The New Republic
Last fall, I walked out of a Kara Walker exhibit because the white couple beside me kept taking selfies.
去年秋天，我走出卡拉·沃克的展览，因为我旁边的白人夫妇一直在自拍。
I’d gone to the Broad Museum in Los Angeles to see African’t , Walker’s black paper silhouettes depicting a dreamy and disturbing antebellum South.
我去洛杉矶的布罗德博物馆参观了《非洲》，沃克的黑纸剪影描绘了梦幻而令人不安的南北战争前的南方。
I felt jarred watching the smiling pair pose in front of horrifying images: A dismembered white explorer roasts on a spit; a plantation owner rapes an enslaved woman; a white girl fondles a black boy while another shoots air up his ass.
看着这对微笑的情侣在可怕的图像前摆出姿势，我感到很震惊：一个被肢解的白人探险家在烤肉叉上烤；种植园主强奸了一名被奴役的妇女；一名白人女孩抚摸一名黑人男孩，而另一名女孩则向他的屁股射气。
Later, I wondered why I’d walked away.
后来我就想知道我为什么要走。
The couple meant no harm; people take pictures in museums all the time.
这对夫妇并无恶意。人们一直在博物馆里拍照。
But I resented, or maybe envied, how easily they delighted in the spectacle of Walker’s art, while I found it hard even to look.
但我怨恨，或者也许是嫉妒，他们如此轻松地欣赏沃克的艺术奇观，而我却发现连看都困难。
If images of slavery make you uncomfortable, then good luck going to the movies.
如果奴隶制的图像让您感到不舒服，那么祝您去看电影好运。
Over the past decade, the entertainment industry has shown a renewed interest in telling stories about the lives of slaves.
在过去的十年里，娱乐业对讲述奴隶生活的故事表现出了新的兴趣。
The Daily Beast declared 2013 “the year of the slavery film,” anticipating the release of 12 Years a Slave, based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography, and Belle, which followed a mixed-race aristocrat in eighteenth-century England.
《野兽日报》宣布 2013 年为“奴隶制电影年”，预计根据所罗门·诺萨普 1853 年自传改编的《为奴十二年》和讲述 18 世纪英国混血贵族故事的《美女》上映。
An interest in slavery narratives has also extended to television this past year, with Underground , a WGN America series about the Underground Railroad, and a reboot of Roots .
去年，人们对奴隶制叙事的兴趣也延伸到了电视领域，包括 WGN America 的一部关于地下铁路的连续剧《Underground》，以及重新启动的《Roots》。
In January, an online debate erupted among black writers when Birth of a Nation , Nate Parker’s film about Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection , was purchased for a record $17.5 million at Sundance.
今年 1 月，内特·帕克 (Nate Parker) 执导的关于 1831 年纳特·特纳 (Nat Turner) 起义的电影《一个国家的诞生》(Birth of a Nation) 在圣丹斯电影节以创纪录的 1,750 万美元的价格售出，引发了黑人作家之间的网上争论。
At Jezebel , Kara Brown wrote that while Turner’s rebellion is a “fascinating story, an important one, and an under-examined one,” she felt ambivalent about seeing yet another film “that centers around the brutalization of black people” for entertainment.
在耶洗贝尔，卡拉·布朗写道，虽然特纳的叛逆是一个“引人入胜的故事，一个重要的故事，也是一个未经充分审视的故事”，但她对于观看另一部“以残酷对待黑人为中心”的娱乐电影感到矛盾。
At The Nation , Mychal Denzel Smith disagreed , counting only seven major studio releases in all of film history that have centered on American slavery, including Amistad (1997), Glory (1989), and Gone With the Wind (1939).
《国家报》的迈克尔·丹泽尔·史密斯不同意这种观点，他认为电影史上只有七部主要电影公司发行的影片以美国奴隶制为中心，包括《阿米斯塔德》(Amistad) (1997)、《荣耀》(Glory) (1989) 和《飘》(Gone With the Wind) (1939)。
“I want a Marvel Universe of films about slavery,” he wrote.
“我想要一个关于奴隶制的漫威宇宙电影，”他写道。
“I want so many films about slavery that white actors start to complain that the only roles they’re being offered are those of slave owners.”
“我想要很多关于奴隶制的电影，以至于白人演员开始抱怨他们唯一能扮演的角色就是奴隶主。”
What does it mean when white audiences are suddenly so eager to consume narratives of black suffering?
