![]() ![]() After boarding the train to freedom, Cora’s first stop is a South Carolina dotted by skyscrapers the state serves as a seemingly progressive haven for ex-slaves, who are treated to a series of social welfare programmes that, it turns out, double as a front for a sophisticated programme of medical experimentation and forced sterilisation. What follows is a journey into an alternate-history version of antebellum America. Cora and her friend Caesar, however, find something very different awaiting them at the first station: an actual steel-and-iron subway system concealed beneath the earth. In reality, this railroad comprised an abolitionist-run network of hideaways and safe houses set up to shelter runaway slaves its ‘conductors’ organised groups of escapees and shepherded them – on foot – from stop to stop on these clandestine paths to freedom. ![]() Having resolved to risk the horrific punishment that awaits her if she is captured, Cora seeks out the famous underground railroad from the slave South to the free North. ![]() On page 80, it takes an abrupt, surreal turn to the fantastic. For seventy-nine pages, Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad (2016) offers what appears to be an unflinchingly realistic narrative of the enslaved Cora’s attempt to escape a brutal Georgia plantation. ![]()
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