The Underground Railroad

Single Text · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad takes the metaphor everyone knows and makes it literal. There are engines, tunnels and station agents under the ground, and each state Cora surfaces in is a different experiment in what America might have done instead.

Whitehead published the novel in 2016 and it won the Pulitzer Prize. He had been carrying the idea since the nineties: the historical Underground Railroad was a network of safe houses and guides, not a railway, and he wondered what a novel would look like if a child’s misunderstanding of the name were true. The result is not fantasy for its own sake. Each state Cora reaches has been reworked so that a different strategy for controlling black life can be examined on its own.

It is prescribed as a single text for 2027 and 2028. The structure is the first thing to get straight, because questions frequently turn on it: long chapters named after states, short chapters named after individual people, and a chronology that doubles back.

The Underground Railroad: The Story in Five Beats

One. Cora is born on the Randall cotton plantation in Georgia. Her mother Mabel ran when Cora was ten and was never caught, which leaves Cora both abandoned and marked as the daughter of the one who got away. She lives on a scrap of ground she defends with an axe.

Two. Caesar, a newly arrived man who can read, asks her to run with him. On the way out they are cornered and Cora strikes a boy with a rock. That act makes her a killer in the eyes of the law and puts the slave catcher Ridgeway on her personally.

Three. South Carolina looks like sanctuary: wages, a dormitory, schooling and doctors. Then Cora learns what the medical programme is for, and that the museum where she works displays living people behind glass as scenes from history.

Four. North Carolina has solved the problem by abolishing black people entirely. Cora spends months in an attic crawl space watching the Friday night hangings on the town common through a gap in the wall.

Five. Indiana offers the closest thing to a future: Valentine farm, black owned, with a library and a lecture hall. It is destroyed by a white mob. Cora escapes underground one last time and pushes a handcar into a tunnel with no known end.

A Railway You Can Actually Board

The literal railroad is the novel’s central invention and it does specific work. Nobody knows who built it. Station agents will not say where a train is going. Lumbly tells Cora to look out of the window as she travels in order to see the true face of the country, and what she sees is darkness. That instruction, given to a passenger who cannot see anything, is the book’s driest joke and its sharpest point.

Each station is different, which matters: some are grand marble halls, some are holes under a barn, and one is a sealed dead end. The railway is not a system that has been designed. It is whatever individual people managed to dig.

Four States, Four Systems

Read the state chapters as arguments rather than settings. Georgia is brute violence, plantation slavery at its most direct. South Carolina is control disguised as kindness, with sterilisation programmes and untreated syphilis studies behind the schooling and wages. North Carolina is elimination, a state that decided its problem could be solved by making a whole population illegal. Tennessee is scorched ground, fire and yellow fever, a landscape that looks like the aftermath of a judgement.

Indiana is the cruellest, because it works. Valentine farm has literacy, ownership, debate and Saturday socials, and it is burned by neighbours who could not tolerate its success. Whitehead is making an argument about the pattern that follows black prosperity in America, and he expects you to see it.

The Names That Are Not States

Between the long chapters sit short ones with people’s names: Ajarry, Ridgeway, Stevens, Ethel, Caesar, Mabel. They are not decoration. Ajarry’s chapter prices a human being repeatedly across a lifetime and lets the figures accumulate. Stevens, the medical student, explains the body-snatching trade in a reasonable professional voice. Ethel’s chapter shows a woman who wanted to be a missionary and settled for a prisoner in her attic.

Mabel’s chapter is placed near the end and reverses the whole novel. Cora has spent the book believing her mother abandoned her. Mabel turned back after a single night and died of a snake bite in the swamp within sight of the plantation, and nobody ever knew. Cora never finds out. That is the most examinable structural decision in the book: you are given a truth the character is denied.

Who’s Who

Cora is watchful, hard to like at first, and entirely believable. Her defining act on the plantation is defending three square yards of vegetable garden inherited from her grandmother.

Ridgeway is the slave catcher, a philosopher of American destiny who has built a whole worldview to justify what he does. He failed to catch Mabel and treats Cora as unfinished business.

Caesar reads, dreams of Boston, and is the one who persuades Cora to run. His fate is delivered almost in passing, which is the point.

Ajarry and Mabel are Cora’s grandmother and mother, and the novel is as much theirs as hers.

Homer, the freed boy who rides with Ridgeway keeping notes, is the most unsettling figure in the book, and Whitehead never explains him.

How This Text Is Examined

Single-text questions on this novel usually land on one of four areas: the effect of the literal railroad, the presentation of Cora as a protagonist, the structure and how the interleaved chapters work, or the treatment of freedom and its cost. Every one of those rewards an answer that talks about how the book is built.

A word on quotation. This is a contemporary novel still in copyright, so use short extracts from your own copy, attributed to the chapter, and spend your words on analysis rather than transcription. Naming a scene precisely is worth as much in the marking as a quoted line.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Four moments cover most of the paper: Cora defending her plot of ground, the museum exhibit in South Carolina, the attic in North Carolina, and the burning of Valentine farm. Add Mabel’s chapter when the question touches on structure or on what Cora is denied. Name the state, name the moment, then say what system that state represents. That is the move that separates a strong answer from a plot summary.

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