The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead: A Review

“If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.” – Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

Most of us know the history of the underground railroad, but not as Colson Whitehead has reimagined it. The novel opens on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Cora is a third-generation slave; her grandmother is dead and her mother ran off years ago, meaning that Cora has grown up a ‘stray’ – a child with no family around her – and has had to learn to protect her own interests. Whitehead’s rendering of the plantation where Cora lives is bleak and heartbreaking. She is without prospects or hope until Caesar, another slave, talks her into running north with him.

What follows is an escape that leads through South Carolina, North Carolina and eventually into Tennessee and Indiana. There are many things that make the novel unique. Whitehead has chosen to make the underground railroad an actual set of tunnels and tracks running beneath the South where free blacks and sympathetic whites risk their lives to help enslaved people escape to freedom. This fantastic element in the novel means that the reader’s focus is more on the individual states where Cora surfaces, rather than on the journeys between states. In Colson Whitehead’s America, each state is unique in trying to “deal” with its black population – South Carolina invests in what it calls “negro uplift” to try to integrate black Americans into white society; North Carolina introduces race laws to drive black people from the state and replace them with cheap white labor from Europe. In Indiana, black people have gained a degree of freedom and prosperity but their security is always threatened by the shadow of racism. While the railroad that ferries Cora away from the plantation is the stuff of imagination, many of the other seemingly fantastical elements Whitehead introduces are not: there were attempts by health agencies in the US to sterilize members of the black community (and others) in order to reduce the numbers of black children being born; black men were unknowingly a part of studies on the impact of syphilis but led to believe they were receiving free health care from the US government. Black people were regularly lynched by mobs who went largely unpunished for their murders. Whitehead meddles with history in terms of locations and time frames so that each state Cora flees to represents an amalgam of ways in which white America tried to use, manipulate and sometimes terrorize the black population.

Given its heavy subject matter, it may be surprising to learn how readable this novel is. It is fast-paced and the characters are sympathetic and their sacrifices are many. Whitehead reveals how black and white Americans came together in unexpected ways to reinforce or fight against the systems of oppression that America was built on. While it covers much of the history dealt with in other novels, like Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes, Whitehead’s feels like a commentary on the racial undercurrents of contemporary American society. The book poses compelling questions about the country’s past and its present; according to one of Whitehead’s characters, America is a delusion but, “sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.” Despite the suffering and injustice the novel reveals, there is always hope. The number of people who help Cora along her journey at significant risk to themselves reinforces that the system can be beaten, and may someday finally be broken.

If fantasy isn’t your genre, I wouldn’t let it deter you from The Underground Railroad. It reads far more like historical fiction and the railroad itself is a negligible part of the plot, despite its significance as a metaphor. Cora is a character to root for and Whitehead’s writing is powerful and page-turning. If you read this novel, I’d love to hear what you think. Until next time, happy reading!