THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
Image Coutesy of Amazon
Wow! Wow!!
Writing is excellent! The images in the story so vivid, I was shook! My emotions were all over the place. There were times when I shut the book and got really quiet. Really withdrawn. There is so much violence and it remind us of the injustice and horrific suffering due to racial inequality.
The underground rail road in this story is a fictional rail road system made to represent the tumultuous journey black people had to go through to attain freedom.
This book takes us on a journey of a slave girl named Cora. She was born a slave in a plantation in Georgia. Cora, is an outcast at the plantation. Not only do her fellow slaves treat her as if she has some infectious disease, the plantation she is at is an amalgamation of all things horrific, macabre and repugnant you have ever heard about slavery. I can’t even start describing it.
Her journey to escape begins when Caesar, a slave who just arrived from Virginia convinces her to escape the plantation. They escape and Colson takes us through the most harrowing journey ever. Ridgeway, a slave catcher is the bane of Cora’s existence with his main goal to capture and return her to her owner. When I say his description will make your blood boil. I mean just that. It reads like a movie. There are times my heart would race as if I was running a 100 meter dash wanting the best for Cora.
The writing is brilliant, the narrative is impeccable but also difficult, it will hold on to you from page one all the way to the end.
Some memorable lines.
“Cora didn't know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.” ( I read this line so many times, I cried!)
“The music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always — the overseer's cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.”
“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.”
Choosing to read a book about slavery means choosing to immerse yourself in brutality, violence, and inhumanity. But there's something essential about reading this kind of book. In the United States it's too easy to forget the dark times in our history. While this book isn't easy or light, it is deeply moving and very powerful. (A goods Read Review)
