The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and is soon to be a mini-series on Amazon. Though slavery has been explored in many recent works of fiction, this one is different. Like the oft-quoted line about the banality of evil, Whitehead's depiction of the peculiar institution is matter-of-fact in its brutality, with line like "In North Carolina the negro race did not exist except at the ends of ropes,".and the slave characters in this book, which is set (I think) around the 1830s are resigned to their fate. Except for two.

Caesar is a slave on a Georgia plantation belonging to a couple of brothers, the Randalls. "James was as ruthless and brutal as any white man but he was the portrait of moderation compared to his
younger brother. The stories from the southern half were chilling, in magnitude if not in particulars." Caesar has an idea to escape, but knows he can not do it alone. He enlists Cora, because she is feisty--she took on another slave with a hatchet when he built a structure in her garden--and because her mother, Mabel, was the only slave to ever successfully escape the plantation.

Caesar has a connection to the Underground Railroad, which in Whitehead's book is literal, not figurative. In fact, a character late in the book had guessed it was figurative. The Underground Railroad here is an actual train that runs in tunnels, with conductors and stations. This bit of magic realism gives the book a hopeful, fanciful air. One just needs to descend some stairs and catch a train to get away, like the train to Hogwarts.

As Caesar and Cora head to South Carolina, a slave catcher is on their trail. His name is Ridgeway, and he's a great villain, because he is smart and articulate. “The name of punishment, dogging every fugitive step and every thought of running away. For every slave I bring home, twenty others abandon their full-moon schemes. I’m a notion of order. The slave that disappears—it’s a notion, too. Of hope. Undoing what I do so that a slave the next plantation over gets an idea that it can run, too. If we allow that, we accept the flaw in the imperative. And I refuse.” He discusses issues with the slaves he has caught, though he is not above putting a bullet in one for singing too much.

Cora will end up making a few more spots. Like Anne Frank, she will hide in an attic in North Carolina, watching a lynching on the public square through a tiny hole. She is the heroine of the book, not only plucky and determined but brave and stalwart.

Though Cora is the main character the narrative shifts to others, such as a white woman who reluctantly houses Cora. I was mystified by one section that features grave robbers in Boston, who never appear again in the story. A short chapter near the end, which recounts what happened to Cora's mother, is painfully poignant. And the book ends, as any book on race relations ends, with a call out to the present: “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. Yet here we are."