The Underground Railroad Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad is a historical fiction novel by American author Colson Whitehead, published by Doubleday in 2016. The alternate history[1] novel tells the story of Cora, a slave in the Antebellum South during the 19th century, who makes a bid for freedom from her Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as an actual rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes.[2] The book was a critical and commercial success, hitting the bestseller lists and winning several literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. A TV miniseries adaptation, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, was released in May 2021.

The book alternates between the perspective of the lead character, Cora, and chapters told from a different character's perspective. The featured characters are: Ajarry, Cora's grandmother; Ridgeway, a slave catcher; Stevens, a South Carolina doctor conducting a social experiment; Ethel, the wife of a North Carolina station agent; Caesar, a fellow enslaved person who escapes the plantation with Cora; and Mabel, Cora's mother. The chapter locations are: Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and (an undefined) "North".

Cora is an enslaved person on a plantation in Georgia and an outcast after her mother, Mabel, ran off without her. She resents Mabel for escaping, although it is later revealed that her mother tried to return to Cora but died from a snake bite and never reached her. Caesar approaches Cora about a plan to flee. Reluctant at first, she eventually agrees as her situation with her master and fellow slaves worsens. During their escape, they encounter a group of slave catchers, who capture Cora's young friend Lovey. Cora is forced to kill a twelve-year-old boy to protect herself and Caesar, eliminating any possibility of merciful treatment should she be recaptured. With the help of an inexperienced abolitionist, Cora and Caesar find the Underground Railroad, depicted as a literal underground train system that runs throughout the south, transporting runaways northwards. They take a train to South Carolina.[3]

Upon learning of their escape, Ridgeway begins a hunt for the pair, mainly in revenge for Mabel, who is the only escapee he has ever failed to capture. Cora and Caesar have taken up comfortable residence in South Carolina under assumed names. South Carolina is enacting a program where the government owns formerly enslaved people but employs them, provides medical treatment, and gives them communal housing. The two enjoy their time there and put off the decision to leave until Cora learns of plans to sterilize black women and use black men as test subjects in an experiment to track the spread and degenerative effects of syphilis. Ridgeway arrives before the two can leave, and Cora is forced to return to the Railroad alone. She later learns that Caesar was killed by an angry mob after having been caught and jailed by Ridgeway.

Cora eventually arrives at a closed-down station in North Carolina. She is found by Martin, the son of the station's former operator. North Carolina has recently decided to abolish slavery, using indentured servants instead, and violently executes any runaway slaves found in the state (as well as some freedmen). Terrified of what the North Carolinians might do to an abolitionist, Martin hides Cora in his attic for several months. Cora becomes ill and is reluctantly treated by Martin's wife, Ethel. While Cora is down from the attic, a raid is conducted on the house, and Ridgeway recaptures her while the mob executes Martin and Ethel.

Ridgeway takes Cora back toward Georgia, detouring through Tennessee to return another enslaved person to his owner. While stopped in Tennessee, Ridgeway's traveling party is attacked by the free-born Royal and two escaped enslaved people, who release Cora. Cora travels to a farm in Indiana owned by a free black man named Valentine, along with Royal. The farm is populated by several freedmen and escapees, living and working in harmony. Royal, an operator on the Railroad, begins a romantic relationship with Cora, although she remains hesitant because of a rape by other slaves in her childhood.

A small faction of freedmen, fearing that the presence of escaped slaves would ruin their peaceful lives, oppose the harboring of non-members of the community. Eventually, the farm is burned, and many people, including Royal, are killed in a raid by white Hoosiers. Various theories are held concerning the source of the attack. Ridgeway recaptures Cora and forces her to take him to a closed-down Railroad station nearby. When they arrive, she pushes him down a flight of stairs, severely injuring him. When last seen, he whispers thoughts on the "American imperative" to Homer, who writes them in his journal. Cora then runs off down the tracks. Eventually, she emerges from the underground to find a caravan traveling West. She is given a ride by one of the wagons' black drivers.[4]

