The Underground Railroad

Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is a story to be gripped by, despite wanting to pull away. 

This sweeping tale follows a hardened young woman, Cora, on the run as a fugitive, dogged by slave catchers and systems that make reality feel like a living hell. Cora travels on a mythological underground railway, inspired by the real-life journeys taken by African slaves in America.

The first thing I noticed about this book was the horror. Descriptions of life on the Georgia plantation where Cora was born are grotesque. Some moments, including the description of a fugitive being burnt alive for the enjoyment of a white audience, forced me to place the book down just to catch my breath. However, as uncomfortable as this book made me feel, these stories serve an important purpose. That is, based on what I’ve learnt of slavery, the extent of its brutality and these painful details are more often brushed over, swapped instead for statistics and dates. The Underground Railroad strikes a powerful emotional cord, leaving a lasting impression that helps us better understand why history cannot be forgotten, and why its legacy still shapes communities today.  

The critical success of The Underground Railroad in the U.S. is, I believe, partially due to the way the book helps expose a nation’s history in all its graphic detail, unafraid to point a critical finger directly at the foundations. It is a violent foundation that evokes shame, a shame many would prefer to dilute rather than expose. And, despite progress, the U.S. still shies away from the marks left by slavery.

As Kathryn Schulz from The New Yorker put it, “Yet, more than a hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, you still will not find, anywhere in our country, a federal monument to the millions of people whom we, as a nation, kept in bondage. To put that omission in perspective, there are more than eighty national parks and monuments and countless other federal memorials commemorating the Civil War. That war lasted four years. Slavery lasted two and a half centuries.”

The Underground Railroad is a vehicle for truth-telling, a movement that rings with a universality across colonised nations. The systematic subjugation of First Nations people in Australia for example is a dark past left largely uninterrogated, a secret history whose grizzly details we still refuse to surface. And so, despite the darkness this book holds, it is an essential tale of resistance and hope.