The Underground Railroad was the name given
to the network of supported routes north which runaway slaves of the southern
states took in their bid for freedom.
Safe houses, food drops, false-bottomed wagons all featured, but to
these Colson Whitehead adds a physical manifestation of underground trains and
rails with drivers, conductors and station-masters. That is the only bit of magic realism in this
gritty telling of the slaves’ lot; generally the realism is brutal and shaming.
Young slave girl Cora’s flight is the peg on
which is hung a sequence of fact-based events.
She flees from a life on the plantation in Georgia already filled with
cruelty, injustice, beatings and rape; spends months in an attic in South
Carolina; and finds respite of sorts in North Carolina, only to discover
acceptance comes with sinister conditions.
Only in Indiana does she find any semblance of normality, and even there
threat lurks.
Along the ‘railroad’ she encounters other
runaways, abolitionist sympathisers, racists and slave-catchers. Across the spectrum people get damaged,
people die.
It is not an easy read but Cora’s plight
keeps the reader engaged. And it is not
one-dimensional fare. Cora is seeking
not only freedom but her mother, who ‘ran’ before her, leaving her baby
daughter on the plantation. The
slave-catchers’ motives have unexpected complexities and there are nuances
within the abolitionists to expose.
A thought provoking book that puts the
reader uncomfortably inside Cora’s skin, a skin that many at that time and
place refused to look beyond.
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