Fanny Briggs’s Story Turns ‘The Underground Railroad’ into a True Epic

Amazon’s The Underground Railroad is a profound work of art based on a novel that was already a masterpiece. Barry Jenkins‘s sprawling 10-episode-long adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s book expands upon that novel’s scope and reinterprets the story of Cora (Thuso Mbedu) as a pure epic. Jenkins imbues side characters in Cora’s quest with dignity and complicates the world of the Underground Railroad by turning it into an expanded bit of bureaucracy.

Nowhere does Jenkins swerve from Whitehead’s text more than in Episode 3 “North Carolina” and Episode 7 “Fanny Briggs.” Jenkins introduces another runaway slave into Cora’s story — Grace (Mychal-Bella Bowman) — who rises almost like a literal phoenix from the fires of tragedy. Grace’s introduction is at first chilling, but later affirms Barry Jenkins’s utter care as a filmmaker.

The Underground Railroad follows the odyssey of a young woman named Cora as she takes a mythical Underground Railroad out of Georgia and through the south to eventual, hard-fought, freedom. One of the more terrifying parts of Cora’s journey comes when she narrowly escapes capture (and sterilization) in South Carolina. She arrives in North Carolina where Black people have been deemed illegal and are routinely round up and murdered for show. A reluctant station agent named Martin Wells (Damon Herriman) takes Cora into his house, but forces her to live in the crawlspace of his attic. In the book, Cora is alone up there for seven months. In the show, she has a younger runaway slave named Grace to “guide” her. When Cora is eventually discovered by the slave catcher on her trail, she is horrified to watch the Wells house go up in flames. The implication is Grace is doomed.

At first I was absolutely irate with Jenkins for introducing Grace. She doesn’t appear in the book and for three whole episodes of The Underground Railroad, we are led believe she died in the flames that consumed the Wells house. I had not hitherto taken Jenkins as a nihilistic director. Introducing a younger Black girl whom Cora leaves in North Carolina to burn to death felt a touch too bleak for Jenkins. As it happens, it was.

In The Underground Railroad Episode 7, Jenkins returns to Cora’s fate. The girl not only manages to survive the fire, but she makes it to the Underground Railroad. It is there that she sheds the name given to her by Mr. Martin and reclaims the one gifted her by her mother: Fanny Briggs.

Fanny Briggs is not a character in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, but she is a fictional historic figure in another of his novels, The Institutionalist. Jenkins’s decision to include her in this series not only creates a dialogue between Whitehead’s books, but it expands the scope of The Underground Railroad‘s story. Cora is not the only runaway slave who has embarked on an unfathomable adventure on the Underground Railroad and each passenger’s story, or “testimony”, is important. The Underground Railroad is not a tale of one young woman’s heroism, but an entire race’s.

Barry Jenkins is one of the most masterful artists working in cinema today. Every choice he makes in The Underground Railroad is as deliberate as it is haunting. The introduction of Grace, the fake out of her death, and the triumph of Fanny Briggs is a testament to humanity’s capacity to endure against all odds. It’s also a welcome subplot in a story that otherwise has a tendency to grind away at our soul.

Where to stream The Underground Railroad