Book Review of the Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad has received a number of awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. Excellent writing, strong concept. The idea of the underground railroad, as an actual railroad, is so smart and interesting.
The power of the book is that the realities of slavery are interwoven so well with believable fictions, that who knows a fair amount of history, finds it difficult to distinguish where history stops and fantasy begins. The Underground Railroad supposedly symbolised a journey to freedom, from the slave south to the free north.
When our protagonist Cora first sees one of the tunnels and asked who built it, her station master replies, “Who builds anything in America?” Black laborers, of course. The answer seems so obvious that I found it easy to believe in this impossible railway, with trains traveling thousands of miles underground, delivering their fugitive passengers to new stations that may (or may not) be safer. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the blending of fantasy and history is one central message of the book: Which is more difficult to believe — that the institution of slavery was built on so much horror and moral rot (true and well-documented) or that North Carolina banned the presence of all Blacks of its own accord before the Civil War in order to prevent uprisings? (totally untrue, but entirely plausible.) Fantasy is no stranger or more sinister than what actually happened in that country, an idea summed up nicely toward the end of the book, when the orator Landers talks about America as a shared delusion. It should not exist. And yet here we are.
As for the plot: our protagonist Cora was born on a Georgia plantation and abandoned as a child by her mother, who was the only person ever to successfully escape the Randall family. When a new arrival named Caesar confides in Cora that he is planning to escape, and wants to take Cora as a ‘good luck charm,’ Cora initially refuses. Then conditions on the plantation turn even more horrible, and she takes the chance of riding on the Underground Railroad.
We follow Cora’s journeys from station to station, state to state, as she searches for freedom and also the fate of her vanished mother, all while being pursued by the vile but wonderfully three-dimensional slave catcher Ridgeway, Cora’s personal nemesis. Each state offers new promises and new terrors — some overt, some hidden — which challenge Cora to determine when ‘safe’ is safe enough for a fugitive enslaved Black. Strangely, the book reminded me of Watership Down, in that it is a perilous journey to find a home, with many dangerous false sanctuaries along the way. It was not an easy book to read, but beautifully written, thought-provoking and compelling.
