The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad is the story of Cora, a slave born on a plantation in coastal Georgia. It follows Cora as she comes of age and escapes. She travels on the underground railroad and spends time in various states in the south and is pursued by the great slave catcher, Ridgeway. The underground railroad is not metaphorical. It is an actual locomotive in tunnels built and operated by runaway slaves and freemen with the aid of abolitionists. Each state Cora travels through has different laws regarding slavery. She decides to stay in South Carolina where the The US government is buying slaves at auction and at estates sales and collecting them in communities, housing them in dormitories, educating them, and giving them jobs. Something similar to the shameful "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male", which was conducted in Alabama from 1932 to 1972, was being carried out in South Carolina in Cora's time a century earlier. Cora then flees to North Carolina where slaves are not allowed. On being seen, black people are summarily and ceremoniously lynched. As Cora and the white couple who hid her in their attic, a la Ann Frank, are about to be executed, Ridgeway shows up and claims her as a runaway to be returned to her owner. Ultimately she escapes and once again takes the underground railroad to the north.

The Underground Railroad won numerous literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction, and was nominated for others. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and was nominated for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Wikipedia describes it as an alternate history novel. When I began The Underground Railroad, I expected it to be historical fiction. I wish I had known it was science fiction rather than an historical novel before I started it; I think I might have enjoyed it more.