In that moment it became strikingly clear that I was not going to be subjected to the finger-wagging of previous attempts to teach the horrors of slavery to mainstream audiences. She says it all in the stilled tongue, in the pursed lip.

She does not have to speak aloud the dangers of overseers or slave patrollers. Mbedu’s portrayal, however, there are a hundred stories in what she does and does not say, all of them likely horrific. Whitehead ends the conversation without any adornment - the negotiation is over almost before it has begun. In the novel, the dialogue is close, but not quite. She thinks it a joke, then turns hot upon realizing that it is not, telling him that she “ain’t nobody’s good luck.” She starts to say something else, but stops, then stomps off. When Cora asks Caesar the purpose of their meeting, he proposes that she escape with him - not because of his love for her, but for good luck. For several beats there are no words, only the dance of unspoken agendas. The story’s enslaved protagonist Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and a newcomer to the plantation, Caesar (Aaron Pierre), are circling one another around a tree, caught in a golden stream of sunshine, in what appears to be a courting dance. The scene didn’t show the kind of brutality I have come to expect from “slave movies.” It is, instead, a moment of startling banality:

Within the first five minutes of Barry Jenkins’s Amazon series, “The Underground Railroad,” there is a scene that struck me so powerfully that I had to pull my copy of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which the series is based upon, from the shelf.

The underground railroad book amazon