当白人观众突然如此渴望消费黑人苦难的叙述时，这意味着什么？
And is this preferable, or even progressive, compared to their long history of looking away?
与他们长期回避的历史相比，这是更好的，甚至是进步的？
During the Oscar campaign for 12 Years a Slave , leaked ballots from Academy members revealed that some voters simply chose not to view the film.
在《为奴十二年》的奥斯卡竞选期间，泄露的奥斯卡成员选票显示，一些选民干脆选择不观看这部电影。
“Look, I’ve lived long enough to know what it was like to be a black person in America,” one voter wrote.
一位选民写道：“看，我已经活了足够长的时间，知道在美国作为一名黑人是什么样的。”
“What I don’t want is more terrible stuff to keep in my head.” Centuries later, the history of slavery hovers like the sun.
“我不想让更多可怕的事情留在我的脑海里。”几个世纪后，奴隶制的历史像太阳一样盘旋。
We feel its presence always, but we cannot bear to stare directly at it.
我们总是感觉到它的存在，但我们不忍心直视它。
American audiences haven’t been this interested in slavery stories since the nineteenth century, when narratives by escaped or freed slaves became best-sellers.
自十九世纪以来，美国观众对奴隶制故事就没那么感兴趣了，当时逃亡或获释奴隶的故事成为畅销书。
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano , an autobiography of a former slave living in Britain that was first published in 1789, had at least ten editions by 1837.
《奥劳达·埃奎亚诺的有趣的生活叙述》是一本生活在英国的前奴隶的自传，于 1789 年首次出版，到 1837 年至少有十个版本。
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave , now required reading, was massively popular upon its release in 1845, selling 5,000 copies in four months.
《美国奴隶弗雷德里克·道格拉斯的一生的叙述》现已成为必读书目，该书于 1845 年出版后广受欢迎，四个月内售出 5,000 册。
Solomon Northup sold 27,000 copies of his book within two years.
所罗门·诺瑟普 (Solomon Northup) 的书在两年内售出了 27,000 册。
Slave narratives “provided antislavery propaganda,” Vernon Loggins observed in The Negro Author in 1931.
弗农·洛金斯 (Vernon Loggins) 1931 年在《黑人作家》中评论道，奴隶叙事“提供了反奴隶制的宣传”。
“But that they sold rapidly is a surer reason for their great abundance.”
“但它们卖得很快是其数量如此之多的一个更确定的原因。”
Some scholars attribute the popularity of slave narratives to their sensationalism.
一些学者将奴隶叙事的流行归因于其煽情性。
“Romantic and thrilling” slave stories captivated readers “by the sheer horror of their revelations,” John Herbert Nelson argues in The Negro Character in American Literature.
约翰·赫伯特·纳尔逊在《美国文学中的黑人角色》一书中指出，“浪漫而惊心动魄的”奴隶故事“因其揭露的纯粹恐怖”而吸引了读者。
Others point to the white audience’s mystification that a former slave was even capable of writing his own life story.
其他人则指出白人观众对一个前奴隶甚至有能力书写自己的人生故事感到困惑。
Despite their popularity, slave narratives were not considered artful.
尽管奴隶叙事很受欢迎，但人们并不认为它是巧妙的。
Nineteenth-century critics often scorned them as “biased,” “inflammatory,” and “improbable.” More than a century later, even black critics remained dismissive, like one scholar who declared that the formerly enslaved “wrote to correct impressions rather than to make them,” and that “their work lacked any significant literary quality.”
十九世纪的批评家经常嘲笑它们“有偏见”、“煽动性”和“不可能”。一个多世纪后，即使是黑人批评家也仍然不屑一顾，就像一位学者宣称，以前的奴隶“写作是为了纠正印象，而不是创造印象”，并且“他们的作品缺乏任何重要的文学品质”。
The problem with the slave narrative is its predictability: A person is born in bondage to a cruel master; he or she observes a first whipping, struggles to obtain literacy, attempts to flee, fails, and later successfully escapes to the North.
奴隶叙事的问题在于它的可预测性：一个人生来就受到残酷主人的奴役；他或她经历了第一次鞭打，努力获得识字能力，试图逃跑，但失败了，后来成功逃到了北方。
If the purpose of autobiography is to uniquely render a unique life, then slave narratives often feel formulaic, the narrators indistinct.
