![]() Northup’s was just one of at least a hundred American slave narratives published between 17, with even more following after the end of the civil war.īut, the first sixty pages of Whitehead’s novel form a prelude to the suspenseful story of Cora’s flight through several different states via the Underground Railroad which, in his telling, becomes a literal network of underground tracks, tunnels and trains with its own stations and station agents. So far, so conventional slave narrative: reminiscent, perhaps, of Steve McQueen’s magisterial film Twelve Years a Slave based upon the story of Solomon Northup who wrote one of the most detailed slave narratives in 1853. Feet cut off to prevent escape and hands cut off to stop theft.’ She decides to run after another slave,who escaped and made it about twenty miles before being hunted down, is whipped for the entertainment of guests – men and women – of the plantation owner, before being castrated, doused with oil and roasted. Women carved open to the bones with the cat-o’-nine-tails. In this opening section, Whitehead conveys the daily brutality of life on the plantation, where Cora is gang-raped, and where whippings (accompanied by scrubbings in pepper water to intensify the pain) are routine.Ĭora has seen ‘Men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Whitehead begins with a harrowing depiction of life on a Georgia plantation around 1850, the place where Cora was born after her grandmother, purchased on the Gold Coast by a slaver out of Liverpool, had been brought there after years of being sold and swapped and resold, her price fluctuating, by the men who needed slaves to sow, weed and harvest their cotton, indigo or tobacco. Have to take leave of your senses to do that. To walk in there at night, heading north to the Free States. Things in the swamp whistled and splashed, hunting in the living darkness. ![]() To ease her restlessness she crept out to her plot and sat on her maple and smelled the air and listened. In flight, Whitehead’s narrative evolves into something both unexpected and surreal as he conjures scenes that fracture the distance between America’s past and its present. Three weeks later they ran, pursued by a fanatical slave catcher named Ridgeway, determined to hunt them down and destroy the abolitionist network that has aided them. The first time she had been approached by fellow-slave Caesar she had said no. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.Ĭolson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, chronicles the life of a teenage slave named Cora, who flees the Georgia plantation where she was born, enduring unremitting hardship in search of freedom.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |