The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad, published in 2016, is a critically acclaimed novel by Colson Whitehead. It won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.

The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, an enslaved teenaged girl, who leaves her Georgia plantation in search of freedom. She is pursued by the slave-catcher Ridgeway who is obsessive in his zeal to catch her and destroy the abolitionist network that is helping her. In this work of fiction, the underground railroad becomes a real railroad with real locomotives and real conductors and real platforms complete with benches in addition to the historical safe houses and secret routes.

I. Loved. This. Novel.

I loved this novel despite all the different manifestations of evil that seeps through each page. The women whose bodies have been “carved open to the bones with the cat-o’-nine-tails”. The lashings that are followed with pepper-water to accentuate the pain. The men hanging from trees left for the buzzards and the crows. The bodies castrated and roasted alive as a deterrent to others contemplating escape from a life of slavery.

I know I’m reading a work of fiction but it is so haunting and so matter-of-fact, that one is left hollow. Slavery in the United States was terrible for all the people who suffered it, who witnessed it and pretended not to see the evil, and who continue to suffer its legacy today. In a way, Cora’s pursuit of freedom harkens the struggles of those today who pursue justice despite intimidation, despite efforts to keep things the way they are or return to the way they were, and despite those who could be allies but who choose to be blind.