The Underground Railroad
Categories: Literature & Fiction
Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel follows Cora, a young enslaved woman on a cotton plantation in Georgia, an outcast even among the others held there. When Caesar, a newcomer from Virginia, urges her to flee with him, she takes the chance. In Whitehead's telling, the Underground Railroad is a literal network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil, and Cora's flight carries her from state to state, each stop a different version of America and its cruelty.