The Underground Railroad

Not since reading Toni Morrison's devastating Beloved, have I been so moved by a novel based on the shameful history of slavery in this country.  Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad takes several pages from this history and uses them to create an imaginative and gut-wrenching story of Cora, a Georgia slave who makes an all-or-nothing attempt to reach freedom in the North.

Cora, a third-generation plantation slave, wrestles with the ghosts of her grandmother and mother as she weighs the pros and cons of an escape . Certainly the punishment if caught was not death (the loss of "property" to the owner) but extensive whipping and further deprivation that left the slave on the edge of death, but just enough alive to be brought back to life for a bleak and never-ending future of forced labor.  

But Cora, urged on by Caesar,  a loved fellow-slave, eventually decides she must be free and thus begins the premise of the novel: Cora's escape.  

Whitehead takes the historical fact of the underground railroad as an overland escape route and reimagines it as an actual underground system of tunnels in which tracks have been laid and abandoned rail cars ferry escapees slowly and with great danger to the North.  Entrance to these tunnels is highly secret and of course any one abetting the runaways is hanged.  Many of the conductors and those leading the runaways are sympathetic whites who pay the ultimate price for their assistance.  

Cora's journey, which is interrupted regularly by terrifying episodes, takes the reader along as Cora emerges along the stops and must, as she progresses through different stops, decide whether to stay at any particular point and live a life in hiding or continue her travels to complete freedom.  

As Cora experiences temporary stays in different states along the route, we experience along with her the multitudes of ways various states are dealing with the "African population."  North Carolina, for example, in a fearful reaction to the growing African population (outnumbering the white population) has made it illegal for anyone of African descent to reside in their state.  Existing slaves have been purchased by the government and forcibly shipped out to Louisiana and Florida, where slaves are in high demand.  Any free blacks attempting to remain in North Carolina will be shot on sight. The North Carolinians are quite proud and pleased with their solution and expressed their opinion of the states taking their exported slaves:

The other states of the cotton empire absorbed the stock; Florida and Louisiana were particularly famished for colored hands, especially the seasoned variety.  A short tour of Bourbon Street forecast the result to any observer: a repulsive mongrel state in which the white race is, through amalgamation with Negro blood, made stained, obscured, confused.  Let them pollute their European bloodlines with Egyptain darkness, produce rivers of halfbreeds, quadroons, and miscellaneous dingy yellow bastards-they forge the very blades that will be used to cut their throats. 

South Carolina, while seemingly welcoming runaway slaves with open arms, is secretly implementing a forced sterilization program as a population control method.  And so it goes.  One horror story after another.  

Whitehead takes the reader's breath away with the sheer ugliness and brutality of these "solutions" and fills at least this reader with shame over this shared history.  And, one must say,  based on the very recent election of our new president,  a sense of dread.  Do we still have drops of this poisonous thinking in our society today? It would seem we might.  And perhaps more than drops. How terrifying is that?

Yet, amidst all this hatred, amidst death, loss, mistreatment, starvation, capture, Cora travels on. Keeps her eye on the prize.  Freedom. For her. For her child. 

Tremendous prices are paid.  

My Rating: **** (Four Stars)