When I finally picked up Colson Whitehead’s book, it came with some pretty serious expectations on my part. I haven’t read all of Whitehead’s works but what I’ve read I’ve enjoyed. I’ve read and listened to interviews with him and admired his way with words. So I figured I would like this book. But as high as my expectations were, they weren’t high enough.
Whitehead’s novel is the story of Cora, a young woman born into slavery on a Georgia plantation. Whitehead’s descriptions of the slavery that Cora experiences are both harrowing and universal to the institution that existed in this nation for nearly 300 years. They bear witness to already well-known historical descriptions of America’s peculiar institution and also manage to be fresh, as we witness life from Cora’s point of view. She is resilient and fragile all at once and when she finally makes her escape, I breathed a sigh of relief.
I shouldn’t have.
Whitehead’s imagined escape route is a literal railroad built underground with well-meaning conductors but nevertheless imbued with all the fear and anxiety of descriptions of the “real” underground railroad. Cora’s flees into places in Whitehead’s imagination, where escaped slaves only briefly feel the safety that whites get to take for granted. Cora makes her way through Whitehead’s re-imagined South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana but never quite finds the comfortable freedom for which she has always longed.
As Cora moves toward a more secure freedom, she learns to read and finds both happiness and escape in the words she can decode. As the reader of her story, I found the same in Whitehead’s words. He writes splendidly and precisely, with vivid descriptions that will linger in my mind. Cora’s story is both individually hers and a universal imagination of the power of freedom in the life of an individual denied its most basic protections. It’s a novel well-worth the emotional energy it required.
