Mixed Media Author Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead’s highly ambitious 2016 novel The Underground Railroad reimagines the figurative slave escape network of the pre-Civil War era as a real railroad, with a complicated system of underground tracks and tunnels that snake into the furthest reaches of the Deep South. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book follows Cora, a fifteen-year-old slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, who hears about the railroad when Caesar, a newly arrived slave from Virginia, convinces her to run on the rails. Their escape is fraught; Cora ends up killing a young white boy who attempts to capture her. But the pair nonetheless manage to find the clandestine station and flee into South Carolina.
They settle into a seemingly progressive small town, with its social atmosphere of whites and free blacks living side by side. But Cora and Caesar soon learn that things are not as they seem. Surgeons conspire to sterilize black women as a strain of syphilis goes studied but untreated among black men — all while the protagonists are pursued by a brutal slave catcher. So Cora escapes to North Carolina, where amidst a campaign to lynch all of the state’s black residents, she lives confined and prone in a tiny attic hideaway for months.
While some may call this novel “alt-history,” what Whitehead is really after is moving the reader through each of our country’s recurring iterations of white supremacist politics and policies, each with the same end — control over the black body. Whitehead comes to the Lensic Performing Arts Center (211 W. San Francisco St.) at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 9. He joins poet and literary scholar Kevin Young in conversation, as part of the Lannan Foundation’s Conversations & Readings series. At press time, this event is sold out; check ticket availability with the box office.