如果说自传的目的是独特地呈现一种独特的生活，那么奴隶叙事往往会显得公式化，叙述者模糊不清。
In To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography , William L.
在《讲述一个自由的故事：第一世纪的非裔美国人自传》中，威廉·L.
Andrews attributes the predictability of slave narratives to their white readership.
安德鲁斯将奴隶叙事的可预测性归因于他们的白人读者。
Unlike white autobiographers, black authors could not expect that readers would approach their works on good faith—they anticipated a skeptical, if not hostile, audience.
与白人自传作家不同，黑人作家不能指望读者会善意地阅读他们的作品——他们预计读者会持怀疑态度，甚至是敌意。
To make their stories seem authentic, ex-slave narrators came to rely on certain established patterns.
为了使他们的故事看起来真实，前奴隶叙述者开始依赖某些既定的模式。
“This was perhaps the greatest challenge to the imagination of the Afro-American autobiographer,” Andrews writes.
“这也许是对非裔美国自传作家想象力的最大挑战，”安德鲁斯写道。
“The reception of his narrative as truth depended on the degree to which his artfulness could hide his art.” The slave narrative thus became trapped in an endless loop.
“他的叙述是否被接受为事实取决于他的巧妙隐藏他的艺术的程度。”奴隶叙事因此陷入了无限循环。
To seem truthful, a story needed to sound familiar.
为了显得真实，故事必须听起来很熟悉。
But over time, the stories became so familiar, readers doubted their truth.
但随着时间的推移，这些故事变得如此熟悉，读者开始怀疑它们的真实性。
In her 1987 essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison bemoans the inability of slave narratives to earn “the fair appraisal of literary critics,” particularly considering the societal confines the authors faced.
托妮·莫里森 (Toni Morrison) 在 1987 年的文章《记忆的地点》中哀叹奴隶叙事无法获得“文学评论家的公正评价”，特别是考虑到作者面临的社会限制。
She focuses on the distance that crept into nineteenth-century slave narratives, especially during moments of violence: “Popular taste discouraged the writers from dwelling too long or too carefully on the more sordid details of their experience.” Instead, writers “pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as ‘But let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.’” The job of the contemporary writer, Morrison argues, is to “rip that veil.” If slave narrators were forced to obscure moments of extreme violence to make their narratives more palatable to a white audience, then contemporary authors must force their own readers to look.
她关注的是十九世纪奴隶叙事中潜入的距离，尤其是在暴力时刻：“流行品味阻止作家们太长时间或太仔细地思考他们经历中更肮脏的细节。”相反，作家们“用诸如‘但是让我们为这些太可怕而无法讲述的事件揭开面纱’之类的短语来缩短叙述。”莫里森认为，当代作家的工作就是“撕开那层面纱”。如果奴隶叙述者被迫掩盖极端暴力的时刻，以使他们的叙述更容易被白人观众接受，那么当代作家必须强迫他们自己的读者去看。
Morrison certainly accomplished that goal with Beloved , her Pulitzer Prize–winning 1987 novel .
莫里森凭借 1987 年获得普利策奖的小说《宠儿》无疑实现了这一目标。
She’d found an old newspaper clipping about Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who had killed her own daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery.
她发现了一份关于玛格丽特·加纳的旧剪报，玛格丽特·加纳是一名逃亡奴隶，她杀死了自己的女儿，而不是让她重新成为奴隶。
When Sethe, Morrison’s fictionalized version of Garner, decides to take her children’s lives, the slave-catchers—and the reader—stumble upon the violent scene, where “two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other.” Sethe holds her dead child’s face “so her head wouldn’t fall off.” After killing one daughter, Sethe tries to nurse the other, “aiming a bloody nipple into the baby’s mouth.” The scene is painful to read, beyond its gory details.
当塞丝（莫里森虚构的加纳）决定夺去她孩子们的生命时，奴隶捕手和读者偶然发现了这个暴力场景，“两个男孩在一个黑人妇女脚下的锯末和泥土中流血，她一只手将一个浸透血的孩子抱在胸前，另一只手握住一个婴儿的脚后跟。”塞丝抱着她死去孩子的脸，“这样她的头就不会掉下来。”杀死一个女儿后，塞丝试图给另一个女儿喂奶，“将一个血淋淋的乳头伸进婴儿的嘴里。”除了血腥的细节之外，这个场景读起来很痛苦。
The reader accesses the slaughter through the eyes of the slave-catchers who, despite serving as the impetus, are horrified and baffled.
