"The Underground Railroad"

In the week that it won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I finished Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad." Whitehead tackles a massive social ill -- the devastation of the nation's soul wrought by American slavery and American racism -- by charting its effects on individuals. The story is gripping, its fictions (an actual railroad beneath the soil; a state-by-state response to slavery's impending demise that is bone-chillingly believable) as instructive as its grounding in historical research. The strength of its plot and its characters, including the unforgettable slave hunter Ridgeway, makes it clear why producers are turning it into a mini-series.

The book also offers quieter pleasures. I found myself moved by a pair of late-book passages. Cora, the protagonist, who has found harbor in an Indiana settlement for runaway slaves and other diasporic Africans, listens to a visiting poet and is left cold: "Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world." 

Then, on the very next page, a friend gives her a gift of a new almanac, a form of book foundational to her haphazard education. "She grabbed his hand. The almanac had a strange, soapy smell and made a cracking noise like fire as she turned the pages. She'd never been the first person to open a book."

Cora's fierce will to be educated, and the quiet description of her love for the book as physical object, left me wondering if, a generation or so hence, her descendants would find a more peaceful place to open themselves to the passions (of poetry, of prayer) that Cora must find "regrettable." In the midst of the novel's unsparing vision, the scene demonstrates a cultural indomitability that's as close as Whitehead skirts to hope.