Module 6: Multicultural: The Underground Railroad

Photo taken by me.

Whitehead, C. (2016). The underground railroad. New York: Doubleday. 978-0-385-54236-4. 

Summary:

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in deep south Georgia. That Randall Plantation is all she’s ever known. But when her master dies and his horribly racist and violent younger brother takes control, Cora agrees to accompany Cesar, a fellow slave who grew up in Virginia before being bought by the Randalls, in escaping slavery. They successfully navigate through the swamps and make it to the first depot of the literal underground railroad, but not without hardship: Cora dealt a fatal blow to a 12 year old who came upon them, and she is now wanted for murder. In addition, Ridgeway, the slave catcher infamous for his brutality, is on their trail.

Cora and Cesar’s first layover is in South Carolina, where things seem so much better. The underground railroad conductor has given them false papers, so that they can live amongst the other people of color in the community: in boarding houses, working in different capacities, “owned” by the United States government. They are given an education, jobs with wages, health care, and freedom to relax at the end of the day. But, there is underhandedness afoot: the “birth control” and “blood diseases” are sterilization and a study on the advancement of communicable diseases. Cora barely escapes a fire that is set to the railroad station’s cover-house and is a hitchhiker picked up by a maintenance engine who must drop her at a disused station in North Carolina.

In North Carolina, Cora is secreted away in a hidden cache above an attic. The conductor at the discontinued station, Martin, is very afraid because North Carolina has recently outlawed African-Americans; if identified as sympathizer, he could be strung up in the gallows in the town park that his front porch faces. Cora hides in North Carolina all summer until she is discovered  during a raid led by Ridgeway, who takes her away in chains.

Ridgeway and his cronies Homer and Boseman and Cora are intercepted in Tennessee by a posse of underground railroad workers: Royal, Red, and Justin. Red kills Boseman and help Cora escape to Indiana, where Cora lives on Valentine’s farm, a safe haven for 100+ African-Americans who live together commune-like. During her time at Valentine’s, Cora and Royal grow close, and Royal shows Cora an abandoned railroad station. Unlike the other stations, it is small, and only fits a hand-pump cart instead of locomotive. But safety eludes Cora again: Valentine’s farm is raided, and Cora is again captured by Ridgeway and Homer. They force her to show her the station, and as they descend the stairs, Cora wraps her chains around Ridgeway’s neck and they fall, causing a compound fracture in Ridgeway’s leg and the rest of his mental faculties to evaporate. Cora is able to escape on the hand-pump cart until she comes to the entrance of the tunnel. There, she finds three wagons headed for St. Louis and the mighty West. She joins the final wagon’s driver, an older African-American man.

As a Genre Example:

The Underground Railroad is multicultural literature because it is fiction about a minority culture, African-American, by an African-American man. As a book centered around a runaway slave, the reader is subjected to the horrors slave and free African-Americans lived through during the 19^th century.

Evaluation:

I enjoyed the first half of The Underground Railroad more so than the second half; I give it three out of five stars. Whitehead’s diction and story-weaving are incredible, but there are two main disruptors that hurt my enjoyment of it. First was the fact that there are some “asides” of, on average, five pages long that introduce a character that either has nothing to do with the story --such as the medical student who is a grave snatcher at night to help pay his tuition-- or gives unnecessary background about a minor character, such as Ridgeway’s childhood. The second aspect of the book that I didn’t like is how it jumps around chronologically. This is particularly noticeable in the Indiana and North “chapters” when the tense of the story changes to past. What is the significance of this? I’m sure there is one that English majors will be writing papers on in the decades to come, but for me (and I was an English major in undergrad), it was a distraction from the story. I was invested in Cora, and I wanted to hear about it from her point of view, not from the point of view of “those who survived” and how they told the tale to their grandchildren. A final point that detracted from my enjoyment was the Whitehead didn’t include a historical or author’s note at the end that tells what is true and what is fiction. Obviously that the Underground Railroad was an actual railroad is fiction, but what about the “help” and sterilization programs in South Carolina? It sounds a lot like what happened at Tuskegee, but was it just inspired by that or was it actually like that? Were there safe-haven communities for African-Americans in Indiana? I know that Zora Neale Hurston based the town in Their Eyes Were Watching God on the town she grew up in in Florida, which happened to be an all African-American community, but were there others like that? Especially back in the 18-teens?

I liked Cora a lot. She was extremely human: she had her faults and her good qualities. She was disturbed by the accidental deathblow she dealt, but worked through that and proved her worth as a dynamic character.

The Underground Railroad will not be the first book I recommend to patrons, but I wouldn’t not recommend it. If they are looking for something that fits this story (i.e. multicultural, historical fiction, strong African-American protagonist who escapes slavery), then I would recommend it to them.

Reader's Advisory:

Fans of historical fiction and literary fiction would enjoy The Underground Railroad. It won the National Book Award in 2016, so readers who like to keep up-to-date with award winning literature will read it.