Whitehead sketches his characters well – we get to know Cora, her mother Mabel, the only slave to have escaped the plantation and Ridgeway’s net, and her grandmother Ajarry who was kidnapped from Africa and sold into slavery. This was a good book, but it got more documentary-like as it progressed. Her flight to freedom has many ups and downs, when she believes she is safe, but finds later that she is not. As Cora makes her way through South Carolina and North Carolina, she has slave-catcher Ridgeway nipping at her heels. Extreme cruelty, debasement, humiliation, sexual exploitation is the norm, not the exception. Through her eyes, we get to see the horrors of slavery. This is Cora’s story, and her journey to freedom. When Caesar, a new slave, broaches the topic of escape, Cora grabs her chance and the two of them make their way up north via the railroad. Cora’s cruel master dies and his even crueler brother takes over, which makes living conditions worse. Here we follow Cora, who is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. This book imagines the underground railroad, to be an actual railroad, instead of what it actually was – a network of secret escape routes for slaves to escape to the north or to Canada.
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