Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award,
the #1 New York Times bestseller from Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de
force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom
in the antebellum South Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life
is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among
her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain
awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the
Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters
do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her.
Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground
Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network
of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop
is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s
placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And
even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels.
Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state,
seeking true freedom.Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Date: Sunday, November 5, 2017
Location: Ela, 627 South 3rd Street,
Philadelphia, PA
Time: 2pm
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