The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, asks her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity. The Underground Railroad is no metaphor, tracks and a secret network of tunnels actually run beneath the Southern ground. Cora embarks on a harrowing journey, meeting new devastations and terrors at each stop through the antebellum era.
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This story was gripping from start to end. It took me nearly a month to read as the detail and research that had to have gone into this book was so realistic that I needed to read it slowly to soak it all in. One woman's desperate journey to freedom in a land filled with the most horrible kind of people. People that actually existed once upon a time (and people that still exist today). The concept of the Underground Railroad being a real railroad that was secretly built and operating under the southern states was riveting. I know as a kid in elementary school, when we first learned about the Underground Railroad, that's exactly what I had pictured, and it was neat to see it brought to life.
Cora has struggled her entire life. Her mother abandoned her to run away and the people living and suffering side by side with her don't even accept her as one of their own. When she runs away with Caesar, it's the obvious choice. What she discovers on her journey, however, is that a runaway slave never gets to stop running. Their first journey takes them to South Carolina, where they are free, but there is a different kind of imprisonment lurking around the corner. Cora's second stop, in North Carolina, is a new kind of nightmare as she finds herself in a town thirsty for blood. Any runaway or free people of colour and/or the people helping them are hanged in the public square every Friday like clockwork in front of the hungry mob. And so it continues along Cora's entire journey, each destination bringing her closer to freedom yet with increasing danger. Slave catchers are hot on Cora's tracks right from the start and no place that she goes is safe from them. From train stop to train stop and state to state, all she can do is run and survive.
In the synopsis of the book, Cora's journey is likened to Gulliver's Travels in that each new destination brings a new encounter and that's true... if Gulliver's Travels was a horror novel. It was almost unbelievable that places like this really existed in the southern states back then. Throughout the entire journey, it's impossible to know who Cora can trust and whether or not the Railroad will be there to help her find a way out. It was a terrifying and magnificent read. Colson Whitehead's writing style was unique, in that there were lots of time jumps and snippets cut from Cora's life to give us just enough to be horrified but not enough to permanently scar us. Consisting mainly of narrative paragraph's and Cora's inner dialogue experiencing all of this first hand, it was not a light read.
The characterization was interesting. Because this book mainly follows Cora's narrative, I feel like we got to know her backwards and forwards and therefore much more invested in her making it out completely unscathed. This made it somewhat of a thriller, on the edge of your seat willing her to just make it out alive. The very ambiguous characterization of some other "mains" was strange like the author didn't want us to get to know them, didn't want us to trust that they were on Cora's side. But in that type of situation, how can you trust someone completely without doubts? It was like he was trying to get the readers to feel what it would be like to be so alone in the world that you have doubts about everyone, even those there to help you. The snippets of each of the antagonists' points of view were chilling. Going from Cora's story, usually ending somewhere horrible, and jumping into the mind of the cruel slave catcher, the elitist white woman, and the crooked doctor was jarring.
I loved the whole concept of the book and how the spotlight shined on the true horrors that took place in real life while still bringing in fictional elements to the book like the railroad. It made it real but still gave you that small taste of wonder, of safety. There was also a lot of relevant topics covered in the book that are still relative today and it was interesting to see how these things were justified back then to how they are now. Things like white supremacy, lynch mobs, and forced sterilization (isn't it terrifying that all these still exist in 2020 in North America?!). A lot of heavy topics covered but true in every form. This fictional book was one of the most truthful stories I've read all year.
I don't want to say much more on this book for fear of spoiling anything but I definitely think it's a must-read. It was a 5-star read for me because I could not find one fault with this book. It was written magnificently and in a way that highlighted the truth and the horror. It had such a fascinating concept of the complications it would take to run an actual underground network of railroad tunnels throughout the south to free the enslaved. I couldn't bear to put it down and I carried it with me everywhere I went. I cannot wait to read more from this author.