After the feast, the slaves dance and play music, but they’re interrupted by James and Terrance Randall, the brothers who own the plantation. Just before the feast, a young man named Caesar pulls Cora aside and asks her to run away with him, an idea Cora dismisses as ludicrous. Before the feast, Cora talks to her friend Lovey, a kind and simple young woman who-unlike Cora-enjoys dancing. One day, the enslaved population on Randall is preparing a birthday feast for Jockey, an enslaved man who picks random days on which to celebrate his birthday. Soon after, she was gang-raped by four enslaved men. Cora destroyed the doghouse with a hatchet and cut off the dog’s tail. Soon after Cora was placed there, she had a confrontation with a man named Blake who built a wooden house for his dog in Cora’s garden. After Mabel ran away, Cora became a “stray” and was placed in Hob, the cabin for “wretched” women. Cora spends every Sunday tending to her garden, which she inherited from Mabel (who inherited it from Ajarry). The narrative jumps to Cora’s adolescence-she is still living on Randall. Ajarry dies of a brain hemorrhage while working in the cotton field. Ajarry has three husbands and five children, and the only one of the children that survives is Mabel, Cora’s mother. When Michelle Obama told the audience at this year's Democratic National Convention that "today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves," many reacted with surprise, having forgotten the history of the nation's most famous residence.The protagonist Cora’s grandmother, Ajarry, is kidnapped from Africa as a child and brought to America, where she is sold many times before ending up on Randall plantation. The Underground Railroad is a novel against forgetting, and it arrives at a moment when the country's collective memory about slavery and race hatred seems to be fading. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now." If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his.
Most chillingly, there's Ridgeway, a ruthless slave hunter with an attitude common to many white people at the time: "If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. Whitehead intersperses the chapters following Cora's journey with short sections focused on the people she encounters: a grave-robbing doctor, an abolitionist's wife, and Caesar, her partner in escape. She does not lose faith, because it's unclear if she ever had faith to begin with. She witnesses kind souls persecuted for their tolerance, and vile monsters rewarded for their barbarity. With this novel, Colson Whitehead proves that he belongs on any short list of America's greatest authors - his talent and range are beyond impressive and impossible to ignore.īy the time The Underground Railroad ends, Cora has traveled through multiple states, sometimes on her own, sometimes not. It still lived in all of them, waiting to abuse and taunt when chance presented itself." There they meet other former slaves, each haunted by their past: "It lived in them. They board the train not knowing where they're going, ending up in South Carolina, a state that prides itself on a relatively more enlightened attitude toward race than its neighbors. It's an actual tunnel, stretching miles in either direction to God knows where. When Cora and Caesar first see the railroad, they're stunned. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to." But after being viciously attacked by a sadistic farmer, she agrees to light out with Caesar under the cover of darkness, destined for a station on the Underground Railroad. When Cora is approached by another slave, Caesar, about escaping from the plantation, she initially demurs: "White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast.
She remembers every horrible incident, even - especially - the ones she'd rather forget: "There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track."
In her time on the Randall farm in Georgia, she's been worked to the point of sickness, beaten, raped, forced to watch her fellow slaves tortured to death. The protagonist of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is a slave on the plantation where her grandmother, Ajarry, died while picking cotton, and her mother, Mabel, escaped from years ago. How?Įditor's note: This review contains language some may find offensiveĬora is 16, maybe 17 she's not quite sure. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Underground Railroad Author Colson Whitehead
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