Book Report: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I guess the worst thing I can say about The Underground Railroad is that it wasn’t transcendent; I’d rather commend it with faint criticism than damn it with faint praise. What it is is really good and really depressing. The central conceit of the book, which recently received the Pulitzer Prize, is that the Underground Railroad existed as, you know, a literal railroad that operates literally underground. That’s genius, and Whitehead probably deserved the Pulitzer for that innovation alone. He otherwise plays it straight without too many other elements of magical realism, as the waning days of the slavery-era south need no embellishment.

The book begins in Georgia, where the central character, Cora, runs away from the Randall plantation, which is depicted as suitably hellish. She and her fellow-traveler, Caesar, are transported to South Carolina via the titular means. South Carolina is depicted as a reform-minded place, where blacks are given some measure of freedom and opportunity for self-improvement. However, there’s a dark side to that “progress”, as whites conduct Tuskegee-style syphilis experiments and coerced sterilizations on slave and free alike.

Cora and Caesar decide that maybe further north would be their speed, and they end up in North Carolina. The Tarheel State has taken a different tack on the slavery issue, as they’ve chosen to eliminate their black population through a targeted lynching program, stringing up bodies for miles through the trees in a so-called Trail of Freedom. North Carolina’s slaveholding farmers have decided that importing poor white immigrants is less trouble and not much more expensive than managing a growing black population, so they intend to either kill or drive off those blacks who are currently about. Cora goes into hiding in the attic of a former conductor of the defunct local spur of the Railroad, but is found out when she’s sold out by the house’s Irish servant. The cowardly couple who had hid her are lynched, and Cora is taken away by the Anton Chigurh-like Ridgeway, a runaway slave catcher who intends to return her to Randall.

Ridgeway conveniently has to make a long detour through Tennessee and Missouri to pick up some other “strays”, which gives Cora an opportunity to be rescued by a couple of gun-toting free blacks and taken to a Utopian black-owned communal farm in free Indiana. No one can have nice things in this world, though, so Ridgeway and a posse massacre the farm, killing Cora’s rescuer in the process. The book ends with Cora revealing the opening to an abandoned Railroad station to Ridgeway, but then killing him by grabbing him and pulling them both in a heap down the platform steps, bashing in his head in the process. A severely injured Cora takes up the hand-powered car and seesaws her way through the darkness into an unknown future.

Whitehead does a tremendous job of taking what seems like a well-worn period in American history and creating an even bleaker, more gruesome tale than I would have imagined possible. Pretty much every white person that Cora encounters is either fully evil, entirely deluded in their motivations, or completely incompetent (frequently two of those or more), which I can’t say is at all unrealistic. The only hope that exists in that world – and perhaps in the current one – is in the striving for something better a little further down the road.