In the midst of it all, Cora, a stray who’s gained a bit of a scarlet letter because her mother fled the plantation and left her behind years back, starts her long journey to freedom one quiet night with nothing but a sack of unripe turnips, two companions and the North Star as their guide. Life on the plantation is as rough for women-who are used as breeders for more slaves, hence more money, and are constantly at the mercy of male appetites, both from those in the ivory tower and those in the fields-as it is for the laboring men. Slaves are beaten and raped for amusement, even on display for the entertainment of guests sipping lemonade attempts at fleeing from bondage or bucking the system are (often arbitrarily) met with public displays of execution, from being strung up and castrated to a good ole-fashioned tarring and feathering. This plantation is an amalgamation of every horror and tragedy you’ve ever heard of about slavery. The Underground Railroad starts on the Randall plantation in Georgia around 1812. I love everything that Colson Whitehead is about (and I hope to read Zone One soon), but this particular foray into his work turned out to be a little less than a love affair for me. I was really looking forward to this read! I had an interesting relationship with The Intuitionist, having read it in college and not quite grasped it then came back to it later and enjoyed it more. “All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.” 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. 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.
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. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. 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. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Matters do not go as planned-Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. 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.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia.
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