How Long Is The Underground Railroad Book? (TOP 5 Tips)

The Underground Railroad (novel)

Author	Colson Whitehead
Subject	Slavery
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	August 2, 2016
Pages	320

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When was the book The Underground Railroad published?

• The Underground Railroad, published in 2016, is the sixth novel by American author Colson Whitehead. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the southeastern United States during the 19th century, who make a bid for freedom from their Georgia plantations by following

How many pages is the underground railroad book?

The average reader will spend 5 hours and 6 minutes reading this book at 250 WPM (words per minute).

How many chapters are in the Underground Railroad?

Based on the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, “The Underground Railroad” is a story divided into ten chapters, but not in a traditional episodic manner.

Is the book The Underground Railroad a true story?

Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-award-winning novel, The Underground Railroad is based on harrowing true events. The ten-parter tells the story of escaped slave, Cora, who grew up on The Randall plantation in Georgia.

Is Colson Whitehead married?

Whitehead lives in Manhattan and also owns a home in Sag Harbor on Long Island. His wife, Julie Barer, is a literary agent and they have two children.

How do I contact Colson Whitehead?

Colson Whitehead

1. Contact: [email protected].
2. Speaking Engagements: Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau.
3. Publicity: Michael Goldsmith [email protected].
4. Photo: Chris Close.
5. Upcoming events: 2021.

What was the Underground Railroad book reading level?

ISBN-10: 0395979153. Reading Level: Lexile Reading Level 1240L. Guided Reading Level V.

What year is the underground railroad book set?

The Underground Railroad takes place around 1850, the year of the Fugitive Slave Act’s passage. It makes explicit mention of the draconian legislation, which sought to ensnare runaways who’d settled in free states and inflict harsh punishments on those who assisted escapees.

What type of book is the Underground Railroad?

It runs for 10 episodes that range in length from 20 minutes to 77 minutes.

Will there be Underground Railroad Season 2?

The Underground Railroad Season 2 won’t come in 2021 Whether the series is renewed or not, we’ve got some bad news when it comes to the release date. The Underground Railroad Season 2 won’t come in 2021.

How many episodes of the Underground Railroad are there?

Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Now, it’s a limited series directed by Academy Award-winner Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk). In ten episodes, The Underground Railroad chronicles Cora Randall’s journey to escape slavery.

Does the Underground Railroad still exist?

It includes four buildings, two of which were used by Harriet Tubman. Ashtabula County had over thirty known Underground Railroad stations, or safehouses, and many more conductors. Nearly two-thirds of those sites still stand today.

What year did the Underground Railroad begin and end?

system used by abolitionists between 1800-1865 to help enslaved African Americans escape to free states.

Amazon.com: The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah’s Book Club): A Novel: 9780385542364: Whitehead, Colson: Books

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and National Book Award-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, the #1 New York Timesbestseller, is a breathtaking tour de force charting a young slave’s exploits as she makes a desperate attempt for freedom in the antebellum South. Now there’s an original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins, which is available now. Cora is a slave who works on a cotton farm in Georgia as a domestic servant. Cora’s life is a living nightmare for all of the slaves, but it is particularly difficult for her since she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is about to become womanhood, which will bring her much more suffering.

Things do not turn out as planned, and Cora ends up killing a young white child who attempts to apprehend her.

The Underground Railroad, according to Whitehead’s clever vision, is more than a metaphor: engineers and conductors manage a hidden network of rails and tunnels beneath the soil of the American South.

However, underneath the city’s calm appearance lies a sinister conspiracy created specifically for the city’s black residents.

As a result, Cora is forced to escape once more, this time state by state, in search of genuine freedom and a better life.

During the course of his tale, Whitehead skillfully re-creates the specific terrors experienced by black people in the pre–Civil War era, while smoothly weaving the saga of America from the cruel immigration of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the contemporary day.

Look for Colson Whitehead’s best-selling new novel, Harlem Shuffle, on the shelves!

The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner)

Chapter 1When Caesar initially contacted Cora about the possibility of running north, she said no. It was her granny who was speaking. Prior to that beautiful afternoon in the port of Ouidah, Cora’s grandmother had never seen the ocean, and the water glistened in her eyes after her confinement in the fort’s prison. For the time being, the dungeon served as a holding cell for the prisoners. The Dahomeyan pirates took the men first, then returned to her town the next moon to take the women and children, taking them in chains to the sea two by two, until they were all dead.

