The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Cora hears a commotion above her and realizes a mob has set Sam’s house on fire.Īfter spending days trapped in the station under Sam’s house, Cora is rescued by an engine passing by. Cora waits there, but neither Sam nor Caesar joins her. Unable to find Caesar, Cora goes to Sam, who advises her to hide in the railroad station underneath his house. Ridgeway, a slave catcher who has been chasing Cora and Caesar, discovers the dormitory where Cora lives.

After her doctor encourages her to be medically sterilized, she realizes that some of the women she lives with are being sterilized against their will as part of a eugenics project to reduce the black population. Cora lives in a dormitory with other young black women. Cora works first as a maid, then as an “actor” in a museum display teaching white people about slavery. However, Cora enjoys South Carolina so much that she is reluctant to leave, and she and Caesar let three trains come and go without boarding them. They are given forged papers with false identities so that they can safely live in South Carolina until another train arrives to take them farther north. The locomotive lets Cora and Caesar off in South Carolina, beneath the home of a station agent named Sam, who is a bartender. Beneath Lumbly’s house, they find a tunnel with a railroad track, and a locomotive carries them north. Fletcher drives them in his cart, covered by a blanket, to the home of the station agent, Lumbly. Fletcher, Caesar’s contact with the underground railroad. They are nearly caught by a group of white hog hunters Lovey is captured, and Cora kills a white boy in order to escape. The two run away in the middle of the night and are unexpectedly joined by a young girl named Lovey. Although she refuses at first, she accepts his invitation a few weeks later. Her fellow slave Caesar, recognizing her independent spirit, asks her to run away with him.

When a young slave named Chester is beaten by plantation owner Terrance Randall, Cora intervenes and is beaten. She fiercely defends the tiny plot of land she has inherited from her mother (who inherited it from Cora’s grandmother, Ajarry) when other slaves try to take it from her, even destroying a doghouse that someone builds on it. When Cora’s mother, Mabel, runs away, Cora becomes a young outcast among the slaves of the Randall plantation. The Underground Railroad covers five primary periods in the life of Cora:

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead