Guns, Drugs and Sewing Kits: Female Strength and Solidarity in the Underground Season Premiere

Before I dive into the great Ernestine (Amirah Vann), I should first say that I found myself thrilled, odd as it sounds, to be on a South Carolina plantation. Too often we think of slavery as a single experience across the board, and the truth is that every plantation was different, and those differences were greater depending on the location and the nature of the work. Rice plantations in South Carolina, for example, resulted in a completely different experience from cotton plantations in Georgia. Of course, enslaved people were still very much enslaved, wherever they were. But Underground is doing something incredible (visually and dramatically) by setting Ernestine among the Gullah people, who have an incredible history that I’m excited to learn a bit more about.

But it wouldn’t be an episode of Underground without some profound heartbreak. If I’d asked you last season to name the strongest character—male or female—on Underground, there’s a good chance Miss Ernestine would have come to mind. She’s certainly my personal favorite character on the show, and after the way things ended for her, I knew Season Two was going to be difficult for everyone who fell in love with her storyline. When someone is stripped of everything—their children, their agency (however complicated that agency), their home (even a home that isn’t really theirs) and some of their illusions, what will they turn to? Who will they become? The answer isn’t always what we want it to be.

Ernestine is in a new “home,” in a new “relationship” and drowning her very real sorrows in an addiction to opiates (smuggled in by the overseer). Ernestine has fallen, but as the ghost of Pearly Mae points out (and isn’t it great to see Vann and Adina Porter on screen together again?), one of the reasons it feels like such a fall is because we (the audience, and Ernestine herself) were always under the impression that Ernestine wielded a certain amount of control in the big house. One of the most exciting and devastating parts of Season One was realizing that Ernestine, much as we wanted her to be, was never in complete control, as an enslaved woman. But we also know that ‘Stine doesn’t stay down for long, so I have to believe that what we’ve seen of her in this premiere is a precursor to her rise from the ashes.

Now that I’ve done my job, here’s what I really wanted to write about, when I first saw this episode. I’d been reading Ann Petry since I was a child, but when I was in college I discovered a short story she’d published in 1945 called “Like a Winding Sheet.” As soon as I saw Ernestine’s lover hit her across the face, after being hit himself by the overseer, for the second time in her presence, I began looking for the story online. If you’ve ever wanted to understand the links between various forms of oppression, or how people in the “same position” can work to bring each other down—and by “people” I especially mean black men, bringing down black women—the story of a day in the life of Johnson and Mae will change your life.

“There was the smacking sound of soft flesh being struck by a hard object and it wasn’t until she screamed that he realized he had hit her in the mouth—so hard that the dark red lipstick had blurred and spread over her full lips, reaching up toward the tip of her nose, down toward her chin, out toward her cheeks. The knowledge that he had struck her seeped through him slowly and he was appalled but he couldn’t drag his hands away from her face…” — “Like a Winding Sheet”

What first drew me to this show was the decision on the part of writers/showrunners Misha Green and Joe Pokaski to present black characters, living under slavery, who are not always innocent. A villain like Cato (where is Cato?!) and an abusive lover are proof that this is a series interested in presenting black, enslaved people as humans—flaws and all. Thinking of ’Stine’s new lover, and where this storyline may go, I know that creating such a character—someone who is both oppressed and oppressive—takes a lot of courage. It’s the same kind that Petry had, and that Alice Walker and Toni Morrison had when they wrote stories where black women were victims of black men, who were also victims of white supremacy, power and oppression.

As we impatiently wait for next week’s follow-up to this jaw-dropping premiere, there’s plenty to wonder about. Will anyone pay for John’s murder? (Unlikely.) When is the Noahlee reunion happening? Because that look they shared when Noah had the rope around his neck just about did me in. Sigh. What will become of the man who opens the episode (with the help of Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar’s “Freedom”), played by one of my personal favorite actors of all time, the Bokeem Woodbine? We have such a brief interaction with him (brief, but powerful—a call for reparations, if there ever was one), and I loved seeing his seemingly small acts of rebellion throughout his day. Now that he’s started teaching himself to read, where will it take him, and where will his character take us? I’ve been waiting 10 months for this moment. And like the end of a full-term pregnancy, suffice it to say, my body is ready.