The central conceit of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is that there was literally a train running underground, shepherding slaves to different versions of freedom. This fantastical premise works; the actual history is so surreal, so violent, that straightforward realistic fiction bends under the pressure of the subject matter. As Whitehead’s heroine, Cora, moves from state to state along the railroad, she encounters abolitionists, minstrels, white-only societies, eugenics-based scientific “studies,” and the conditional tolerance that persists today. Cora’s story is not a plucky American myth of grit, struggle, and reward, but a grim odyssey towards a freedom that remains elusive. In the end, like Huck Finn, she stands on the edge of the frontier and must light out for the territory.

Ajarry bore five children… Two died miserably of fever. One boy cut his foot while playing on a rusted plow, which poisoned his blood. Her youngest never woke up after a boss hit him in the head with a wooden block. One after another. At least they were never sold off, an older woman told Ajarry. Which was true—back then Randall rarely sold the little ones. You knew where and how your children would die. The child that lived past the age of ten was Cora’s mother, Mabel.

Ajarry died in the cotton, the bolls bobbing around her like whitecaps on the brute ocean. The last of her village, keeled over in the rows from a knot in her brain, blood pouring from her nose and white froth covering her lips. As if it could have been anywhere else. Liberty was reserved for other people, for the citizens of the City of Pennsylvania bustling a thousand miles to the north. Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.

It was her grandmother talking that Sunday evening when Caesar approached Cora about the underground railroad, and she said no.

Three weeks later she said yes.

This time it was her mother talking.

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Links:

• Colson Whitehead on The Underground Railroad: ‘There’s no rule about what I can write’ – interview with Harsimran Gill, Scroll.in, February 10, 2019

  
  

• Colson Whitehead interview with Terri Gross, NPR Fresh Air, November 18, 2016

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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