231. The Underground Railroad
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by: Heather Ringoen
Author: Colson Whitehead
Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction
306 pages, published August 2, 2016
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora and other slaves as they suffer through the brutalities of slavery in the South and dream of freedom. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells Cora about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. The two are hunted by the merciless Slave Catcher Ridgeway as they make their way out of Georgia. Author Colson Whitehead traces the brutal importation of Africans to the United States and re-creates the unique terrors black people faced in the pre-Civil War era.
Quotes
“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes–believes with all its heart–that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.”
“Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.”
“She wasn’t surprised when his character revealed itself—if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.”
“Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.”
“The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.”
“If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now. Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor–if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.”
“The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.”
“Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.”
“Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.”
“Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.”
“Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal.”
“There was an order of misery, misery tucked inside miseries, and you were meant to keep track.”
“The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.”
My Take
While The Underground Railroad was richly rewarded (Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017), Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2017), National Book Award for Fiction (2016), Arthur C. Clarke Award (2017), Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction (2017)
The Rooster – The Morning News Tournament of Books (2017), NAIBA Book of the Year for Fiction (2017), Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (2017), Kirkus Prize Nominee for Fiction (2016), Goodreads Choice Award for Historical Fiction (2016), PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Nominee (2017), I did not connect with this book as much as I expected too. It was too graphically and unrelentingly violent. The subject of slavery is depressing and this is quite a depressing read. If you want to read a book about slavery, I prefer The Invention of Wings.
