“TheUndergroundRailroad”

by Colson Whitehead

“The music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always – the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude”

Colson tackles historical fiction like no other. As a child, Whitehead heard stories of the Underground Railroad, imagining an actual locomotive whisking slaves to safety. As an adult, he kept returning to his initial conception of escape. In this neo-slave narrative, Whitehead blends the fantastical with the historical to showcase the multiple horrors of life for slaves on the plantation and those on the run. Whitehead writes eloquently about the history of African Americans in this country, blending the compounding atrocities that awaited black people before and after emancipation. 

Raised on the Randall plantation in Georgia, Cora is an orphan, her mother Mabel having been the only slave to successfully escape the plantation when Cora was a child. When Mr. Randall dies, and his two sons take over the plantation’s operations, Cora begins considering the risks of escape. One brother has his eye on Cora, and rather than risk the brutal rapes to ensue, Cora decides to flee, with the encouraging of another slave named Caesar. The two evade multiple attempts at capture and land in South Carolina, a budding black microcosm where free black people seemingly are allowed to live in peace. Faced with the reality of the slave catcher Ridgeway nipping at their heels, Cora and Caesar debate whether to keep running or settle into this new reality. The narrative follows Cora across several states, some kinder to free blacks and some fraught with horrors reminiscent of plantation life. 

Whitehead’s plot twists and turns and denies readers’ predictions. Cora never feels safe, and readers glimpse the trauma that accompanies the victory of escape. A slave’s run is never complete. One is forced to constantly look over her shoulder for the master’s whip or the slavecatcher’s chains. Ridgeway’s fascination with Cora due to her mother’s evasion makes Cora’ journey more perilous. The mission becomes Ridegway’s obsession. 

Whitehead is the author of 8 novels and two works of nonfiction. The Underground Railroad won the 2016 National Book Award and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Whitehead was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship. His newest novel Harlem Shuffle, published in 2021, highlights a heist gone wrong in 1960s Harlem. Whitehead currently lives in New York with his wife and two children. 

“Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits.”