The Underground Railroad is available on Amazon Prime from 14 May 2021. When Barry Jenkins first heard of the underground railroad as a child, he pictured Black men and women building, piloting and riding steam trains through the innards of antebellum America, whisking slaves away from the plantations of the South to freedom in the North. “There was something magical about it,” Jenkins tells me over Zoom on a Saturday morning in March. “I still remember it as being one of the purest senses of pride for being Black that I’ve ever had.” Learning, eventually, that the railroad was actually a metaphor for the informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by runaway slaves was like discovering “that Santa Claus and the tooth fairy aren’t real”, Jenkins says. It wasn’t so much the loss of a fantasy as an awakening to the enormity of what it took to flee slavery – a system so bloodcurdlingly wretched, and so deeply entrenched, that even a prosaic escape acquired a mythic glint.