THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY
Newly released in India, Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, works well as a literary thriller of sorts, and is set in pre-Civil War America. With all the excitement of a physical chase, it’s a cat-and-mouse game between the slave and the slave-catcher, with the latter closing in on his quarry all the time.
At the centre of the story is Cora, an African slave from a cotton plantation in Georgia. Cora, we learn, is ‘an outcaste even among her fellow Africans’ because her mother, Mabel, managed to escape slavery, leaving her daughter and her fellow slaves to their fate. Cora is welcomed to womanhood by four rapists who drag her behind the smokehouse to finish their job. Nobody intervenes. ‘The Hob women sewed her up,’ the narrator informs us clinically.
When Caesar, a young slave from Virginia, decides to include Cora in his plans to escape slavery using the underground railroad, it does not take her long to throw in her lot with him—even though both of them are aware that being caught would mean a virtual death sentence. Their journey becomes even more perilous later in the story, after Cora is forced to kill a ‘white boy’ in order to escape his clutches.
The underground railroad is not simply a metaphor; it’s an actual track with a box car led by a steam engine, which is occasionally used to harbour refugees and convey them to freedom. At one of the stations there is even a cave-in, ‘a ruse to camouflage the operation below’. Close on Cora and Caesar’s heels is Ridgeway, a most brutal slave-catcher who especially despises Cora because her mother managed to escape him. Help comes from unexpected quarters in unexpected ways— from Sam, Martin and Ethel Fletcher—amateur rescuers, sympathisers and raw abolitionists who eventually have to buckle before the powerful evil forces.
As a character says, ‘And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all…. This nation shouldn’t exist... for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty.’
Whitehead’s account of the horror of slavery is unsparing. He writes about it unflinchingly. And yet, one senses a distance between the writer and his work. The narrative lacks the psychological depth that would have hooked readers who demand more.