The Underground Railroad / Colson Whitehead

"The underground railroad is bigger than its operators — it's all of you, too. The small spurs, the big trunk lines. We have the newest locomotives and the obsolete engines, and he have hand-cars like that one. It goes everywhere, to places we know and those we don't. We got this tunnel right here, running beneath us, and no one knows where it leads. If we keep the railroad running, and none of us can figure it out, maybe you can."

Cora's grandmother Ajarry was kidnapped from her village in Africa, chained, sold and swapped multiple times, ending up on a Georgia cotton plantation.

Cora's mother Mabel dug up the vegetables in her plot one night and vanished, leaving her 9-year-old daughter a stray in living hell.

Cora grew up in Hob, the cabin reserved for the plantation's crippled, broken, rejected. Still a girl, she took a hatchet to the dog house a fellow slave built on the strip of dirt her grandmother and mother had tended with ferocious care. And the second time Caesar asked Cora to run away with him, she said yes.

Their flight takes them on the underground railroad — an actual railroad, with subterranean tunnels, and station masters who risk their lives to help fugitives on their path to freedom. Their first stop is South Carolina, where attitudes to black people appear more enlightened. Provided with new names and something resembling a new life, they start to believe that they could settle, even thrive there, but Cora soon realizes through subtle clues that bondage may take on many forms. Hunted by Ridgeway, the vicious slave catcher who failed to recapture Cora's mother and will not be defeated a second time, she must use every ounce of her intelligence and courage to make her way north.

While this was by no means a "fun" or "enjoyable" reading experience in the usual sense, it was a compelling and gripping one. I took a week to finish this novel, in short installments, because I needed time to process it. Despite suspecting that things would not get bright and rosy, I simply had to continue, not only to find out what would happen to Cora, but also because giving up would have felt like an act of disrespect for the real human beings who suffered through the experiences depicted in this work of fiction. The descriptions of the terrible treatments inflicted on slaves didn't make for pleasant reading, yet I'm thankful to Colson Whitehead and must commend him for writing so unflinchingly about this; although he no doubt could have included far more extreme examples of brutal acts that were indeed committed on slaves, he never glosses over the violence. He also shows, irrefutably, how the abolition of slavery in no way marks the end of subjugation for the oppressed, and that the absence of chains doesn't mean freedom for the slaves. In Cora — magnificent, brilliant, kickass Cora —, he pays beautiful homage to the enslaved women who endured more than physical blows and lashes, who sacrificed far more than their bodies. Chilling, uplifting, and relevant.

I borrowed this book from my local library.

Rating: ****½