In the "Acknowledgments", Whitehead mentions two famous escaped enslaved people: "Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs". While in Jacobs's native North Carolina, Cora has to hide in an attic where, like Jacobs, she is not able to stand, but like her, can observe the outside life through a hole that "had been carved from the inside, the work of a previous occupant".[5] Martin Ebel, who observed this parallel in a review for the Swiss Tages-Anzeiger, also observes that the "Freedom Trail", where the victims of North Carolinian lynchings hang from trees, has a historic predecessor in the crosses the Romans raised along the Appian Way to kill the enslaved people who had joined Spartacus' slave rebellion, written on by Arthur Koestler in his novel The Gladiators. Ridgeway reminds Ebel of inspector Javert, the hero's merciless persecutor in Victor Hugo's Les misérables.[6]

In The New Yorker, reviewer Kathryn Schulz likens Ridgeway to both Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick and the slave catcher August Pullman of the television series Underground: "Ridgeway ... and August Pullman, in "Underground", are Ahab-like characters, privately and demonically obsessed with tracking down specific fugitives".[7] Both Ahab and Ridgeway have a soft spot for a black boy: Ahab for the cabin-boy Pip, and Ridgeway for 10-year-old Homer, whom he bought as a slave and set free the next day.[8]

In Whitehead's North Carolina, all blacks have been "abolished".[9] Martin Ebel observes the parallel to the Nazi exterminations of Jews and also the parallel between Cora's concealment and Anne Frank's.[6] Another parallel to literature on Nazi Germany may be found in the erection of three gallows by Cora's plantation master. He had the three gallows erected for Cora and her two fellow fugitives to put them to a cruel death as soon as each was returned.[10] In Anna Seghers's novel The Seventh Cross, written in exile between 1938 and 1942, seven prisoners escape from a concentration camp. The camp commander has a cross erected for each of them to be tortured there after being returned.

Critical reception

The novel received positive reviews from critics.[11][12][13][14] Reviewers praised it for its commentary on the past and present of the United States.[12][14] According to Book Marks, the novel received "rave" reviews (or an "A"[15]), based on 32 critic reviews, with 25 being "rave", six being "positive", and one being "mixed".[16] In the November/December 2016 issue of Bookmarks, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the novel received a rating of 4.0 out of 5.[17][18]

In 2019, The Underground Railroad was ranked 30th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.[19] The novel was voted the greatest of its decade in Paste and was third place (along with Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad) in a list by Literary Hub.[20]

Honors and awards

The novel has received a number of awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction[21] and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction.[22] The previous book to win both the Pulitzer and the National Book prizes was The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx, in 1993.[21] While awarding the Pulitzer Prize, the committee recognized Whitehead's novel for a "smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America".[23] The Underground Railroad was also awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature[24] and the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence,[25] and was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.[26][27] When The Underground Railroad was published in the United States in August 2016, it was selected for Oprah's Book Club.[28][29] In 2024, The New York Times named it the seventh best book of the 21st century.[30]

On August 5, 2020, a crater on Pluto's moon Charon was named Cora, after the character in the novel, by the International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature.[31]

It was announced in March 2017 that Amazon was making a limited drama series based on The Underground Railroad, written and directed by Barry Jenkins.[32] The series was released on Amazon Prime Video on May 14, 2021.[33]

