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The Underground Railroad
5/5. Cora escapes enslavement and flees to the underground railroad. Which is an actual railroad, actually underground. That takes her on a strange, terrifying trip through several faces of American racism as it deposits her in different eras and different not-quite-true-to-history moments.
This is extraordinary. And brutal. And mesmerizing. And so complex and rewarding that I’ve been thinking about it for a month, and yet seem to have nothing of great weight to say here. Some bullet points:
• The bent history of this is doing something brilliant, but I can’t articulate all of it. Cora goes from antebellum Georgia to South Carolina during an event like the Tuskeegee experiments (which actually happened in Alabama, in a different century), to North Carolina in the grip of extreme racial violence that never quite occurred on that scale. Time doesn’t work right in this book, and the details don’t line up, and I can’t explain it, but that makes this recount of not history more potent a recounting of our real history. How? I don’t know. It does.
• This book is only genre by courtesy. There is a genre conceit to it – the railroad – but the book is generally uninterested in the bend of reality at its heart. Cora thinks once, in passing, that the railroad is a secret so profound she never wants to speak of it. The whole book keeps that silence. It’s metafiction more than genre, is what I think I’m saying.
• Cora had to be a woman. There’s something in her furious, scared, scarred survival that just . . . required it.
• The first fith of this book is set on the plantation before Cora flees, and it shocked me in that I’d never read anything like it before. To be fair, I don’t read historical fiction much at all, but. Somehow I was culturally aware of plantations as organized white supremacy concentration camps where torture and terror ruled – what else could they be – but had never actually been presented with that in fiction. Ever. How is that possible?
• * I also don’t know how this is possible, but this book is not utterly and nihilistically horrid. Racial violence is at Cora’s heels from beginning to end, and it intrudes, eventually, into every space where she thinks she might at last be a little bit safe. The book is a recounting of modes of racism and modes of living with it, and all of them . . . end badly. And yet. And yet. It’s not that it retains a grain of hope. This isn’t quite a pandora’s box book. It’s just . . . she survives. She keeps moving.
5/5. Cora escapes enslavement and flees to the underground railroad. Which is an actual railroad, actually underground. That takes her on a strange, terrifying trip through several faces of American racism as it deposits her in different eras and different not-quite-true-to-history moments.
This is extraordinary. And brutal. And mesmerizing. And so complex and rewarding that I’ve been thinking about it for a month, and yet seem to have nothing of great weight to say here. Some bullet points:
• The bent history of this is doing something brilliant, but I can’t articulate all of it. Cora goes from antebellum Georgia to South Carolina during an event like the Tuskeegee experiments (which actually happened in Alabama, in a different century), to North Carolina in the grip of extreme racial violence that never quite occurred on that scale. Time doesn’t work right in this book, and the details don’t line up, and I can’t explain it, but that makes this recount of not history more potent a recounting of our real history. How? I don’t know. It does.
• This book is only genre by courtesy. There is a genre conceit to it – the railroad – but the book is generally uninterested in the bend of reality at its heart. Cora thinks once, in passing, that the railroad is a secret so profound she never wants to speak of it. The whole book keeps that silence. It’s metafiction more than genre, is what I think I’m saying.
• Cora had to be a woman. There’s something in her furious, scared, scarred survival that just . . . required it.
• The first fith of this book is set on the plantation before Cora flees, and it shocked me in that I’d never read anything like it before. To be fair, I don’t read historical fiction much at all, but. Somehow I was culturally aware of plantations as organized white supremacy concentration camps where torture and terror ruled – what else could they be – but had never actually been presented with that in fiction. Ever. How is that possible?
• * I also don’t know how this is possible, but this book is not utterly and nihilistically horrid. Racial violence is at Cora’s heels from beginning to end, and it intrudes, eventually, into every space where she thinks she might at last be a little bit safe. The book is a recounting of modes of racism and modes of living with it, and all of them . . . end badly. And yet. And yet. It’s not that it retains a grain of hope. This isn’t quite a pandora’s box book. It’s just . . . she survives. She keeps moving.