Summary and Analysis of The Underground Railroad: Based on the Book by Colson Whitehead
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Summary and Analysis of The Underground Railroad: Based on the Book by Colson Whitehead
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Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
This short summary and analysis of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter summaries
- Analysis of the main characters
- Themes and symbols
- Important quotes
- Fascinating trivia
- Glossary of terms
- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
About The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead:
Colson Whitehead’s National Book Award–winning The Underground Railroad is a bold, original, and unflinchingly brutal portrait of slavery during the darkest period in American history.
On the cusp of womanhood, Cora is a runaway slave, pursued by her memories of abuse and abandonment, and by the implacable and notoriously cruel slave hunter known as Ridgeway. Her journey on the Underground Railroad—in Whitehead’s conceit, a literal, subterranean railway—propels her journey across a dangerous landscape in search of freedom.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of fiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504044080 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Summary and Analysis of The Underground Railroad
Based on the Book by Colson Whitehead
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4408-0
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Ajarry
Caesar, a slave on the Randall plantation in Georgia, suggests that Cora and he flee together to the North. Her refusal prompts a flashback to the story of her grandmother Ajarry, who was kidnapped in her native Benin and taken onboard a slave ship to South Carolina.
During the course of her lifetime, Ajarry was bought and sold many times. She came to understand that slaves were literally objects: Their value was determined by their usefulness. Ajarry's own value as a woman, she reasoned, was that she could bring more slaves into the world; however, all of her children died, with the exception of Cora's mother, Mabel.
Georgia
Cora's mother disappears when she is eleven years old, leaving the girl adrift in plantation slave life. The only link she has to her family is a tiny garden plot that was tended by both her mother and grandmother.
When a young slave places a doghouse on the site, Cora destroys it with a hatchet and then confronts the slave. The incident earns Cora a reputation as a madwoman, someone not to be trifled with.
When Terrance Randall, one of the plantation's owners, beats a slave boy with a cane, Cora throws her body over the child to take the punishment herself. This merits her a blow to the face from Terrance's cane — and whippings on the days that follow.
Here we learn that Mabel, Cora's mother, was not sold, but escaped from the Randall plantation. To sustain herself during her journey, Mabel dug up every sweet potato from her vegetable garden. For Cora, the tiny patch of land became not only a source of sustenance, but also a source of hope that she might one day be reunited with her mother.
When Cora realizes that Terrance Randall has decided to take her for a mistress, she accepts Caesar's proposal to flee. The following night, they depart the plantation. Lovey, Cora's friend, secretly follows the pair through the swamp.
The next night, the three are surprised by a group of bounty hunters. Cora kills one, and she and Caesar manage to escape, but Lovey is captured. Cora and Caesar make it to the house of a white man, Fletcher, who takes them to the next stop on their journey: a barn with a secret tunnel that leads to an improbable destination — a railroad, buried deep under the ground, that will transport them to freedom.
Ridgeway
Arnold Ridgeway, a blacksmith's son, found his calling as a teenager when he joined the "patrollers," who scoured the back roads of Georgia, hunting down runaway slaves. Ridgeway quickly graduated from patroller to slave hunter, traveling north to retrieve runaways from the free states and return them to their owners for rewards. His skill at tracking down slaves and his legendary cruelty earn him mythical status among slaves.
Ridgeway has formed his own gang of slave catchers who, in spite of interference from abolitionists and courts in the North, rarely failed to recapture an escapee. One of the few exceptions was Cora's mother, Mabel, whose freedom Ridgeway regards as a personal failure. Cora's escape convinces Ridgeway that the underground railroad must be operating in Georgia.
South Carolina
Cora and Caesar arrive by locomotive in South Carolina, a state with liberal views regarding "colored advancement." Aided by Sam, a white man who is a member of the underground railroad, the pair assumes new identities, finds jobs, and lives essentially as free people, although in segregation.
They receive free medical treatment, during which the men are submitted to frequent blood tests and the women are encouraged to consider sterilization. Later, Sam discovers that the former slaves are guinea pigs in a vast experiment to control the size of black population (which, by 1810, was nearly equal to the white population in South Carolina).
Shortly after, Ridgeway arrives in town, and Cora escapes capture by descending again into the tunnel that leads to the underground railroad, but Caesar is left behind.
Stevens
Dr. Aloysius Stevens, the physician who Cora met with in South Carolina, paid for his medical studies with a part-time job as a body snatcher's assistant. He helps Carpenter, a rough-hewn Irishman, to rob gravesites to supply cadavers to medical schools, where they are used for dissection and anatomy classes.
Body snatching was a lucrative business, and the corpses of colored men and women were the easiest prey, as their families would not resort to the law to reclaim them. However, Stevens realizes that only in death are the black man and the white man equal. When a student inserts his scapula into the cadaver of a black man, it's then, in death, that the corpse becomes a human being.
