The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Summary
Cora is enslaved on a Georgia cotton plantation, an outcast among the other enslaved people because her mother ran and left her. When Caesar, newly arrived from Virginia, tells her he has found a way out, she goes.
Whitehead's central move is to make the Underground Railroad literal. There are tunnels under the southern states, actual rails, engineers and station masters, and Cora travels north by train. Each state she surfaces in is a different America: South Carolina appears benevolent and is conducting medical experiments; North Carolina has abolished Black existence entirely and hangs the evidence along a road; Indiana offers a free Black settlement that white neighbours will not tolerate.
Behind her the whole way is Ridgeway, a slave catcher who failed to find her mother and has made Cora a personal matter.
The South Carolina section is the sharpest thing in the book. Cora is given a job, a dormitory and a wage, and part of the job is standing in a museum diorama performing Life on the Slave Ship for white visitors while doctors upstairs decide what to do about Black birth rates. Everyone is polite. Nothing is safe.
The device turns the novel into something between history and fable, letting Whitehead compress centuries of American racial violence into a single journey north. The prose is cool and unhurried, which makes the violence land harder, and short chapters give the minor characters their own biographies.
It is around three hundred pages and reads at speed. Best for readers who want historical fiction that refuses to stay inside history, and who can take a book with no reassurance in it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Underground Railroad won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in a citation praising 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.
It had already taken the National Book Award in 2016, and it went on to collect the Carnegie Medal, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which is given for science fiction, as well as reaching the Booker longlist. Very few novels have been honoured by both a literary establishment and a science fiction jury.
Whitehead, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016, took the Pulitzer again three years later for The Nickel Boys. Barry Jenkins adapted this novel as a ten part television series in 2021.