Colson Whitehead · 2016 · rail

Colson Whitehead's 2016 novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, in which the Underground Railroad is reimagined as a literal network of tracks and locomotives beneath the Southern soil. Cora, fleeing a Georgia plantation, rides it state by state, and each state is a different and terrible America, an allegory of the nation's making. Pursued relentlessly by a slave-catcher, she travels through wonder and horror toward a freedom that keeps receding. A brutal, luminous reckoning with the American original sin.

1. 1
   Georgia

   Cora, born into slavery on the Randall cotton plantation in Georgia, endures the unendurable, until Caesar tells her about a secret railroad and they run.

2. 2
   South Carolina

   A first stop that seems a haven, a South Carolina of tall buildings and kind words, until she learns what the doctors and the dormitories are really for.

3. 3
   North Carolina

   In North Carolina, where the very presence of Black people is punished by death along the Freedom Trail, she hides for months in a cramped attic.

4. 4
   Tennessee

   Dragged back into bondage by the slave-catcher Ridgeway, across a Tennessee of wildfire and disease, before she breaks free once more.

5. 5
   Indiana

   To the Valentine farm in Indiana, a community of free Black people that feels like a promise, until the violence finds it too and she takes the rails one last time, north and west toward an unknown country.