Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Underground Railroad’

In 2016, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award for Fiction and reached the top spot on the New York Times Best Sellers list, a rare achievement. What makes this feat even more remarkable is that Whitehead accomplished it with a challenging story that contains some of the most disturbing accounts of slavery ever printed.

Despite its horrific subject matter, The Underground Railroad conjures a vision of hope out of so much savagery and despair. Its heroine, Cora, more than survives; she escapes, and as she does so, she grows in depth and maturity until her wisdom and grace suffuse the book. Thanks to Cora, Whitehead’s much-noted central conceit of the Underground Railroad being a real subterranean train system gains a moral as well as an aesthetic gravity. It’s her human heart that gives an otherwise serious work of historical fiction permission to embrace this one wild element of fantasy.

The book begins in Georgia, where Cora fights for survival in the competitive hell of a cotton plantation. Together with Caesar, who introduces her to the railroad, Cora runs away and makes it to Charleston, where things seem better at first. In Charleston, Cora samples some of the benefits of freedom, but in a world where fugitive slaves are hunted relentlessly, and even seemingly benign medical institutions turn out to be engaged in eugenic experiments, nowhere is safe for long. Soon Cora is back riding the underground rails again to other places and to face new dangers.