#65 - The Underground Railroad - Colin Whitehead

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.