Author: Colson Whitehead
I purchased this highly acclaimed book and it sat on my shelf for several years. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 and was on numerous top 10 lists, but having recently read “Washington Black”, I didn’t have the will to read another tale that recalled American’s ugly history with slavery. The local library provided a steady supply of alternatives and I almost forgot about this little red book. But in 2020, COVID19 shut down everything, including the library and I could avoid it no more. I started reading the “Underground Railroad” with much fear and trepidation, but after the first handful of pages, I was hooked. I finished the book in a day.
Like me, if you don’t know about the Underground Railroad, this book will pique your curiosity to learn more about it. I learned — not from the book — that the Underground Railroad was a network of both African American and White people who helped runaway slaves, by offering them shelter, aid and most importantly, providing them crucial information on how to make it across to the free states in the North and Canada. The book re-imagines this time in American History, by inventing an Underground Railroad that ferries runaways into the elusive land of hope and freedom.
The Railroad is not the only thing imagined in the book. Colson Whitehead vividly describes life in a plantation in Georgia, a city in South Carolina, a town in North Carolina and a few other places. These are all a figment of the author’s imagination, but the sad part is that it all seems so plausible.
The protagonist in this tale is a young slave girl named Cora, who meets her life of misery head on. As the novel progressed I was increasingly impressed with how she stoically dealt with all that the pre-civil-war South threw her way. The book is peppered with wisdom that I found myself reading over and over again. Sometimes, it takes just a single sentence — “Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood” — to describe the times vividly.
The book is gripping and thought provoking. This quote sums the book up well. “Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth”
