colson whitehead the underground railroad sparknotes

Within these pages, you’ll embark on a re-imagined historical truth that could only be a creation of Colson Whitehead. With a bounty on her head and dreams of education and freedom beckoning her forward, she will stop through a slew of Southern states-all with their own systems of Southern justice and oppression-and find herself on Whitehead’s re-envisaged Underground Railroad.

But the untold horrors that she will face ahead of her on this trek will sometimes rival those that she left behind. In the midst of it all, Cora, a stray who’s gained a bit of a scarlet letter because her mother fled the plantation and left her behind years back, starts her long journey to freedom one quiet night with nothing but a sack of unripe turnips, two companions and the North Star as their guide. Life on the plantation is as rough for women-who are used as breeders for more slaves, hence more money, and are constantly at the mercy of male appetites, both from those in the ivory tower and those in the fields-as it is for the laboring men. Slaves are beaten and raped for amusement, even on display for the entertainment of guests sipping lemonade attempts at fleeing from bondage or bucking the system are (often arbitrarily) met with public displays of execution, from being strung up and castrated to a good ole-fashioned tarring and feathering. This plantation is an amalgamation of every horror and tragedy you’ve ever heard of about slavery. The Underground Railroad starts on the Randall plantation in Georgia around 1812.

I love everything that Colson Whitehead is about (and I hope to read Zone One soon), but this particular foray into his work turned out to be a little less than a love affair for me. I was really looking forward to this read! I had an interesting relationship with The Intuitionist, having read it in college and not quite grasped it then came back to it later and enjoyed it more. “All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.”

Colson whitehead the underground railroad sparknotes