读者通过奴隶捕手的眼睛来了解这场屠杀，尽管奴隶捕手起到了推动作用，但他们却感到恐惧和困惑。
They find Sethe’s actions inscrutable, and their lack of empathy feels like an additional act of violence.
他们发现塞丝的行为难以理解，而他们缺乏同理心感觉就像是一种额外的暴力行为。
But while the slave—catchers fail to understand Sethe, they still witness the bloodshed.
尽管奴隶捕手无法理解塞丝，但他们仍然目睹了流血事件。
In Beloved, nobody is allowed to look away.
在《宠儿》中，任何人都不允许把目光移开。
If the problem of a nineteenth-century white audience was doubt, then the problem today seems to be acceptance.
如果说十九世纪白人观众的问题是怀疑，那么今天的问题似乎是接受。
If we already understand that slavery was terrible, why must we keep experiencing stories about slavery’s horrors?
如果我们已经明白奴隶制是可怕的，为什么我们必须不断经历有关奴隶制恐怖的故事呢？
Beloved is frequently challenged by parents who deem the novel too graphic for children to read in schools; the novel currently ranks 26th on the American Library Association’s list of top 100 books most frequently banned over the previous decade.
《宠儿》经常受到家长的质疑，他们认为这本小说过于生动，不适合孩子在学校阅读。该小说目前在美国图书馆协会过去十年最常被禁的 100 本书中排名第 26 位。
In the midst of this conversation enters Colson Whitehead’s newest novel, The Underground Railroad, a brilliant reimagining of antebellum America.
科尔森·怀特海德的最新小说《地下铁路》就在这场对话中登场，它对内战前的美国进行了精彩的重新想象。
The novel centers on Cora, an enslaved woman who’s been abandoned by her mother, the only slave to escape their plantation without being caught.
小说以科拉为中心，她是一名被母亲遗弃的奴隶，也是唯一一个逃离种植园而没有被抓住的奴隶。
As a young girl, Cora is banished to the Hob, a shack reserved for disturbed women, and later she is brutally gang-raped by four male slaves.
作为一个年轻的女孩，科拉被放逐到霍布，这是一个专为精神错乱的妇女保留的棚屋，后来她被四名男奴隶残酷地轮奸。
She is tough but guarded, marked by trauma and ostracized, aware of her own loneliness.
她很坚强，但又很谨慎，经历过创伤和排斥，意识到自己的孤独。
“Somewhere, years ago,” Whitehead writes, “she had stepped off the path of life and could no longer find her way back to the family of people.”
“几年前的某个地方，”怀特海德写道，“她已经走出了生活的道路，再也找不到回到人们家庭的路了。”
One day, Cora is approached by Caesar, a literate slave who plans to escape north on the Underground Railroad.
有一天，凯撒接近科拉，凯撒是一位有文化的奴隶，计划通过地下铁路向北逃亡。
In Whitehead’s vision, the railroad isn’t a secret network of abolitionists who organize routes and safe houses to guide slaves to freedom, but an actual train that rumbles below the earth.
在怀特海德的愿景中，铁路并不是废奴主义者组织路线和安全屋引导奴隶走向自由的秘密网络，而是一列在地下隆隆作响的真实火车。
Cora quickly learns the rules: While aboard, you don’t know where the train will take you, you don’t know when the next train will arrive, and you don’t know where the next train will lead.
科拉很快就学会了规则：在车上，你不知道火车会带你去哪里，你不知道下一趟火车什么时候到达，也不知道下一趟火车会开往哪里。
The invention of a literal train illuminates the absurdity within an already absurd slave system, further complicating the predictability of the slave narrative.
火车的发明阐明了本已荒谬的奴隶制度的荒谬性，使奴隶叙事的可预测性进一步复杂化。
In most slave stories, the Underground Railroad is a source of relief, the method through which a runaway eventually arrives in a free state, liberated.
在大多数奴隶故事中，地下铁路是一种解脱的来源，通过它，逃亡者最终到达自由州，获得解放。
Whitehead presents a murkier picture.
怀特海呈现出一幅更加阴暗的景象。
With each stop along the way, Cora wonders whether to remain or take her chances on the next train.
沿途每停一站，科拉都会考虑是留下来还是碰碰运气搭乘下一趟火车。
Will it take her someplace better or worse?