• They informed her that when her father couldn’t keep up with the speed of the arduous march, the slavers stove in his brain and dumped his body by the side of the road.
• Cora’s grandmother was sold several times throughout the journey to the fort, passing through the hands of slavers in exchange for cowrie shells and glass beads.
• Eighty-eight human souls were exchanged for sixty crates of rum and gunpowder, a figure that was reached after the usual haggling in Coast English was conducted.
• The Nanny had left Liverpool and had already made two stops along the Gold Coast before arriving in Brisbane.
• It was impossible to predict what kind of rebellion his hostages might concoct if they spoke the same language.
• Ajarry was rowed out to the ship by two sailors with yellow hair and a humming sound.
• In order to drive Ajarry to madness, the toxic air of the hold, the gloom of imprisonment, and the screams of those tethered to her were concocted together.

On the trip to America, she attempted to kill herself twice: once by depriving herself of food, and then again by drowning in the ocean.

When Ajarry tried to jump overboard, she didn’t even make it to the gunwale before being rescued.

Chained from head to toe, head to toe, in a never-ending cycle of anguish.

The plague had taken the lives of everyone on board.

Cora’s grandma was completely unaware of what had happened to the ship.

In her stories, Isay and Sidoo and the rest of the characters managed to buy their way out of bondage and establish themselves as free men and women in the City of Pennsylvania, a location she had overheard two white men discussing at one point.

Once the doctors verified that she and the rest of the Nanny’s cargo were free of sickness, the second time Cora’s grandmother was sold was after a month in the pest house on Sullivan’s Island, following which she was sold.

A large auction usually attracts a large and diverse audience.

Meanwhile, as the auctioneers yelled into the air, onlookers chomped on fresh oysters and sizzling corn.

A bidding battle erupted over a group of Ashanti studs, those Africans who were famed for their industry and muscle, and the foreman of a limestone quarry scored a fantastic deal on a bunch of pickaninnies.

Just as the sun was setting, a real estate agent purchased her for $226 dollars from her family.

His outfit was made of the whitest material she had ever seen, and he looked absolutely stunning in it.

Whenever he pressed against her breasts to check whether she was in blossom, the metal felt chilly on her flesh.

In the middle of the night, the coffle began their lengthy journey south, stumbling after the trader’s buggy.

Below decks, there were fewer cries to hear.

Her proprietors were thrown into financial catastrophe on an alarmingly regular basis.

However, despite the fact that the schematics were persuasive, Ajarry ended up being another asset that was liquidated by a magistrate.

One of the previous owners died of dropsy, and his widow organized an estate auction in order to raise money for a return to her home Europe, where the air was pure.

And so forth.

That many times you are sold on anything means the world is training your brain to pay attention.

Masters and mistresses with varying degrees of depravity, estates with varying levels of wealth and ambition Occasionally, the planters wanted nothing more than to earn a meager livelihood, but there were other men and women who want to own the entire planet, as if it were a matter of acquiring the appropriate amount of land.

• Everywhere she went, she was selling sugar and indigo, with the exception of a brief spell folding tobacco leaves for a week before being sold again.
• She had become a lady at this point.
• She was well aware that the scientists of the white man probed under the surface of things in order to learn how they operated.
• It is necessary to maintain certain temperatures in order to harvest cotton in good condition.
• Each object had a monetary worth, and when the monetary value changed, so did everything else.
• In America, there existed a peculiarity in that individuals were objects.
• Customers were enthralled with a young buck descended from powerful tribal blood.

If you were an object, such as a cart, a horse, or a slave, your worth defined your potential.

Georgia, at long last.

She didn’t take a single breath outside of Randall Land for the rest of her life.

Cora’s grandma had three husbands throughout her lifetime.

The two plantations were well-­stocked, with ninety-­five head of nigger on the northern half and eighty-­five head on the southern half of the plantations, respectively.

When she didn’t, she remained calm and patient.

The fact that they sold him to a sugarcane farm in Florida didn’t make Ajarry upset, because he had become part of the family.

In the days before his death from cholera, he enjoyed telling stories from the Bible to his old owner, who was more liberal when it came to slaves and religion than he was.

The unfortunate sons of Ham.

The wounds continued to leak pus until he was rendered inert.

That’s where you came from, and it’s also where I’ll send you if you don’t heed to my instructions.

Fever claimed the lives of two people.

After a boss whacked him in the head with a wooden block, her youngest son never regained consciousness.

At the very least, an elderly woman informed Ajarry, they were never auctioned off.

You were well aware of where and how your children would perish.

She died in the cotton, with the bolls bobbing around her like the waves of a stormy sea.

‘She was the last of her tribe,’ she said, as she collapsed in the rows due to a knot in her head, blood streaming from her nostrils and white froth coating her lips.

Liberty was reserved for others, for the residents of the booming city of Pennsylvania, a thousand miles to the north, who possessed the right to vote.

Know your worth, and you’ll understand your standing in the hierarchy.

