The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, captures the horror of slavery.  The writing is exquisite and complex while the plot is both straightforward and sprinkled with magical realism. Cora, a young woman, lives on a cotton plantation in Georgia with an overseer as cruel as Simon Legree. Cora escapes with a fellow slave named Caesar to catch a train heading north on the Underground Railroad. In Whitehead’s telling, Cora boards an actual locomotive running beneath the ground. The novel follows Cora as she stops in different states, each with a different approach to dominating and exploiting African Americans. At every stop, Cora experiences humiliation and degradation and lives in terror that Ridgeway, the slave catcher, or someone else will capture her. The draconian Fugitive Slave Act punishes anyone who assists escaped slaves.

There are some Underground Railroad stations that are located in states that treat African-Americans relatively better. Yet each state has its own approach to denigrating African-Americans through emotional, physical, or spiritual torture. And as if the terror of being sold and separated from family isn’t enough, the brutality of the violence Mr. Whitehead describes is grotesque and gruesome. He writes, “Cora had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres. Feet cut off to prevent escape and hands cut off to stop theft.” In one scene, the plantation owners’ guests are served lunch while one of Cora’s fellow slaves is whipped in front of them and then he is doused with oil and roasted. Who are these people? Psychologically speaking, it is hard to make sense of their atrocious actions. How have they convinced themselves that this abhorrent behavior is acceptable? Though they think of African-Americans as barbarians, it is these plantation owners, overseers, slave catchers, and acquiescent Southerners who are the barbarians in this horror show as they project their own barbarism onto their slaves. It is a painful book to read.

A couple of decent folks emerge in the book, but it is dark from beginning to end. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for Colson Whitehead to write this book. He is a deserving recipient of both the 2016 National Book Award and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. All Americans should read this book. It is yet another reminder that our government has offered no formal apology or financial reparations to the descendants of slaves. Though in a different form, the scourge of racism persists today. Only when the United States government and its citizens confront and engage with this horrible history will we, as a country, heal and move forward.