She takes several trips via the Underground Railroad, which Whitehead reconceives as a literal subterranean track with hidden stations and steam engines running along it. Cora, the heroine of Whitehead’s novel, flees a cotton plantation in Georgia at the age of “sixteen or seventeen”-even the basic self-knowledge of her own birthdate has been denied her-when conditions promise to go from routine brutality to baroque sadism with the arrival of a new owner. Slavery is the rape of work, the perversion of labor from a potential source of pride and self-discovery into an endless torment.
So perhaps it was inevitable that Whitehead would one day write about slavery in America, as he does in his new and already much-celebrated The Underground Railroad.
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