The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

 

Cora, a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, knows she faces a bleak future. Given the chance to escape, she's initially reluctant, but a shocking event eventually spurs her on, and we follow her as she uses the underground railroad to escape her owner and evade slave-catchers.

One of the good things about being part of a book group is that you are occasionally forced to read out of your comfort zone. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is certainly well outside my usual genre. It took me a couple of pages to get used to the author's writing style, but once I'd settled down, I found the story very accessible and engrossing.

I vividly remember watching the TV mini-series Roots as a teen (it's shocking to consider this was almost fifty years ago) and being appalled by the treatment of slaves. As a result, the description of the treatment of the slaves wasn't anything I didn't already know. What I did find different was the story being told from the perspective of a teenage girl. In Cora's words, "Know your value and you know your place in the order", as a young, orphaned, female slave, she is well aware that her value is low. Treatment of slaves by owners and overseers was brutal, with horrific punishments for wrongdoings. Cora faced all of these alongside abuse from other slaves.

Despite the story being set over a hundred and fifty years ago, and the book being written ten years ago, I found lots of parallels with what is happening in America today: the description of the patrollers as "attracting a type....in another country they would have been criminals",  and how the patrollers would break into homes and places of work to kidnap slaves who thought they were free. Hypocrisy resonates throughout the story. The Declaration of Independence, claiming that "all men are equal," didn't apply to slaves. In fact, the only time that this was true was when body snatchers provided cadavers to students; under a scalpel, all bodies are the same.

Those helping slaves escape frequently risked their own lives. Abolitionists were fervent in their desire to put an end to slavery. Unfortunately, the message the general public received wasn't always accurate. The scenes in a museum where Cora has to participate in various tableaus of the life of a slave are extremely sanitised and laughable by modern standards. To the public, the life of a slave would not seem particularly extreme.

The cat-and-mouse game that plays out between Cora and the slave-catcher, Ridgeway, adds an extra layer to the story. While Cora's capture and return to her owner has a monetary value, Ridgeway's desire to catch her becomes an obsession. The time and effort expended far outweigh any payment he will receive. We see an example of this when a captured slave is killed simply because it doesn't make financial sense to return him. It is this preoccupation that leads to the horrifying and shameful conclusion, highlighting that even people who were born free or became free men were still considered to be worthless by slave catchers. 

**As I'm writing this, I've discovered that there is a mini-series based on the book. I'll certainly be checking it out.**

Author Details

Colson Whitehead is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, for The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. A recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.