As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey-hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven.īut the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor-engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Matters do not go as planned-Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood-where even greater pain awaits. A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.Ĭora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia.
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