Rick Riordan's Reviews > The Underground Railroad

I loved Colson Whitehead's take on the zombie apocalypse, Zone One, so I wanted to see what he did with this novel, a sort of alternate history of pre-Civil War America in which the Underground Railroad, a loosely organized system which tried to help enslaved Blacks reach free states, was a *literal* railroad underground.

The power of the book is that the realities of slavery are interwoven so well with believable fictions, that even a reader like me, who knows a fair amount of history, finds it difficult to distinguish where history stops and fantasy begins. Every child in school, upon first hearing the term 'Underground Railroad,' probably pictures exactly what Whitehead has written: an actual system of trains running through secret tunnels from the South to the North. I know I did when I was in second grade. To see that idea brought to life is fascinating and surprisingly credible. When our protagonist Cora first sees one of the tunnels and asked who built it, her station master replies, "Who builds anything in America?" Black laborers, of course. The answer seems so obvious that I found it easy to believe in this impossible railway, with trains traveling thousands of miles underground, delivering their fugitive passengers to new stations that may (or may not) be safer. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the blending of fantasy and history is one central message of the book: Which is more difficult to believe -- that the institution of slavery was built on so much horror and moral rot (true and well-documented) or that North Carolina banned the presence of all Blacks of its own accord before the Civil War in order to prevent uprisings? (totally untrue, but entirely plausible.) Fantasy is no stranger or more sinister than what actually happened in this country, an idea summed up nicely toward the end of the book, when the orator Landers talks about America as a shared delusion. It should not exist. And yet here we are.

As for the plot: our protagonist Cora was born on a Georgia plantation and abandoned as a child by her mother, who was the only person ever to successfully escape the Randall family. When a new arrival named Caesar confides in Cora that he is planning to escape, and wants to take Cora as a 'good luck charm,' Cora initially refuses. Then conditions on the plantation turn even more horrible, and she takes the chance of riding on the Underground Railroad.

We follow Cora's journeys from station to station, state to state, as she searches for freedom and also the fate of her vanished mother, all while being pursued by the vile but wonderfully three-dimensional slave catcher Ridgeway, Cora's personal nemesis. Each state offers new promises and new terrors -- some overt, some hidden -- which challenge Cora to determine when 'safe' is safe enough for a fugitive enslaved Black. Strangely, the book reminded me of Watership Down, in that it is a perilous journey to find a home, with many dangerous false sanctuaries along the way. It was not an easy book to read, but beautifully written, thought-provoking and compelling.