The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Saturday, May 9, 2020--San Antonio, TX

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award three years ago and the Pulitzer Prize the same year.  It is NOT a book about the Underground Railroad.  In fact, the railroad, when a part of the story, is a literal railroad with rails--one of the aspects of magical realism Whitehead uses to tell his story which really dwells on how bad the treatment of slaves was and how the USA, no matter what the Declaration of Independence says, was founded by white people for white people and that its whole history has been built upon the premise that white people assume the right to take what they want from non-whites and get rid of who they want who is non-white.  Therefore, the story, with asides of magical realism about attempts to deal with the "problem" of the blacks in different ways--a state in the South that puts up a front of caring for the blacks while giving them limited opportunities and sterilizing them to assure they will never become the majority or a threat to whites, another state in the South that declares the existence of blacks to be illegal and hangs them from trees outside of towns and leaves them hanging there forever as a warning, and a northern state where blacks build an ideal community that comes to an end when the local whites start feeling threatened by their success--shines a mirror on the fact that things today in the USA are not much better for blacks than they were back then even though slavery is now abolished.  It's a fascinating book that held my attention throughout.  I gave it 5 stars out of 5!