North Carolina
Cora's next stop is North Carolina, where she hides in the attic of a house owned by another white abolitionist, Martin Wells. Through a peephole, she witnesses a horrifying spectacle: the lynching of a runaway slave girl in the presence of cheering white townspeople. Cora soon discovers that this is a regular event called the Friday Festival. Martin explains that North Carolina is bent on eliminating the black population and having their work done by Irish or German immigrants.
Cora's time in the attic reminds readers of The Diary of Anne Frank, in which the Frank family is protected from capture by a few thin walls and the kindness of strangers. However, Cora's confinement ends when Fiona, an Irish maid who works in the Wellses' house, tells the night riders that she suspects Martin and his wife, Ethel, are harboring a runaway.
The night riders, who have already searched the Wellses' house once, return as the Friday Festival is taking place. The Wells are tied to a tree, and Cora is taken away by a posse of slave catchers, led by Ridgeway, who are intent on returning her to the Randall plantation in Georgia.
Ethel
This brief chapter contains a character study of Ethel, Martin Wells's wife. Her marriage to Martin was troubled by his decision to carry on his father's work helping runaways to escape to freedom, something she disapproved of. She grew up in a slave-owning family, but harbored a childhood fantasy about becoming a missionary in Africa. However, Africa comes to her in the body of Cora, whom she helps nurse back to health, in spite of her misgivings about aiding runaway slaves.
Tennessee
Ridgeway and his band of slave catchers — a freed boy, Homer, and a white slave hunter, Boseman — begin the long journey to take Cora and another recaptured slave, Jasper, to their masters. However, instead of going south, they head west through Tennessee, along the Trail of Tears and Death traveled by the Cherokee nation on its forced march to Oklahoma.
From Ridgeway, Cora learns that Lovey, the girl who had escaped with her from the plantation, was recaptured and executed by Terrance Randall. Ridgeway despises Randall for his gratuitous violence, but he shocks Cora when he murders the other runaway, Jasper, before her eyes.
The band of travelers arrives at a small town, and Ridgeway takes Cora to supper in a tavern, expounding his philosophies on life and justifying his grim trade. On the way out of town, the slave-hunting party is attacked by Royal, a freeman, and two runaways. Ridgeway is left in chains and Cora flees with the attackers.
Caesar
This brief chapter, written from Caesar's point of view in the past, describes his love for Cora. He was attracted by her beauty and, being a woodworker, dreamed of carving a sculpture of her. Caesar also admired Cora's courage, which he saw firsthand when she tried to protect the slave boy from Randall's blows. Caesar, who had once enjoyed a status near to that of a freeman, knew that Cora's courage and determination would be essential to his own escape.
Indiana
The action jumps forward in time and place to Indiana, where Cora is living on a large communal farm owned by a family of freemen, the Valentines. Cora continues to inquire about her mother among the other runaways, but she finds no answers. She works at various tasks, including childcare, farming, and doing laundry. She also pursues her education, but her future remains uncertain.
Royal, the freeman who rescued Cora from Ridgeway, courts her. He takes Cora to the terminus of the underground railroad, prompting a recollection of her escape. She tells him she doesn't want to run anymore and that she's content on the Valentine farm, but Royal intimates that now that she has been saved by the underground railroad, she must become a part of it.
Sam, the white man who had helped Cora escape South Carolina, appears at the farm and gives her some welcomed news: Terrance Randall is dead. Ridgeway, the infamous slave hunter, is still alive, but he lives in disgrace because of Cora's escape in Tennessee.
But Ridgeway soon reappears, this time among a group of white men who attack the Valentine farm, murdering many of the residents and scaring off the rest. Cora is recaptured by the slave hunter.
Mabel
In another flashback chapter, we discover what Cora will never know — that her mother, Mabel, died in the swamp bordering the Randall plantation on the night of her escape. Mabel felt freedom for a few brief moments, but she was tortured by the fact that she had left her daughter behind. She turned back, hoping to reach the plantation before she was missed. Instead, Mabel was bitten by a poisonous snake, and her body slid into a bed of moss, where it would remain undiscovered.
The North
As the carnage at the Valentine farm continues, Ridgeway forces Cora to show him to the entry to the underground railroad. On the steps down to the platform, Cora struggles with Ridgeway, and they both fall to the bottom. Ridgeway sustains a severe head injury, allowing Cora to escape by using the handcar parked on the nearby rails.
After pumping for hours, an exhausted Cora finds a way out of the tunnel. Upon emerging, she encounters a family of white settlers traveling west to California. A black man driving one of their wagons invites her to come aboard. The novel closes as Cora begins yet another stage in her long journey to freedom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of The Underground Railroad by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Cast of Characters,
Summary,
Character Analysis,
Themes and Symbols,
Author's Style,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
Critical Response,
About Colson Whitehead,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,