Every Sunday, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for April 8 through 15 is “Minty,” the sixth episode of season two of WGN’s Underground.
Underground defies TV convention with a stunning hour-long Harriet Tubman monologue
Her 1858 speech might feel a little more relevant than expected in 2017.
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.
Letting a single character take center stage to talk for a full hour, with next to no interruptions, sounds like a surefire way to make a television audience tune out. TV’s most basic principles rest on casts of characters living out multiple stories at once, the best to grab our increasingly abbreviated attention spans. TV’s not a movie, and it’s not a play; it’s a series of chapters that we’re able to consume in (relatively) bite-size pieces.
I’m so glad Underground decided not to care about any of that for “Minty.”
The episode stars Aisha Hinds as Harriet Tubman, a figure who looms so large in our history that seeing her brought to life so intimately on Underground is almost jarring. In “Minty” — written by Underground creators Misha Green and Joe Pokaski — she delivers a passionate, personal plea to a group of (mostly white) abolitionists, talking about her childhood and the horrors of not even knowing what it means to “be free.” Then, finally, she talks about the lengths she believes they all must be willing to go to in order to break the chains of this bloody cycle.
In a TV landscape that’s hardly starved for innovative storytelling, “Minty” stands out as a singularly stark and ambitious achievement. The episode’s success is entirely dependent on Hinds and the script — and not only do they deliver, but by the time the powerful hour is over, Harriet’s titanic speech becomes a mission statement for the entire show.
Anchored by Aisha Hinds, “Minty” is a powerful statement of purpose
Underground is a slick, deeply affecting retelling of what it meant to fight for freedom in the era of slavery. The first season largely followed the journey of a single group of slaves plotting their escape from a Maryland plantation, and the terrible cost they had to pay. This second season — which introduced Hinds’s Harriet as a regular character — widens the scope to make more room for the incendiary and infuriating politics that surrounded slavery in 1858.
“Minty” lays bare all the ugliness informing both seasons, as Harriet retells her own time as a slave and the endless frustrations that greeted her once she finally made her way to freedom, and wonders what freedom even means when so many others are still in chains.
As directed by Anthony Hemingway, the episode starts quietly. The camera sits behind Harriet as she prepares, lingering just long enough on her exposed back to see the crisscrossing highways of raised scars there. Then she buttons up her jacket, adorned with gold buttons — armor for the battle ahead.
And make no mistake: This is a battle. As Harriet acknowledges, these abolitionists thought they were there to hear the inspiring story of a slave woman who beat the odds and became a legend. And at first, they — and we — do get to hear that story, one Harriet tells with urgency and grace. She talks about the horror of being a child and not understanding why she was getting beaten, of having to clean her own blood from the floors, of taking every hit “as an opportunity for defiance.” In one stunning moment, she recounts the time she managed to steal a lick of sugar and took off running, and Hinds allows her cadence to speed up and sprint along with it, like Harriet can see the moment in her mind’s eye and wants nothing more than to catch it.
Once Harriet finishes the tale of how she escaped slavery, the light in the room shifts from a bleak gray monochrome to a warmer gold — the kind she insists greeted her when she made it out of the South. She sings “Let My People Go,” the room clapping with her, Hinds’s voice somehow both rumbling low and soaring into the rafters.
But then her speech takes a turn that takes the room by surprise. Suddenly, Harriet Tubman isn’t just telling them why slavery is “the next thing to hell.” Instead, she’s making an impassioned pitch for why they should stop thinking of freeing slaves as activism and start considering it as what it is: war.
Harriet’s speech takes place in a single room, but its message resonates far beyond it
The only time anyone but Harriet gets to speak during “Minty” is when she mentions the name “Captain Brown.” As the indignant men in the room sputter, John Brown was a particularly controversial abolitionist because he took big, often violent actions to achieve his goals. But while Harriet acknowledges that not everyone agrees with Brown’s methods, she’s firm in the assertion that she, a woman who knows something about the evil they’re trying to dismantle, does.
“War,” Harriet breathes, the word echoing in the room. “The more he said the word to me, the more sense it made.” She takes her time letting it sink in, before making her point plain. “Slavery ain’t just a sin,” she says, Hinds imbuing the moment with gravity and reverence. “It’s a state of war, profiting off the bodies of others. Raping the bodies of others. Killing the bodies of others. Those are all acts of war.”
It’s impressive that after 45 minutes of monologuing, the final act of “Minty” still manages to pack the biggest punch. Hinds grows ferocious as Harriet makes her case, confident that she’s laid enough groundwork with this group that she can now make them uncomfortable — not just about the plight of slaves but also about their roles in trying to end that plight.
Whatever good work they’re doing now, she says, is probably not enough. “You may think it is,” she acknowledges. “You can think it is, because you’re free.”
In fact, she continues, their movement is plagued by destructive infighting that just gives their adversaries more room to achieve their goals. “So much of our breath be spent arguing over methods that it overshadows the purpose,” Harriet says. “A passionate debate about action is important, but it should never be mistaken for action itself.”
This dual encouragement and condemnation sits heavy in the room, and she knows it. But she still goes in for the final blow — one that resonates far beyond the confines of that drafty warehouse, or even the century in which she’s saying it:
You gotta find what it means for you to be a soldier. Beat back those that are trying to kill everything that’s good and right in the world and call it “making it great again.” We can’t just be citizens in a time of war. That would be surrender. That’d be giving up our future, and our souls. Ain’t nobody gets to sit this one out, you hear me?
And with that, the episode ends.
But I have no doubt that Harriet’s audience, challenged and uncomfortable though they were, could only answer in the affirmative. Her call to action is an informed, vital one — and one that Underground clearly wants us to heed while watching in 2017, a year marked by fierce infighting and a war of wills over what, exactly, making this country “great” again actually means.
