Title: The
Underground Railroad
Author: Colin
Whitehead
Genre: Historical
Fiction
Read by: Bahni Turpin
Publisher/Date:
Penguin Random House Audio
Dates listened to: 10/3/17 – 10/24/17
CDs/Hours: 9/11
ISBN:
978-1-5247-3625-5
From the back cover – “Cora is a slave on a cotton
plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for
all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora, an outcast even among her follow
Africans. When Caesar, a recent arrival
from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a
terrifying risk and escape. Matters do
not go as planned – Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head
north, they are being hunted.
“In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground
Railroad is no mere metaphor – engineers and conductors operate a secret
network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South
Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface asks an
insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is
close on their heels. Forced to flee
again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true
freedom.
“As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for
black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga
of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises
of the present day. The Underground
Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to
escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the
history we all share.”
Whitehead was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017
for this novel. I always associated the
under-ground railroad with the Civil War and pictured it as not an actual
railroad but a series of places the slaves escaped to with the help of people,
both white and black. I feel saturated
with reading so much about slavery lately.
Though Whitehead has set me straight in his rendition of escaping slaves
and all the atrocities they endured I’m ready to move on. He does, however, a great job describing the
characters, stereotypical as they are, and the plantations they belonged to and
the setting, time and place of the story.
I read the Prize winners regardless of subject.
