The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead delivers page after page of devastation in this raw and piercingly graphic story.

Cora is a young, terrified slave desperate to escape the bloody, brutal machine of slavery in the South. She discovers the underground railroad where brave people risk all to help slaves escape to safe states. However, here she discovers a different kind of control, a different set of assumptions — less violent but still reeking of the privations of parity.

If your knowledge of slavery in America comes from lifeless history books, as does mine, you will have the breath knocked out of you with this depiction of the gears of human bondage. Mr. Whitehead has fixed his pages with images so vivid, you will feel the manacles gauge into your own flesh and your heart will plunge when the cruelest slave-owner steps through the door.

Whitehead has a distinct voice and a forceful writing style. There is nothing elliptical about his sentences. He whips with his words, and you will feel wounded by them. I think this is his aim. Although Mr. Colson seems to have had all of the advantages of wealth and a superb education, he taps into the depravity of the ownership of humans by other humans as though he had been right there. That’s the power of his writing. It makes you feel. The pain migrates away from the journalistic toward the experienced, where it is felt and is not dismissed. Is not shelved.

As a reader you will come away with a new sense of horror and disbelief that this happened on our soil. This book made me considered, all over again, the full measure of this poisonous past. For example, we know how long it takes certain toxic substances to decay. Radium-226 has a half-life of 1600 years. What is the half-life of slavery upon a culture, I wonder?

The economics of slavery — the cotton business — is a leitmotif throughout. It underscored (for me) the grave danger of a culture that worships big industry — industry and the making of money and its ruinous potential to diminish humanity.

I found The Underground Railroad very hard to read and more than once turned my head and my heart away from the wickedness inflicted on the enslaved. I found I had to catch my breath. This is a powerful book.