Clare L. Deming

Sometimes I decide to step back from genre fiction and read something more mainstream. Although part of the premise of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is fantastical, that is not what the book is about (paid links). This novel won several awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. Read on below to find out more.

Here is the blurb:

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood–where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned–Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.

In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor–engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey–hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

This was a hard book to read on an uncomfortable subject. This alternate history story set in the pre-Civil War American South features a literal underground railroad. Rather than providing a way for slaves to escape to freedom, this railroad is a literary device that the author uses to show the effects of slavery and racism in different constructed social settings.

Cora starts her journey as an enslaved young woman on a traditional southern plantation. The terrors on the Randall Plantation are those that are we’d expect from history. When the “kinder” of two brothers who own the plantation dies and Cora catches the eye of the remaining brother, her situation turns more imminently dangerous, impelling her to flee with the help of another slave.

In each destination that Cora reaches, she finds arguably better treatment. Yet none of these places treat her the same as the whites, even once she finds a freer community in the north. She has the illusion of freedom, but others are making decisions about what is best for her. She never has the agency that she should.

Throughout Cora’s story, she loses everyone who tries to help her. Cora doesn’t dwell too much on these losses and while this could make her characterization seem shallow, I felt like this was also a way for the author to make a specific point. Cora was originally abandoned by her mother, and given that families were torn apart in the slave trade, this was part of her life and something that she would have had no control over. It doesn’t seem fair that even when Cora finds some degree of safety and freedom, she still loses those she cares for, but her life is not fair because she cannot escape the color of her skin.

I’m glad that I read this book, but I don’t think that it added anything to what I personally already believe about human rights and discrimination. It was definitely a worthwhile book and offers a unique perspective on how racism has changed through history and how abolition hasn’t solved racial discrimination. I will probably donate this book to my local library so that other people can read it.

Have you read any books by Colson Whitehead? Is there another one that you would recommend I read? Let me know in the comments!

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