When Caesar contacted Cora about the underground railroad on that Sunday evening, it was her grandmother who was talking, and Cora refused to talk about it.

This time, though, it was her mother who spoke.

It is believed that the aforementioned girl is in the region of Mrs.

I will pay the above-mentioned prize upon delivery of the girl, or upon receiving information that she is being held in any jail in this state.

W.

DIXON was born on July 18, 1820.

They made an effort to hold a proper celebration.

Work ended at three o’clock, and everyone on the northern plantation scrambled to finish off their last-minute preparations, racing through duties.

Unless you had a pass to go into town to sell crafts or had rented yourself out for day labor, the feast took precedence over anything else.

Everyone was well aware that niggers did not celebrate birthdays.

The birthday feasts had always included turnips or greens, but Cora was unable to contribute today due to a lack of produce.

The voices were more crotchety than furious, but they were still loud.

“If you had the opportunity to choose your birthday, what would you choose?” Lovey was the one who inquired.

Lovey was straightforward, and there was going to be a party that night to commemorate the occasion.

It was hard labor, but the moon helped to make it bearable.

She’d try to drag Cora away from the sides, completely ignoring her complaints in the process.

Cora, on the other hand, refused to join her, pulling her arm away.

“I told you when I was born,” Cora confessed to her mother.

Her mother, Mabel, had already moaned about her difficult birth, the uncommon frost that morning, and the wind roaring through the cabin’s seams.

Cora’s imagination would play tricks on her every now and then, and she’d make the story into one of her own recollections, putting the faces of ghosts, all of the slave dead, who gazed down at her with love and indulgence into the narrative.

“If you had a choice,” Lovey remarked, smiling.

“It has already been determined for you.” “You’d better get your mood back on track,” Lovey said.

Cora kneaded her calves, happy for the opportunity to get off her feet for a while.

She considered herself to be her own property for a few hours every week, which she used to pull weeds, pick caterpillars, thin out the nasty greens, and sneer at anybody who tried to intrude on her area.

Colson Whitehead: ‘To deal with this subject with the gravity it deserved was scary’

In the midst of writing a novel about the digital economy, Colson Whitehead was struck by the phantom of an old thought. Despite the fact that the 47-year-old had been working as a critic for the Village Voice since his twenties and has subsequently produced five novels and two non-fiction works, the author was in what he describes as “the constantly melancholy attitude” that is his default setting while writing. In his words, “I normally have two or three ideas flying around in my head.” “During my spare time, the one I end up thinking about the most is the one I end up pursuing,” says the author.

1. The book Whitehead eventually wrote was The Underground Railroad, which tells the story of Cora, a 15-year-old slave who escapes from a plantation in Georgia through the use of the Underground Railroad.
2. The rights to the show have been purchased by Barry Jenkins, the director of the Academy Award-winning filmMoonlight, and Whitehead has experienced a makeover over the past six months as a result.
3. So that’s something fresh, and it’s a wonderful feature.” Will the gloomy mood return once more?
4. “I’m assuming that once I get into a new book, my body temperature will return to its normal average.” However, I have been thoroughly enjoying it.

Putting money down for my children’s college education, purchasing new clothing, and generally walking around in a pleasant attitude are some of my plans.” At a cafe near Whitehead’s home in midtown Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, Julie Barer (also a literary agent), and their little son, who is three years old, we talk about his writing.

1. As one of four children of wealthy entrepreneurs, Whitehead grew up in Manhattan with his mother and father.
2. He and his brother occupied a position of luxury that was deemed so inaccessible to African Americans that the parents of white students began to wonder whether he and his brother were indeed African kings.
3. “Posh,” he says, referring to the word for “posh.” “Upscale; bourgeois ideals,” says the author.
4. The Hamptons were a little too wealthy for me after I went to college, and they didn’t seem to match the principles I was adopting in my late teens, so I moved away.
5. He laughs as he recalls his discovery of the restaurant after September 11, 2001: “it was a wonderful, quiet spot to hang out.” Success on a very different level.
6. Photograph courtesy of PR Whitehead’s parents were the owners of an executive recruiting agency, and they were less than thrilled when he declared his wish to pursue a writing career.
7. He had been a “goody-goody” up until he got to Harvard, according to Whitehead, and had fulfilled all of his parents’ expectations of him.
8. Then he went to college and changed his mind.
9. Irritatingly, he says, “I was available to hang around.” “At the time, the Department of English was a highly orthodox institution.
10. So I would enroll in courses in the theatre department – not for performing, but for studying plays – as well as in the African American studies department, which at the time was in a state of disarray, prior to the arrival of Henry Louis Gates.
11. I had a game of cards.

