308 pages
Published 2016
Read from March 4 to March 6
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
At one point, early in Cora’s escape from enslavement, an underground station agent tells her: “Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America.” Cora follows his advice, but “There was only darkness, mile after mile.” That’s a concise thesis statement for this novel as a whole.
Much of The Underground Railroad’s marketing emphasizes how Whitehead literalized its namesake network. Physical trains chuff through physical tunnels, connecting vignettes to illustrate the Black experience in America. Enslavement, torture, medical exploitation and experimentation, sterilization, eugenic schemes, cadaver theft, lynching, genocide, rape, evangelism — all of them central to the American project, all of them linked by white Americans’ apostolic frenzy to dehumanize and subjugate Black folks. Stolen land worked by stolen bodies: the sickness and rot at the heart of everything this country has ever been.
Railroad’s vignettes are powerful, appalling, gripping, linked by the conceit its literal underground tunnels, at first a streamlining artifice of storytelling and metaphor that reaches its full brilliance at the end of the book. Regardless of marketing, Railroad is as magnificent, and as devastating, as you’d expect.
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