DAVID ADAMS reads Colson Whitehead’s award-winning novel about slavery, The Underground Railroad…
Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad
Fleet, London, 2017
ISBN-18: 978-0708898406
“A timely, brutal and powerful retelling of the story of slavery told to a world still struggling to come to terms with the issue, both in the US and around the world.”
A confronting and at times, bleak, book, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the story of the ‘underground railroad’, a name given to the network of secret routes and safe houses maintained by abolitionists and used by slaves escaping servitude in the southern US during the early to mid 19th century to flee to sanctuary in the northern free states and Canada.
In an imaginative twist, however, in Colson’s book the underground railroad is not an abstract concept but an actual secret underground railroad – a fact which can seem a little disconcerting at first but which soon settles into the story and which, despite the war waged against it, continues to provide a central point of hope for the escapees it’s aimed at aiding.
The narrative follows the story of a young woman named Cora, a slave living on a cotton plantation in Georgia, whose mother Mabel had become something of a legend when she had successfully escaped, leaving her daughter behind.
Cora, who is shunned by other slaves thanks to some political manouvering by a rival, initially has no intention of escaping when she is approached by a young slave named Caesar about doing so. But after events make life on the plantation all but impossible for her, she agrees to leave with him.
The narrative then follows Cora’s fortunes as she tries to make her way to a safe haven in the face of betrayals, bigotry and the dogged slave catchers, in particular one named Ridgeway, who always seem to be hot on her heels.
As one might expect with a novel dealing with such subject matter, this is, at times, an uncomfortably visceral account as we are informed in detail of the fate that awaits those who oppose or resist the slavery system – slaves and those who aid and abet their escape alike.
The book, which seamlessly blends fact and fantasy, captures the relentless brutality Cora and her fellow slaves face but it doesn’t linger gratuitously. There’s a strong sense of Cora’s inner turmoil as events propel her along the railroad and bring her into contact with a range of curious and, at times, baffling characters like Ridgeway and Homer, a former slave the boy who follows him.
This book is a testament to the strength of human will – despite the frustrations, disappointments and outright setbacks Cora faces, she doesn’t give up, somehow, against the odds, continuing her journey to freedom when others had long ago turned back.
A timely, brutal and powerful retelling of the story of slavery told to a world still struggling to come to terms with the issue, both in the US and around the world.
