The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
A review.
By Razaq Khazi-Syed
This is the first Colson Whitehead book I have read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Ajarry is kidnapped from an African village and sold into slavery in the American South. She ends up on a hellish cotton plantation in Georgia called the Randall Plantation. This is the story of how her daughter Mabel, and later her granddaughter Cora, the main character in the book, attempt to throw off the shackles of slavery. It is a story of the culmination of a line of indomitable, resilient, and unbreakable women.
In Colson Whitehead’s interpretation, the Underground Railroad is an actual, physical, breathing, and huffing and puffing thing, with its tunnels and platforms and stations, and a reach deep into the slave south to assist the very small number of slaves who are able to break free from their bondage.
We meet Cora on the Randall plantation which, at this point, has been split into two, a north portion and a south portion, each run by a Randall brother. Cora is on the north plantation, and very early on we see glimpses of her character. During a slave celebration on the north plantation, there is a minor mishap (a slave boy bumps one of the Randall brothers, causing him to spill a single drop of wine on his spotless white shirt). It is as though the little boy has spilt blood itself, and Terrance Randall (the gratuitously cruel one of the brothers) starts to beat the boy mercilessly with his cane. Though Cora knows that it is ill-advised and though she knows that there will be consequences for her, she jumps in between the two to shield the boy from the blows. She is beaten mercilessly by Terrance, and she is whipped with the cat-o’-nine-tails (three mornings in a row by the white overseer) for daring to show the slightest bit of insubordination. The entire slave population of the plantation is made to watch this flaying as a warning.
Things take a turn for the worse on the plantation, and the cruel Randall brother assumes ownership and operation of the entire plantation when his brother dies. This does not bode well for the slaves.
The book has an interesting structure. There is the arc of Cora’s story… you might say the various stages of her desperate dash for freedom, punctuated by short chapters introducing the key characters in the book, bookended by Ajarry at the beginning and Mabel (Ajarry’s daughter and Cora’s mother) at the very end.
Ajarry never leaves the Randall plantation once she is brought there, Mabel miraculously escapes the plantation abandoning a young Cora, and despite the mortal dangers of running away, Cora decides that her future lay in escaping to the North. At this point one might imagine that Cora has an unforgiving, but justifiable view of a mother that abandoned her to face the scourge of slavery all on her own as a stray orphan.
Unlike some authors, Colson Whitehead does not sugarcoat the inter-personal relationships amongst the slaves — while the slaves are in no position to protest or do anything to their masters for their ill treatment, some among them are only too glad to prey on the weak. Now think about Cora, a young orphan, left to fend for herself in such circumstances. As they say, what does not kill you makes you stronger, and Cora grows up to be a strong-willed young woman, who does not suffer fools, and who knows how to survive the plantation. In a testament to the common decency instilled in her by her grandmother and mother, Cora has not lost her humanity — she has not allowed the brutalizing effects and the daily degradations by the slave masters and the overseers (white and black) to dehumanize her. She does the right thing even if it means a literal flaying of her back.
Cora teams up with Caesar, another slave on Randall, and they run away to rendezvous with the station agent of the Underground Railroad station in Georgia. Caesar has connected with the station agent during his occasional trips to town on plantation business. Cora and Caesar don’t have as much of a head start as they think they do, but they manage to evade the chase and manage to inch their way north and cross the border into South Carolina.
Cora is the hero of the book, and she must contend a formidable enemy. Ridgeway is a slave catcher/bounty hunter who is especially driven to nab Cora. He is still smarting that Cora’s mother ran away from Randall and that he never managed to track her down. He is determined to not let that happen with Cora.
As Cora makes her way North, she finds that each leg of the journey is fraught with unexpected dangers. Things are not always what they seem. The stations are run by agents, most of them very sympathetic to the plight of the slaves, but they must operate with utmost care. Suffice to say that this massive Underground Railroad delivers only a trickle of passengers to the safety of the north.
Colson Whitehead doesn’t explain exactly how or when or who built the railroad. The general response to Cora’s questions about the construction of the railroad generally tends to be: you know who builds everything in America, implying that it is African slaves who built this marvelous underground miracle.
Whitehead uses very spare prose and does not let the words get in the way of the story. There is never any sentimentality for Cora’s horrific plight, and the focus is only on the stoic pragmatism that Cora exhibits as she deals with her evolving circumstances.
Cora goes from South Carolina (Cora and Caesar almost naively believe that could make a life there) to North Carolina (she spends practically the whole time in an attic because by this point North Carolina has promulgated laws that prohibit the entry of slaves into North Carolina). From her attic hideout, she discovers how every Friday night the townspeople — men, women and children gather for an evening of music and entertainment, the final piece of the night’s macabre entertainment usually being a slave’s lynching. She is almost lynched during one of those Friday night festivities after her presence is discovered by the authorities. In the nick of time, Ridgeway appears on the scene and kidnaps her from her captors because she is wanted as a runaway slave in Georgia.
She is rescued from Ridgeway and taken to a thriving free-black farm in Indiana. She is enthralled and also unsettled by this farm. Black people are living and working on this farm, no different than what their ex-slave masters or other whites would be doing in Indiana or anywhere else in America. There is growing sentiment against blacks (free or enslaved or runaway slaves) in Indiana and there is an undercurrent of dread on the farm, and things come to a climactic head on the farm soon, involving none other than the slave catcher Ridgeway, still hot on Cora’s trail, and various other local pro-slavery forces.
Though this is not based on a real story, Colson Whitehead paints a compelling and disturbing picture of slavery, without overlooking the pernicious traits that sometimes trickled even into the very victims of this vile practice. It is worth reflecting upon the merciless persecution of a whole class of human beings for no reason other than their skin color, to rob them of their essence — their life, their liberty, and their happiness. In this day and age, many of us feel far removed from this long dark period of American history which has left an almost permanent stain on the country’s character, but a sizable segment of the population still sees the effects of slavery, Jim crow and its aftermath in their everyday lives today and that is unconscionable. As a society, we can and must do better.
