The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
(Format used for this read: Audiobook)
I finished this book yesterday and I’m still sitting with many thoughts about it.
Here is the summary:
“Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.
In Colson Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.
As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman’s will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share.”
This book is historical fiction but so much of it was truth.
Vivid, disturbing, graphic, heart wrenching stories of human beings treated as property and their relentless fight to be free.
The main character, Cora, is filled with so many kinds of strength….some strengths no person should ever have to develop…surviving horrific, unimaginable cruelties against her.
While reading her story and her journey, I was reminded that while she is a fictional character, there were so so so many women and men just like her who were REAL PEOPLE.
This book reminded me about the reality of the history of our nation….
How black bodies—ESPECIALLY black Women’s bodies—have been mistreated and abused as no soul made in the image of God should ever experience.
It was hard to read at times remembering this but I think it so necessary to remind ourselves of painful truths.
But there was also joy among the sorrow in the pages as well as hope among the despair.
And the way the author wrote the Underground Railroad as an ACTUAL railroad with tracks and conductors was so creative and fascinating.
In a review by Esquire magazine they say this about the book:
“.A wonderful reminder of what great literature is supposed to do: open our eyes, challenge us, and leave us changed by the end.”
This book most definitely did that for me.
I definitely recommend it.
*I do want to warn my black friends (especially my black women friends) that this book may be a very emotionally taxing and triggering read*