"And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes - believes with all its heart - that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft and cruelty."
Cora is a slave on a plantation in Georgia. When her master flies into yet another vicious, drunken rage, she decides to follow in her mother's footsteps and flee. As she travels along the underground railroad, through the Carolinas and Virginia and Pennsylvania, Cora has to constantly stay ahead of the slave catcher sent to drag her back to Georgia as well as navigate a society rife with racism, hate, fear and hypocrisy.
I can't say I enjoyed The Underground Railroad. It's a powerful and raw evisceration of America as the 'land of the free.' The prose is sparse and matter-of-fact which builds up the tension - I knew what is coming and I knew it was going to be horrific but Colson Whitehead would not let me off the hook. He forced me to face the uncomfortable realities of American history. As a character, Cora is not particularly well-developed or likeable, but this book is not about Cora. It's about the humiliation and terror of being black in a slave nation. The humiliation of being seen as less than human, of being treated like backward children, the fear of being exploited, sent back into slavery or of becoming the target for a lynch mob.
Intense and unflinching, The Underground Railroad is not a comfortable read, but an important one. In a time when racial tensions in America are rising, books like this remind us why different narratives around history are so essential.
Read On: There are lots of other books that depict the lives of African Americans in the southern states. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is the writer's memoirs of her childhood in rural Arkansas, and The Colour Purple by Alice Walker is a novel about the lives of poor black women in Georgia in the 1930s.
