Underground Returns for Season 2 And It’s Got Me Wondering: Were Runaway Slaves the “Undocumented Immigrants” of 1857?
On march 8th my favorite television show comes back on. march 8th is a wednesday. if I make it through a long hump day of work, i will come home, put on my sweats, pour whiskey on some ice cubes, turn off all the lights in my apartment, and get ready for some heart-wrenching historical fiction. i don’t always watch tv shows about depressing moments in history, but when I do, I prefer Underground.
last year, the first season of the drama told the story of a band of coloured folk who decide to risk life and limb to get out of a fucked up situation. the fucked up situation is that they are slaves on a Georgia plantation in 1857. to get out of that fucked up situation they make a plan to escape and migrate 600 miles north to freedom, ON FOOT. they leave with a single firearm, a folk song containing directions to the promised land, and the desperate hope to one day sit on their own front porch, sipping ice tea, years removed from bondage, shouting “we came from nothing to something nigga.”
now i want you to imagine this scenario for a second: you, your pastor (or imam), your asshole supervisor from work, and a woman you have a serious crush on are all counting on each other to escape human bondage. you and this most unlikely group of associates are unified by a common bone-deep desire to run north to the land of the free. this is the premise of Underground. the crew is led by Noah, a rebellious field slave, with an irrational pie-in-the-sky belief that he can lead this group out of the only reality they have ever known. there are gashes on his back, marking the history of his past rebellions and the brutal punishments that he received because of them. his posse includes a one-eyed preacher named Moses, a crooked Uncle Tom overseer who nobody can trust and last but not least Rosalee, a bad and boujee house slave (who turns out to be a lot more BAD than bougie).
my heart starts beating all types of berzerk during the terrifying chase scenes –brown bodies dashing through thick brush with vicious dogs and bounty hunters hot on their trail, all set to the frantic pounding drums of Kanye West’s “Black Skinheads.” i live for the plot twists and their cunnimg nick-of-time solutions to the deadly challenges that come in their way. but the main reason i like this show is because I get to unapologetically root for undocumented immigrants as they run from the po-po.
i got so much love for undocumented immigrants — whether they are running from slave catchers without free papers in 1857 or running from ICE without a green card in 2017.
i tune in every episode hoping that Noah and Rosalee can outrun, outgun, and outsmart the slave catchers long enough to get across the border. yes, they are running for the border, just like Guatemalans, Salvis and Mexicanos running for Texas or Arizona. except the crew from Underground is tryna cross the Mason Dixon line, the geographic boundary between the southern slave states and the Northern land of the free.
in the midst of their northern migration noah and rosalee fall in a deep magical radical love. noah and rosalee’s relationship is an I-will-step-in-front-of-live-gunfire-if-it-will-get-her-an-inch-closer-to-freedom kind of love. it’s an I-will-bring-him-back-from-the-grave-by-rubbing-Geechee-medicinal-herbs-on-the-bullet-wound-while-praying-to-the-ancestors type of love. it is brave and refreshing to have such a powerful love affair in the midst of all this terror. while watching Underground you realize that underneath the tragedy of every refugee’s story is a complex emotional life filled with desire, passion, and wild fantasy. who would’ve thunk that refugees could have such full love lives?
i am amped for the return of my favorite show. one thing that really blows my mind about this story is that in 2017 runaway slaves are unequivocally the heroes of the story. this says something profound to me about history — that characters who were once deemed by a society to be villains can completely reverse and become heroes over the course of 160 years. in 1857 the greater American society did not treat fugitive slaves as heroes. to the average dick and jane runaways were illegals. they were unwanted. they were deplorables. there were a lot of unsubstantiated rumors floating around that when they came dashing across the Mason Dixon line they were coming to rape your wife, or invade your home and steal your jewels. (sound familiar? if not, see donald trump’s “a lot of Mexicans are rapists” comment).
all this to say, if you were a brown person found in the north without your freedom papers there were not a whole lot of people clamoring about your human worth. the few white folks that cared about you at all were called abolitionists and they were working uphill against popular opinion and the entire legal system of the day. there was a law on the books called the Fugitive Slave Act that mandated that if you were found without papers, your criminal ass would be rounded up and sent right back across that border. hasta luego muchacho, you’ve been deported.
but in my favorite show, written in the ultra-civilized modernity of 2017, we know that the stories of runaways being criminals were just propaganda and that these slaves were actually heroes. we get to see rosalee as a deep thinker, someone who could play sonatas on the piano and fall in love. she’s an amateur botanist that uses the chemical properties of plants as weapons to poison bloodhounds or as medicinal herbs to heal her kin. in 2017 rosalee is no longer relegated to her undocumented status. we see her as a full human being trying her hardest to unbind herself from the crippling slave society she was born into. miraculously, after 160 years we can finally see that the most notorious undocumented migrants in American history were worthy of refuge.
