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Free thinking
Jul. 13th, 2023 08:22 pmBook Review: The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
I had been looking for something lighter to read, but in the end I settled on this; it was on the shelf and ready to read. Just before the pandemic I saw Harriet; had I not seen that film, I probably wouldn't have been all that interested in this book. For many reasons, the subject of slavery has become much more prominent in recent years; we are not responsible for the actions of our ancestors, but we are responsible for living with the consequences.
The imagined story of Cora, a young girl born into slavery and orphaned by a runaway mother, is told carefully. After witnessing and suffering another episode of brutality, Cora decides to join fellow slave Caesar in an escape attempt. Many challenges and obstacles lie in their path, but they also find the help of a network of people running, literally, an underground railroad. Although frequently grim, Whitehead keeps the action moving so that the reader does not need to dwell too much on the unconscionable. Ironically, I found the idea of a physical railroad less plausible: for one thing, where does all the smoke go if it is to be kept secret? But it is a device for moving from one part of the country to another. There is a paradox in the way slave owners completely devalued their slaves, until they sought freedom, at which point no price was too high to rein them in; countering the railroad is the business of slave-catching. There is much collateral damage along the way, on both sides, and equivocation about the use of violence in countering violence. Does Cora find freedom, or is she doomed to be forever running? Overall, then, it's thought-provoking, which is no bad thing.
I had been looking for something lighter to read, but in the end I settled on this; it was on the shelf and ready to read. Just before the pandemic I saw Harriet; had I not seen that film, I probably wouldn't have been all that interested in this book. For many reasons, the subject of slavery has become much more prominent in recent years; we are not responsible for the actions of our ancestors, but we are responsible for living with the consequences.
The imagined story of Cora, a young girl born into slavery and orphaned by a runaway mother, is told carefully. After witnessing and suffering another episode of brutality, Cora decides to join fellow slave Caesar in an escape attempt. Many challenges and obstacles lie in their path, but they also find the help of a network of people running, literally, an underground railroad. Although frequently grim, Whitehead keeps the action moving so that the reader does not need to dwell too much on the unconscionable. Ironically, I found the idea of a physical railroad less plausible: for one thing, where does all the smoke go if it is to be kept secret? But it is a device for moving from one part of the country to another. There is a paradox in the way slave owners completely devalued their slaves, until they sought freedom, at which point no price was too high to rein them in; countering the railroad is the business of slave-catching. There is much collateral damage along the way, on both sides, and equivocation about the use of violence in countering violence. Does Cora find freedom, or is she doomed to be forever running? Overall, then, it's thought-provoking, which is no bad thing.