"Conduction" by Ta-Nehisi Coates As Political Allegory

Ever since I read "Conduction" by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The New Yorker of June 10 & 17 of 2019, I've been wondering if it should be viewed as political allegory, in this case a story set in the age of slavery illuminating current circumstances.

Allegory involves the representation of abstract ideas by a specific narrative.  In this instance, the idea in question is where should blacks look for betterment?




By way of allegory, "Conduction" suggests blacks should look to whites as opposed to one of their own and that's the way it turned out in the recent Democratic primary elections.  None of the black candidates generated great enthusiasm among what might be thought of as their own people and in South Carolina, where the black vote was all important, Joe Biden's candidacy was dramatically rescued from what just prior to that appeared to be early oblivion.

What does that have to do with "Conduction?'

In Coates' story, a young black man escapes from a Virginia plantation and thanks to operatives associated with the Underground Railway, one of whom, a man named Bland, is white, makes it to the free city of Philadelphia.  There, he is introduced to the notion of family and put to work on the Underground Railway so as to help other blacks escape.

Lurking in the background is Ryland's Hounds, a gang of white men looking to kidnap escaped blacks and return them to their owners for a fee, black slaves being at that time  "the most valuable thing a man could own."

The protagonist, who readers eventually learn is named Hiram, joins the Conduction, but in a somewhat mystical manner, it begins to wear on him. He begins to feel a sense of loss as opposed to a sense of freedom as his activities helping others trigger certain memories. Perhaps that is because, as he notes at one point, blacks had been "close to the earth" in slavery.  In Philadelphia and in his activities, he's out of place. Melancholy starts to consume him.

So one day, he simply sets off walking with no destination in mind, only to be seized by Ryland's Hounds.  But while he is tied up and his four captors are eating dinner, who should sneak up but Bland, the white friend of blacks, who promptly kills all the Hounds, setting Hiram free.

This is Bland and Bland alone:  none of the blacks who helped Hiram escape slavery, get accepted into a family in Philadelphia and invite him to join them in the work of the Conduction are with Bland. Only the white man had somehow known what happened and how to deal with it.

Hiram was enslaved by whites and and ultimately saved by a white: not by one of his own. So  Coates seem to be saying here that in the current circumstances, where blacks make up but a small percentage of the overall U.S. population, they should look more to sympathetic whites than to blacks for socioeconomic assistance.