Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Colson Whitehead has written The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys, and Harlem Shuffle. He talks to Kim Hill at the 2023 Auckland Writers Festival.

Hear Colson Whitehead in this highlight of the 2023 Auckland Writers Festival

In his novel John Henry Days, the author Colson Whitehead includes moments of humour which appeal to Kim Hill. She says, "this is a joke I like: Tiny says, 'you know, I don't mean to be un-PC, but I like Little Black Sambo. My mother used to read me Little Black Sambo when she tucked me into bed at night. It's a cute story underneath.' And Jay Sutter says, 'You were undisturbed by the eyeholes cut into the pillow you lay your little head on?'"

To laughter from the audience, she adds, "It's good! They are funny. The Underground Railroad is not funny. There are no jokes in The Underground Railroad."

Colson Whitehead explains that once he was committed to writing the novel (which posits a world in which there is a real underground railroad transporting slaves fleeing the American South to freedom), he was chose not to avoid that kind of ironic, sardonic, tone.

"I was not going to write a kind of slave story like Gone with the Wind," he says. "I was going to be accurate, and undertaking the research, and coming to the material in my 'forties, rather than being a kid watching Roots, I realised that my props, my jokiness would not fit. And also that it had to be really brutal just to be realistic. And I wanted it to be realistic because my ancestors had somehow survived that."

"Terribly brutal," Kim Hill agrees, and reads from the text:

On the third day, just after lunch, the hands were recalled from the fields, the washerwomen, the cooks and the stablehands interrupted from their tasks, the house staff diverted from its maintenance. They gathered on the front lawn. Randall's visitors sipped spiced rum, as Big Anthony was doused with oil and roasted. The witnesses were spared his screams as his manhood had been cut off on the first day, stuffed in his mouth, and sewn in.

"Did that happen?" she asks…

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