‘The Underground Railroad’ Episode 10 Recap: Into the West

There’s not much to it, in the end. Not really.

Cora’s mother Mabel (Sheila Atim) never escaped, that’s one thing. The legend of the sole enslaved person to evade the clutches of the slave-catcher Arnold Ridgeway is just that, a legend. She died of a snakebite in the swamp just outside the plantation where she was held in bondage, moments after realizing she’d run away in shock and deciding to turn back to reunite with her daughter.

What drove her away? What shut her mind down so completely that she was maybe miles away before she even knew what she was doing? The fathomless cruelty that drove her masters to enlist a bereaved mother named Polly (Abigail Achiri), grieving for her stillborn baby, into serving as a wet nurse for another woman’s twin babies—stolen from their own grieving father at a nearby plantation after their mother died during childbirth. From the start, Mabel is gravely concerned, both about Polly’s mental health (this was her third stillbirth) and about the capacity of her late baby’s father Moses (Sam Malone), a driver for the bosses, to properly care for her.

But even Moses is brought to his knees by what ensues: Polly kills the babies, then herself. Moses is whipped to death for this loss on the masters’ investment; Mabel is forced to scrub the blood from the cabin where the deaths occurred. Suddenly she can take no more. She staggers out, staggers away, walks through the forest and halfway into the swamp before suddenly returning to herself. A snake cuts short her attempt to return to the plantation, to her daughter. No one will ever know the truth of it.

And what about Cora, now an adult, and Molly (Kylee D. Allen), the girl she rescued from the ruins of Valentine Farm? They pump the handcart in the Underground Railroad’s “Ghost Tunnel” to the end of the line, where they find an abandoned farm. Cora plants her mother’s okra seeds, rescued from Valentine by Molly, and literally waters them with her tears. She approaches the first wagon that rides by, driven by a friendly Black man named Ollie. He’s headed down to St. Louis to meet some people, he says, then out to California, out West: “That’s what’s best,” he says, rhyming. (Polly, Molly, Ollie—as the phrase goes, history never repeats itself but it rhymes.) Cora and Polly climb aboard the man’s wagon, huddling together under a blanket. They ride on. The end.

And in the end, The Underground Railroad‘s titular, fictional, fantastical version of the real world’s underground network wound up being a bit player in its own story. Cora is transported from place to place by the Railroad and its offshoots several times, yes. But the story is found in the crimes that drive her from one destination to the next, always seeking safe harbor, finding nothing but an uncertain future—a hopeful one, yes, especially compared to where she’s come from and where she’s been, but still an uncertain one. We know now, decades and decades after Cora’s story, that there really is no safe harbor from the horrors of American racism—not in St. Louis, not in California (ask Them about that one), not in any given place.

No, to the extent that a better place exists, it’s in the uncertain hopes of people, people like Cora and Polly then and everyone involved struggling against what the late, unlamented Arnold Ridgeway referred to as “The American Imperative” today. “Are you kind, mister?” Cora asks Ollie when she approaches his wagon. “Most times, yes,” he says, before adding “Of course, like anybody, I falters, of course.” Of course, of course—he repeats it for emphasis, taking it as a given that no one can be their ideal self all the time, not in this world. But you can try, damn it. You can try.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Underground Railroad Episode 10 on Amazon Prime