这会带她去更好还是更糟的地方？
This uncertainty adds to the growing tension when we learn that Ridgeway, a legendary slave-catcher, is on the hunt for Cora, motivated by his failure to capture her mother.
当我们得知传奇奴隶捕手里奇韦因未能捕获科拉母亲而开始追捕科拉时，这种不确定性加剧了紧张气氛。
In The Underground Railroad, freedom is always precarious, safety merely temporary.
在地下铁路中，自由总是不稳定的，安全只是暂时的。
Whitehead shatters the comforting mythology of the Underground Railroad as a system that rescued enslaved people from terror by whisking them away to a utopian North.
怀特海粉碎了地下铁路这一令人安慰的神话，认为这是一个通过将被奴役的人们从恐惧中拯救出来、将他们送往乌托邦北方的系统。
No matter where Cora flees, “America remained her warden.”
无论科拉逃到哪里，“美国仍然是她的看守者。”
The strength of the novel is its voice—chameleonic and distant, carrying on in a tidy nineteenth-century register that calls back to the literature of antebellum America.
这部小说的力量在于它的声音——变色龙般的、遥远的、干净利落的十九世纪语调，让人回想起南北战争前的美国文学。
Like Beloved, The Underground Railroad features intense violence, but unlike Morrison, Whitehead often draws the veil.
和《宠儿》一样，《地下铁道》也以强烈的暴力为特色，但与莫里森不同的是，怀特海德经常揭开面纱。
Take the moment of Cora’s gang rape:
以科拉轮奸的时刻为例：
Not long after it became known that Cora’s womanhood had come into flower, Edward, Pot, and two hands from the southern half dragged her behind the smokehouse.
不久之后，人们知道科拉的女性气质已经成熟，爱德华、波特和南半部的两只手把她拖到熏房后面。
If anyone heard or saw, they did not intervene.
如果有人听到或看到，他们也不会干预。
The Hob women sewed her up.
霍布妇女把她缝合起来。
In a moment of extreme trauma, the narrator almost politely looks away.
在极度创伤的时刻，叙述者几乎礼貌地移开视线。
Here is a proceeding too terrible to relate, Whitehead announces, and in his silence, the proceeding becomes even more terrible.
怀特海宣布，这是一个可怕到无法描述的过程，在他的沉默中，这个过程变得更加可怕。
The gaps in the narrative force the reader to fill in the blanks on her own.
叙述中的空白迫使读者自己填补空白。
We not only imagine the horror but become active participants in its construction.
我们不仅想象恐怖，而且成为恐怖构建的积极参与者。
Throughout the novel, some of the most viscerally violent moments occur offstage.
在整部小说中，一些最内心暴力的时刻发生在舞台之外。
Cora does not witness but instead hears of the fate of an escaped friend, who is caught and hung from a gallows, “hooked through her ribs by a large metal spike and dangling.” While hiding in an abolitionist’s attic, she watches through a spy hole as townspeople gather weekly in an idyllic park to watch night riders kill runaway slaves and line the road with their corpses.
科拉没有亲眼目睹，而是听说了一位逃跑的朋友的命运，她被抓住并挂在绞刑架上，“一根大金属钉刺穿了她的肋骨，悬在空中”。当她躲在废奴主义者的阁楼里时，她通过一个间谍孔看到镇上的人们每周都聚集在一个田园诗般的公园里，观看夜间骑手杀死逃跑的奴隶并在道路上摆满他们的尸体。
Whitehead’s novel approaches a violence that is precise yet obscured, his language hiding while acknowledging what is being hidden.
怀特海的小说呈现出一种精确而又模糊的暴力，他的语言隐藏着，同时又承认所隐藏的东西。
In The Underground Railroad, the veil exists not to protect the reader, but to challenge us.
在《地下铁路》中，面纱的存在不是为了保护读者，而是为了挑战我们。
Whitehead forces us to see through the veil to witness the violence a nineteenth-century narrator might have been forced to hide.
怀特海迫使我们透过面纱来目睹十九世纪叙述者可能被迫隐藏的暴力。
In a 1986 article about Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , one of the first slave narratives to mention sexual violence , Joanne M.
1986 年，在一篇关于哈里特·雅各布斯 (Harriet Jacobs) 的《女奴生活事件》的文章中，乔安妮·M·乔安妮 (Joanne M.
