Jim Fonseca's Reviews > The Underground Railroad

A good read and Pulitzer Prize winner, with so many reviews already, I’ll make this brief.

The main character is a young woman slave who hates her missing mother for having escaped when she was a child. A young man plans to escape from the Georgia plantation and invites her to go with him, partly because he thinks she’s “good luck” because of her mother’s escape. The main story becomes one of a cat and mouse game with a brutal slave hunter on their tail. There is a “real” underground railroad running in tunnels.



While on the run and at times masquerading as a freewoman, she has a variety of experiences designed to give us a view into slave life at the time (say the early 1800’s). After her early life picking cotton and the escape, she works with forged papers as a maid to white folks in Charleston; as an African at a “living exhibit” at a good-intentioned museum; and she hides in an attic for months. As a female slave she has it worse than a man because she is constantly vulnerable to sexual abuse from whites and blacks as she makes her way from Georgia to both Carolinas, Tennessee and eventually Indiana.

The story portrays the catalog of abuses that blacks were vulnerable to – all the daily abuses and even the killings of slaves. But it’s not just the story of brutal work and evil slave masters, but the hunting down of freed slaves; the lies of masters who promised freedom and then reneged; the duplicity of white doctors performing eugenic experiments on unknowing blacks; the constant worry about broken families – and not just parents worrying about the fate of children stolen from them, but children worrying about the whereabouts and fate of parents now getting elderly. There is even an attack by whites on a free black settlement in the North.

I think this is a great addition to the collection of books about American slavery, especially for young people, who have not read, and probably never will read, old classics such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.