The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

I have been reading this book for over a month now and only just finished it. I will say that this book was very good and well done, but it definitely did not live up to my goal of reading books that made me happy this year. I was reading it for my book club, and I was the one who suggested it, so I really should have enjoyed it. But given the subject matter--a slave escaping from slavery--it was really heavy and sometimes dark reading that didn't lend itself to being loved. I think this was a good book, an important book, a worthwhile book, but not one of my favorites that I would pick up again for fun.

This book is about Cora, a slave who escapes from her plantation in Georgia with another slave named Caesar. The plot seems like straight historical fiction until Cora and Caesar are helped into the Underground Railroad--and in Colson Whitehead's version of history, it's a real underground railroad with trains and tracks barreling along underground. And in each state that Cora travels to in her journey to freedom, she encounters different and not-actually-historically-accurate circumstances for black people. For example, in South Carolina, black people are given quite a lot of freedom and help, or so they think--until she learns that the doctors that are helping them are actually doing tests on them and trying to sterilize the people they deem undesirable. In North Carolina, they've exterminated and expelled all black slaves from their state and brought in white poor workers to take their place. In Indiana, she lives on a sort of commune farm owned by a black man who has taken in all sorts of runaways and people who need help. But all along the way Cora is being chased by Ridgeway, the slave hunter who was never able to find her mother who ran away long ago when Cora was a child, and who has sworn to not let Cora do the same thing to him.

I have a lot of confused, half-baked thoughts about this book, but mostly, I liked how it made me think. Obviously Whitehead is making some serious points about the history of relations between blacks and whites in America through this time-traveling journey through American history--it's like Cora visited the Tuskegee Institute in South Carolina in the 50s just after escaping from her plantation in Georgia, for example. I think I need to watch or listen to some interviews with Whitehead to get a little more out of it. So the historical information was pretty interesting. However, it was hard to get that invested in Cora or in the story, because you never really got to know her. She was very closed off, even from the reader, so you never knew much about her other than what she did on the outside. Same with all the other more minor characters who drop in and out of the story, and it's hard to tell what they are all about. Obviously it was also pretty difficult to read about the terrible things that slave owners did to their slaves, but even more difficult to remember that those things really happened and were not just a part of a fictional story. I felt guilty reading the scene where an escaped-then-recovered slave was hung and tortured and burned in front of a garden party of other rich white planters who came for the "entertainment"--it made me wonder, what kind of depraved people were these people? And would I have been that terribly unconcerned about slaves and torture if I had been born in that time and place? (I think these thoughts are healthy in a humbling way, and a good reminder that we all are predisposed to racism if we don't actively try to work against it. Don't you?)

In the end, I'm glad to have read this, but I don't know that I'll recommend it to most people as a pleasure read--definitely more of a thought-provoking one.