in the season finale last year, after 600 miles of running, after rosalee finally crosses into the promised land, not even a week after she has grasped what it is like to have risen up from slavery, she realizes that she cannot be free unless her entire family is free. so she sets out to find someone that will lead her on a rescue mission back into Georgia to rescue her kin. who does she find for this mission? in the very last scene we find out that it is none other than harriet tubman. that is the cliffhanger where the writers left us — rosalee staring up at a silhouette of the most lionhearted woman in Black history.
i’ve been waiting 9 months to see what will happen with rosalee and harriet. but one thing is clear. in season 2 harriet tubman will be a bad ass superhero. she will be on some storm from x-men meets jessica jones, whoop-a-slave-catcher-in-the-head-with-a-shotgun type flow. while I love seeing Black superheroes, I have to ask, “in what year specifically did harriet tubman switch from being a criminal to an American hero?” harriet has two different Hollywood biopics coming out before 2020 (1 & 2). by 2030 she will be on the American 20 dollar bill. apparently we are in drastically different times than the nineteenth century when the only pictures made about harriet were plastered on wanted posters. look at your history books and you will recall that harriet tubman was basically the bin laden of 1857. ok perhaps not quite bin landen but somewhere on the spectrum between julian assange and bin landen in that she was the most wanted fugitive in America. let’s be honest, if slave catchers had found her, there was a 40-thousand-dollar bounty on her head. she would have been shot on sight, and white folks would have been posting videos of her death on their facebook feeds in celebration.
when did we reach the point where our whole society is watching together on wednesday night, all rooting for black women fugitives to stick it to the American system of white supremacy? well it’s probably because it’s much easier to honor the undocumented immigrants of 1857 than it is to honor the ones of 2017; the Guatemalan lady that cleans your house, the Salvadoreño that landscapes your lawn. they came to America to escape the rampant violence and instability in Central America and are being honored for their heroism with deportation.
when I lived in California I lived in a community that was 60% immigrants from Mexico and Central America. i worked at an afterschool youth program where a lot of my students had parents who were undocumented, and a few were undocumented themselves. i had one student that I was pretty close with, for the purposes of this article I’ll call him Javier to protect his identity. i remember Javier told me a story once about driving with his family one evening. as they’re riding and listening to tunes and getting on each other’s nerves, like families do during car rides, all of a sudden a cop pulls up behind them in a routine traffic stop. immediately with a chilling desperation in his voice his father screams out, “Run! Ahora!” they jump out of the vehicle, dash across moving traffic and run off into the shadows. i’m telling you the story of Javier’s family because it is a story of runaways. of people that feared deportation so much that they would abandon their motor vehicle on the side of the road. because getting caught meant getting sent back down south.
Javier’s life was like a scene out of my favorite television thriller. kind of like when rosalee is hiding in the bushes as white slave catchers on horseback come trotting within two feet of her. the hiding. the uncertainty. the desperation. but in 2017 Javier is not a hero like Rosalee. not yet. maybe in the future. maybe in the year 2177, they will make a period piece about his plight and cast a bunch of emotionally complex and flawlessly gorgeous characters to play his family. it’s possible. Javier’s country has a tendency to make heroes of people generations after dehumanizing them.
it turns out that I’m not the only one that sees similarities between Javier and Rosalee. a few folks before me have made the connection between runaway slaves and undocumented immigrants from central america. in the 1980s, over 500 churches and synagogues collaborated to produce a nationwide network of sanctuaries where undocumented immigrants were ushered across the border, transported to a city, and given a place to hide and receive resources. tucson Arizona resident Jim Corbett, a devout quaker and founder of the sanctuary movement, modeled this elaborate network of churches, safe houses and the routes between them after the Underground Railroad. Jim Corbett believed that if there were runaways in the modern day, then it was imperative that Amerians with the privilege of citizenship become modern day abolitionists.
i hope all my undocumented brothers and sisters are tuning into Underground on march 8th. i hope they put on some sweats, turn off all the lights (the whiskey is optional) and crowd around as a family to scream “ándale rosalee ándale. run hermana run.” it will be an inspiration for the little American boy who has heard his loved ones referred to as illegal aliens. maybe it will encourage him to learn that during the first half of this country’s history there was a caste of humans that were “illegal” just like him, who were residents but not citizens, who were considered criminal simply because they were audacious enough to pursue freedom and opportunity in the place on the map where it could be offered. maybe that American boy will find sanctuary in the fact that today, 160 years later, one of those illegal migrants has made it to the 20 dollar bill. as black descendants of the most notorious undocumented immigrants in American history, we offer our queen mother harriet to you as a patron saint, an American boddhisathva if you will. we will bow to her now like my ancestors did decades ago. because for those of us who don’t have our papers, for those of us who are second class citizens, three-fifths citizens or not citizens at all…she will lead us to freedom. every wednesday at 10/9 central.
many thanks to the comrades that helped to inspire and edit this article including Alisa Whitfield and my partners in crime Gulu & Natalia. click here for extra references related to the content in this article, including information on the Sanctuary Movement.