Braxton critiques the skewed treatment of a genre that disproportionately focuses on the stories of “heroic male slaves.” She points to Incidents as a text that taught her that “the silences and gaps in the narratives of women’s lives are sometimes more significant than the filled spaces.” Both Beloved and The Underground Railroad concern themselves with these gaps by centering on female characters who are too complicated to fit neatly into a nineteenth-century white audience’s idea of what a slave story should be.
布拉克斯顿批评了对这种不成比例地关注“英雄男奴隶”故事的流派的歪曲处理。她指出《事件》这本书教会了她“女性生活叙事中的沉默和空白有时比填充的空间更重要”。 《宠儿》和《地下铁路》都关注这些差距，都以女性角色为中心，这些角色太复杂，无法完全符合 19 世纪白人观众对奴隶故事的看法。
Sethe commits an unthinkable act—the murder of her own child—to free her daughter the only way she knows how.
塞丝犯下了难以想象的行为——谋杀了自己的孩子——以她知道的唯一方式释放了她的女儿。
Cora is sexually violated not by a lecherous master, but by fellow slaves.
科拉遭受性侵犯的不是好色的主人，而是其他奴隶。
She is prickly and unsentimental yet vulnerable, difficult to love but so deserving of it.
她多刺、不感情用事，但又脆弱，难以爱，但又值得爱。
Like Morrison, Whitehead interrogates the silences in history by drawing from the form and language of slave narratives to force a twenty-first-century audience to see the violent reality anew.
和莫里森一样，怀特海利用奴隶叙事的形式和语言来质疑历史上的沉默，迫使二十一世纪的观众重新审视暴力现实。
This is one of the biggest tragedies of the slave narrative: the pernicious belief that those closest to an experience are somehow the least authoritative.
这是奴隶叙事中最大的悲剧之一：一种有害的信念，认为那些最接近经历的人在某种程度上是最不权威的。
The ex-slave narrator was expected to condemn his oppression yet maintain a nuanced depiction of his oppressor, and to recall the events of his life in a manner that was clear, neutral, and devoid of any contradiction, lest he be accused of falsifying the past.
前奴隶叙述者应该谴责他的压迫，但仍对压迫者进行细致入微的描述，并以清晰、中立、没有任何矛盾的方式回忆他的生活事件，以免被指控伪造过去。
It’s difficult to imagine how any writer could have told the brutal truth about American slavery when held to these impossible standards.
很难想象，当遵循这些不可能的标准时，任何作家如何能够讲述美国奴隶制的残酷真相。
Even Frederick Douglass was criticized by a contemporary critic for his “severity of judgment and a one-sidedness of view.” Yet, as Morrison writes, “no slave society in the history of the world wrote more—or more thoughtfully—about its own enslavement.” Black-American literature can be traced back to these men and women, born in bondage, who fought for literacy and wrote to free us all.
就连弗雷德里克·道格拉斯也被一位当代评论家批评为“严厉的判断和片面的观点”。然而，正如莫里森所写，“世界历史上没有一个奴隶社会对自己的奴役写下了更多或更深思熟虑的文章。”美国黑人文学可以追溯到这些出生在奴役中的男女，他们为识字而奋斗，为解放我们所有人而写作。
Two centuries later, black writers, inheritors of this literary legacy, continue to tell stories about slavery in a moment when white audiences are eager to consume them, but often still reluctant to engage with their brutality.
两个世纪后，黑人作家，这一文学遗产的继承者，继续讲述有关奴隶制的故事，而白人观众却渴望阅读这些故事，但往往仍不愿参与其中的残酷行为。
During a recent conversation about The Underground Railroad, a white woman told me that she was hesitant to read Whitehead’s novel because she’d heard that it was gory.
在最近一次关于《地下铁路》的谈话中，一位白人妇女告诉我，她对读怀特海德的小说很犹豫，因为她听说这本书很血腥。
Is it, she wanted to know?
是吗，她想知道吗？
She wanted my reassurance.
她想要我的保证。
I understand.
我明白。
I still find it hard to look.
我还是觉得很难看。
But black writers are ripping the veil, and I’m grateful to see.
但黑人作家正在揭开面纱，我很高兴看到这一点。
Brit Bennett is the author The Mothers , forthcoming from Riverhead.
布里特·贝内特 (Brit Bennett) 是《母亲》的作者，即将出版于 Riverhead。
She recently earned her M.F.A.
她最近获得了艺术硕士学位。
in fiction at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
密歇根大学海伦·泽尔作家项目的小说专业。