Book Review: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Book Review

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

 

It can’t be easy to write a book that’s describing very real atrocities from the past, and yet make it readable and engaging. The Underground Railroad combines real facts and visceral conditions into composite situations, but doesn’t use composite characters. One situation leads to the next in this book, and somewhere along the way you realize that you are traveling the rails of history, which for Americans of African descent has meant one struggle after the next. And the journey isn’t over, either, as by book’s end the symbolism of the railroad makes clear.

The story starts appropriately in Africa, with the main character’s grandmother. But we’re soon joined at the hip with Cora, an abandoned child slave on the Randall plantation in Georgia. The stress and pain of everyday life is vividly portrayed, which makes the appearance of an actual railroad of escape a bit of a lurching turn. But it’s a (literal and literary) vehicle to reach several stops on the black experience in America, with other locales and eras combined into representative places. The Tuskegee experiments, the Tulsa massacre, and other historical outrages come to life as Cora moves among the ‘states’ of the Black experience (the author using US states as the locales for these episodes). While using elements of fantasy and poetic license runs the risk of trivializing the suffering and separating us (the reader) from the hard facts, somehow Whitehead keeps it all feeling real, and personal.

I enjoyed the writing very much, with short dialogue that sounded authentic to my ear. It was easy to picture each scene from its description. The occasional shifting of perspective, or hard-turn of the topic from sentence to sentence were occasional speedbumps, in my humble opinion. But on the other hand, my book group (we just met about the book) all uniformly said the writing was excellent.

This is the first book I’ve read by this author, and I look forward to more. The Underground Railroad has a lot to say, and the literary references are rich (I probably missed half of them). I think it would be a great read for anyone who wants to understand the African-American experience. For a college-age reader, starting here, then elsewhere reading the dry facts of history, could be a meaningful way to study.

Speaking of history, I can’t close this without taking the opportunity to promote “White Over Black” by Winthrop D. Jordan. The late Jordan, of course, is my father; a former professor of US History at UC Berkeley, then later Ole Miss. “White Over Black” is his seminal 1968 National Book Award-winning history of Anglo-American views of Africans over the last half a millennium. (The title caused a bit of the stir at the time of publication, and maybe still does—it’s descriptive of white oppression, not an advocacy of it.)  Anyone who’s interested in the detailed facts on the Atlantic slave trade and colonial slavery should have a read. 


Review of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Published 2016 by Doubleday

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