• Tuskegee Syphilis Study

1. ^ Brian Lowry (May 13, 2021). "'The Underground Railroad' conducts an unsettling ride through an alternate history". CNN. Retrieved May 19, 2021.
2. ^ "The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, 2016 National Book Award Winner, Fiction". National Book Foundation. Archived from the original on December 8, 2017. Retrieved December 6, 2016.
3. ^ Vásquez, Juan Gabriel (August 5, 2016). "In Colson Whitehead's Latest, the Underground Railroad Is More Than a Metaphor". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 19, 2018. Retrieved October 18, 2018.
4. ^ "The Underground Railroad (novel) Summary & Study Guide". Bookrags. Archived from the original on April 16, 2017. Retrieved April 16, 2017.
5. ^ Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad. London 2017, pp. 185.
6. ^ a b Martin Ebel (September 17, 2017). "Colson Whitehead: "Underground Railroad". Enzyklopädie der Dehumanisierung" (in German). Deutschlandfunk. Archived from the original on April 18, 2021. Retrieved March 16, 2021.
7. ^ Schulz, Kathryn (August 15, 2016). "The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on July 23, 2020. Retrieved March 2, 2020.
8. ^ Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad. London 2017, pp. 242-243.
9. ^ A white politician named Garrison says: "We abolished niggers.", Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad. London 2017, p. 197.
10. ^ Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad. London 2017, p. 250.
11. ^ "Book Marks reviews of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead". Book Marks. Retrieved June 8, 2022.
12. ^ a b Kakutani, Michiko (August 2, 2016). "Review: 'Underground Railroad' Lays Bare Horrors of Slavery and Its Toxic Legacy". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 28, 2019. Retrieved April 14, 2017.
13. ^ Lucas, Julian (September 29, 2016). "Review: New Black Worlds to Know". The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on April 13, 2021. Retrieved April 13, 2021.
14. ^ a b Preston, Alex (October 9, 2016). "The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead review – luminous, furious and wildly inventive". The Guardian. Archived from the original on February 9, 2019. Retrieved April 14, 2017.
15. ^ "The Underground Railroad". Book Marks. Archived from the original on December 5, 2016. Retrieved July 12, 2024.
16. ^ "The Underground Railroad". Book Marks. Retrieved July 12, 2024.
17. ^ "The Underground Railroad". Bookmarks. Retrieved January 14, 2023.
18. ^ "The Underground Railroad". Bibliosurf (in French). October 4, 2023. Retrieved October 4, 2023.
19. ^ "The 100 best books of the 21st century". The Guardian. September 21, 2019. Archived from the original on December 6, 2019. Retrieved September 22, 2019.
20. ^ "The 40 Best Novels of the 2010s". pastemagazine.com. October 14, 2019. Archived from the original on October 15, 2019. Retrieved November 9, 2019.
21. ^ a b "2017 Pulitzer Prize Winners and Nominees". The Pulitzer Prizes. 2017. Archived from the original on April 11, 2017. Retrieved April 10, 2017.
22. ^ Alter, Alexandra (November 17, 2016). "Colson Whitehead Wins National Book Award for 'The Underground Railroad'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on February 9, 2019. Retrieved January 24, 2017.
23. ^ "Winners | The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction". The Pulitzer Prizes. Archived from the original on May 7, 2019. Retrieved May 13, 2019.
24. ^ Page, Benedicte (May 3, 2017), "Whitehead shortlisted for Arthur C Clarke Award" Archived August 16, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, The Bookseller.
25. ^ French, Agatha (January 23, 2017). "American Library Assn.'s 2017 award winners include 'March: Book Three' by Rep. John Lewis". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on December 8, 2017. Retrieved January 24, 2017.
26. ^ Haigney, Sophie (July 27, 2017). "Man Booker Longlist Features Arundhati Roy and Colson Whitehead". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on December 12, 2018. Retrieved May 23, 2018.
27. ^ Loughrey, Clarisse (July 27, 2017). "The Man Booker prize 2017 longlist has been revealed". The Independent. Archived from the original on July 7, 2018. Retrieved May 23, 2018.
28. ^ "The Underground Railroad Reading Group Guide". Oprah.com. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
29. ^ Dean, Michelle (August 17, 2016). "Interview | Colson Whitehead: 'My agent said: Oprah. I said: Shut the front door'". The Guardian. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
30. ^ "The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century". The New York Times. July 8, 2024. Retrieved July 12, 2024.
31. ^ "Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature – International Astronomical Union (IAU) Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN) – Planetary Names: Crater, craters: Cora on Charon". Archived from the original on March 25, 2021. Retrieved August 14, 2020.
32. ^ Kimberly Roots, "The Underground Railroad Series, From Moonlight Director, Greenlit at Amazon" Archived March 29, 2017, at the Wayback Machine, TVLine, March 27, 2017.
33. ^ Haring, Bruce (February 25, 2021). "'The Underground Railroad' Amazon Prime Limited Series Sets Premiere Date". Deadline. Retrieved February 25, 2021.