Whitehead's novel takes the historical metaphor literally: the Underground Railroad is a real railroad, a secret network of tunnels, tracks, and locomotives beneath the slave South, and fugitives ride it in boxcars between states that each embody a different era of American racism. Cora, enslaved on the Randall cotton plantation in Georgia — where her mother Mabel's legendary escape left her behind — flees with Caesar after brutal punishment, pursued across the whole novel by Ridgeway, a slave catcher whose failure to catch Mabel has become an obsession. South Carolina first looks like refuge, with jobs, schooling, and medical care, before Cora uncovers the sterilization and disease experiments beneath its paternalism; North Carolina has outlawed Black presence altogether and hides her in an attic above weekly lynching festivals; Tennessee is a plague-and-fire wasteland; and the free Black farm settlement in Indiana offers her first experience of community and love before white raiders destroy it. Whitehead drew on WPA slave narratives for the texture of plantation life, and the episodic structure turns Cora's journey into a survey of the nation's racial history compressed into one woman's flight. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, and was an Oprah's Book Club selection.
Author: Colson Whitehead · Original publisher: Doubleday (New York), 2016
