, although not probable, in light of the various compromises about the issue of slavery that preceded the Civil War. I also enjoyed the melding of alternative history with the thriller genre. Winters balanced the two elements very elegantly, to the extent that I can see Underground Airlines being made into a great movie
What about the very ending of Airlines? Suggesting Martha & Victor have teamed up to find the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico where Martha’s husband is being enslaved?
That was too much a stretch for me. i didn’t see them sticking together (Martha & Victor), much less plotting that kind of rescue.
I think the point of that was to remind the reader that even though Victor got his chip out and was free – hooray! – there were many people who still weren’t and the work wasn’t over yet.
The interview with both Whitehead and Winters (post #85, by ignatius) wouldn’t play for me.
If anybody listened to it and learned something valuable, please share.
^^^ I listened to it last night. Winters addresses his worries about writing a black protagonist while he himself is white. He ultimately decided that he had a story to tell and it only worked with Victor as a black man. He discussed it with others and ultimately the advice boiled down to something like “handle it with respect.” I came away knowing Winters’ views on many things political, Whitehead’s not so much.
The ending of UA doesn’t bother me. I can see Martha and Victor sticking together. Neither have any other support system. In their case, together eases life somewhat for each of them, while stopping short of messy romantic entanglement. Martha’s boy likes Victor and vice versa. I look at them and think “why not stick together?”
I got the impression that Martha and Victor team up to wreak havoc on that plantation in the Hard Four. Any knowledge gained that she can use in her personal quest can be considered lagniappe. Martha continues to hope to find/rescue her husband but understands the odds. (But odds can be beat, right?).
I had some trouble with Martha’s slide into action heroine but then decided to just go with it. I scratched her surface and decided Martha was tougher all along than I gave her credit for. She loves/marries exactly who she wants and then sticks after the worst happens. She has an underlying dignity the first time Victor sees her at the breakfast buffet and then again with her son at the pool. After all, Martha has to be tough to decide to look for her husband and then keep at it. We meet her at a later stage in her search than at the beginning.
Martha loves her husband, her son, and doesn’t shut herself away from others. Consider her the opposite of Victor; he doesn’t know how to love. By the end of the book Victor’s taking baby steps in the direction of trust; he couldn’t do that without a Martha to watch.
I agree. The story definitely lends itself to screenplay adaptation. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that such a project is already in the works.
It was interesting to listen to the authors talk about their work, although I wouldn’t say there were any big “reveals” in the conversation. A few things:
- Colson Whitehead read a lengthy excerpt from *The Underground Railroad/i. Winters did not read from *Underground Airlines*. I don't know why not; I wish he had.
- Whitehead said that he stuck to historical fact for the opening segment of his novel, set at the plantation. He decided not to play with time or history there, but instead to lay out life as it really was, as a homage to his slave ancestors. After that, he said, he "re-booted" (his words) the novel every 60 pages, and Cora's travel stops incorporated different injustices to blacks throughout history.
- Whitehead said his writing was deeply influenced by slave narratives. He chose Cora as his protagonist because he was inspired by the narrative of Harriet Jacobs, who fled her abusive master and spent seven years hiding in an attic.
- Ben Winters was asked if anyone told him **not** to write his book in the persona of a black man. He said no, no one told him that, but many people advised him to proceed with care and respect, and that he tried very hard to do that. He said he briefly wondered as he began to write if he should make Victor a white man, but that the story would not have worked. (edited to add: I see @ignatius covered this point above).
- As @ignatius wrote, Winters talked about his book in terms of the current political climate and the dangers to human rights that might be headed our way. (The interview took place a few days before the election, so it was kind of eerie to hear his words in light of recent events.)
- The two authors barely interacted with each other at all, although Winters made it clear that he had read Whitehead's book. Winters commented on the character of Ridgeway in *The Underground Railroad* as being almost supernatural in his menace and relentlessness. (I was glad he brought that up because I had thought of Ridgeway kind of like a Stephen King villain--virtually unstoppable and really hard to kill!)
This. The successful quest for “the envelope” was more than a little improbable, IMO – but, it is a novel, and all sorts of unlikely things happen in a novel!
I, too, wondered if Victor’s chip was really removed. Maybe I’ve read/seen too many double-agent books/movies …
I had no idea about Oregon. Certainly I never got that part of US History going to school in the northeast …
Ridgeway was truly like a monster, but I was intrigued with how Whitehead included the sequence in Tennessee where he took Cora out to dinner and talked to her. And how he wrote about Ridgeway’s boyhood with his gifted blacksmith father.
I did think Cora’s finally vanquishing Ridgeway at the end of the novel by rolling down the UGR steps with him was far-fetched. She was injured also, yet afterwards managed to travel many miles alone on a railroad handcar. Oh well, the point is that she got away. Yay, Cora! (As I mentioned in another post, I had been so appalled when Ridgeway appeared at Valentine’s that I couldn’t keep reading and had to put the book aside and pick it up later.)
@ignatius Thank you for the interview link and the word of the day: lagniappe 
. Out of the interview, I appreciated hearing the authors’ thoughts on how a nation built with slavery impacts our society today–voter suppression, Black Lives Matter, Stop and Frisk, our continuing complicity (or not).
Yes! Colson Whitehead said in the interview that he was going for “charming sociopath.”
The more I read all of your comments about Martha, the more comfortable I am with her role in the novel, particularly her “slide into action heroine.” I think that very improbability is part of the genre that Winters is emulating – even if it leads to a bit of an eye-roll.
I read a joint review of our two books by…I don’t know, some guy online, LOL and hurray for the internet…anyway, his review was excellent and I thought he put this aspect of it very well:
I hadn’t thought about it but I guess Cora has her own slide-into-action-heroine moment.
Just my Louisiana roots showing up, I guess.
Ben Winters’ trilogy The Last Policeman, is exactly in the old-fashioned hard-boiled detective genre alluded to above, but with a unique setting: an asteroid is headed to Earth and everyone knows just about when the world will end. Many people freak out, or leave their lives to have bucket list experiences, or become preppers, anarchists or worse, but Winters’ protagonist just goes on and does his job, solving crimes. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition, and I see Underground Airlines as a growth of him as an author from an (albeit slightly twisted) genre to another. When I read the Last Policeman trilogy I remember thinking 1) it was the quietest apocalypse story ever and 2) the strange detachment with which the main character viewed his life and the world was strangely affecting and poignant. Those of you who like UA might like to try his earlier works.
Thanks, @jaylynn, I will for sure. Not only did I like Underground Airlines, but y’all know I love the apocalypse.