Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain ...

I feel safe saying that Underground Railroad was the most horrifying thing NUBClub has read. As a surreal and symbolic trip through the racism of US history, Whitehead's novel was downright terrifying in parts, and that was just incredible to read. The scenes in North Carolina in particular, with the hanging forests and the angry mobs outside, will haunt many of our memories forever. All of us saw Cora's struggle as a powerful indictment of American history, and we were deeply moved by her journey and the tragedies she had to endure. But the point of the book we thought most about was the plot. What interested us so much was that Whitehead uses the idea of the underground railroad and journey north to freedom as a metaphorical journey, a la Gulliver's Travels, through racist policies, but Whitehead never draws attention to that. As a group, the more historically knowledge of us had to remind the rest that the underground railroad was not and could never have been an actual railroad, and everyone realized that the South Carolina scenes of experimentation were ahistoric to the rest of the novel. While it was clear to us in analysis that this was intentional, we couldn't help but think that many readers who didn't have access to that history wouldn't realize how fantastical the book was. We talked a lot about why Whitehead wasn't explicit about that -- did he assume people would know it was a melange of history, or was he only writing for an audience that WOULD understand what he was doing? We struggled a bit not knowing that, as the point of the book changes if you might not recognize the deep fiction in the setting. That said, we were drawn back to the final moments of the book, where Cora has learned to avoid white people and ride silently with the black traveler she's found, as a powerful last symbol of the crimes of racism. This novel is a powerful condemnation of cultural bigotry, taut and stunning in its expression, and many of us ranked Whitehead's odyssey as one of the best novels we've read.