I had read only one Colson Whitehead book before, his take on zombies and societal trauma, Zone One. I liked that book quite a lot, without ever feeling really emotionally affected by it. In contrast, The Underground Railroad provoked strong emotion, as it should. Every time someone asked me what I was reading, I'd say it was very good, but very difficult to read.
Which, of course, it should be. This is a book about slavery, using the device of a literal railroad and a slightly (but only very slightly) fantastical journey to send the protagonist through different manifestations of racism in the United States, both during, concurrent with, and after, slavery. Much of it was gut-wrenching because it allowed no place to hide from the evils of slavery, and with a double whammy of seeing how much of the hatred, racism and pain has ripples that you can still so clearly see, although Whitehead does not make those connections overt. It was hard to escape the fact that they were there.
The novel starts on a plantation, in a location that disposes handily of the fiction that there were "good" slaveholders, and because they were not as brutal, life could be pretty okay there. No, no fucking way. Whitehead does not flinch from the violences slavery inflicts even when it's the "softer" side that some people like to imagine was the truth. This book isn't exploitative of the pain, but it is also not shy about showing it in ways that make it impossible to find bullshit excuses.
Cora lives on this plantation, relegated to a lower-status cabin, defending a small patch of land that she had planted, and her mother before her. Her mother escaped years ago, and Cora has never let go of the bitterness that she could go and leave her daughter to whatever horrors might come. Despite the owner of the plantation being the sort who'd like to avoid looking at or dealing with the violence upon which his wealth is predicated, it is still there. And when he dies and his harsher brother takes over, Cora takes a chance in escaping with another slave, Caesar, to the Underground Railroad, which, as has been said, is a real underground train system
Cora and Caesar end up first in South Carolina, then later Cora goes on to North Carolina (I think I have the order there right), and in each place, racism is not less prevalent, but takes different forms. We see the people surrounding them, vitriol and condescension, as well as those who work on the Railroad, risking lives willingly or reluctantly, to be conductors. Through all of this, there is a slave catcher on their trail, and he's known for being implacable - no matter how long a former slave has been gone, how safe they think themselves to be, they are not, and could come under his power at any time.
It was these parts in particular, that had the keenest resonance with today - different context, of course, but the way in which racism can lash out unexpectedly, the sense of danger and watchfulness, the ways in which a Black person can never count on being entirely free of it, were chilling.
I want to talk in more detail about the stops on Cora's journey, but I also don't want to spoil those bits for people who read this. The last section is heartbreaking, much as everything else, and the ending left me, at least, with questions and things to think about. This was a powerful book, encapsulating moments and kinds of racial prejudice in ways that are not precisely historical, but bring forward truths without needing them to be exactly realistic. That is, they feel real, but the settings are often a more impressionistic view of something in particular than they are a representation of a time and place. This holds an interesting ground between reality and larger themes, and the railroad holds that together in a way that works.
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