But it was there that I first met James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon, as well as a slew of other great authors and works that I continue to turn to for inspiration and structure today.” In 2014, Whitehead published The Noble Hustle, a poker memoir that was adapted from a magazine piece based on the seven days he spent in Las Vegas participating in the World Series of Poker.

1. It boasts one of the finest subtitles ever: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death, to name a few examples.
2. “It’s a new elevator, newly pressed to the tracks, and it’s not built to fall this rapidly,” Whitehead writes.
3. John Updike and Stephen King are among the authors of commercial literary fiction, as are Norman Mailer and Judith Krantz.
4. So that meant reading Tom Wolfe and The Bell Jar, as well as horror and comic books – all of which inspired me to create.
5. Her books were always released on the 10th of December, so we knew exactly what to purchase her for Christmas every year.
6. To be really honest, that felt like a lot to me.

When my first book was eventually published and they were able to hold it in their hands and read reviews of it, they finally stopped nagging me to find a “real job.” The concept for The Underground Railroad came to Whitehead quite early in his career – in 2000, just after the publication of his first book.

1. According to Whitehead, those difficult years were instructional.
2. However, if you were in the paper, you were able to write for a variety of areas, and they were willing to give you a fair go provided you were in the building on a daily basis and underfoot.
3. “Even if it turned out to be dumb.” It was clear that his teenage self-assurance had its limits.
4. He was certain that he intended to write about the conduits that slaves used to escape from farms in the southern United States to those in the northern United States.
5. His main character, he believed, would be a young and unmarried man, as he himself was at the time of writing.
6. The notion “seemed like a decent idea when I came up with it in 2000,” he recalls, “but I didn’t think I could pull it off at the time.” “I didn’t consider myself to be a good enough writer.
7. As a result, I steered clear of it.

And then, a few of years ago, I began to wonder if perhaps the frightening book was the one you were intended to be reading.” The heroine was no longer a guy in his mid-20s, but a teenage girl named Cora, who had followed in her mother’s footsteps as a runaway.

In this section, Whitehead concentrates on the relationships between slaves, which are typically romanticized in more superficial representations of slavery.

And that include thinking about people who have been traumatized, brutalized, and dehumanized throughout their whole lives, as well.

Everyone is going to be fighting for the one additional mouthful of breakfast in the morning, fighting for the one extra piece of property they can get their hands on.

Cora is a fictional character created by author Charles Dickens.

Those two incidents, in my opinion, said volumes about who she was and what she would do to protect herself.” While researching for the book, Whitehead spent a significant amount of time combing through oral history archives, in particular the 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, at a time when the last survivors of slavery were in their 90s, which is incredible considering their age.

• He claims that the information he received about slavery was pitifully inadequate while he was in school.
• I believe things have improved significantly.
• Picture taken by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME Whitehead also desired to write about parents and children in a more generalized manner.
• Cora’s passion is fueled by her affection for and rage at her mother, Mabel.
• And both of those factors distort Cora’s perspective and cause her to behave in a variety of ways throughout the novel.
• What happened to Mabel is the book’s big shock, and the tension around it is what pushes most of the story’s plot forward.
• Answer: Of course he did not feel uncomfortable.
• Although the stakes were high in this novel – if she was detected, she would be put to death – I believe it necessitated a different approach than in some other works due to the nature of the situation.
• Moreover, I believe that the narrative, like comedy or the type of narrator you employ, is simply a tool that you employ for the appropriate story at the right moment.” Whitehead is recharging his batteries right now.
• He’s not in a rush at all.
• “I take pleasure in my downtime.

Even when I’m not working, I put in my time, but I believe my wife was concerned when we first started dating that I sat around all the time.” And after that, what? He cracks a grin. “And then the self-loathing comes in, and I have to get back to work,” says the author.

The Underground Railroad is a towering series about the ways slavery still infects America

It is unavoidably difficult for a white critic such as me to examine a work of art that is explicitly about the Black experience in America. There is a danger of coming across as condescending at best and appropriative at worst when attempting to equate the pain, trauma, and terror that often falls on Black Americans to the personal sorrows that white viewers may experience in their everyday lives, as is the case with this film. It is conceivable and even desirable for white audiences to discover personal connection in the lives of protagonists in films like as Do the Right Thing or12 Years a Slave because great art weaves universal stories out of unique realities.

1. Despite the fact that I have a terrible background, I do not live under the same crushing weight of centuries of slavery and institutional racism as so many others have.
2. Both Do the Right Thing and 12 Years a Slave are excellent films, but both urge us to look unflinchingly at the horrendous ways in which America abuses its Black residents.
3. As a result, I’d want to proceed with caution when evaluating The Underground Railroad, a 10-episode television version of Colson Whitehead’s National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.
4. In no way should it be lauded as a narrative in which anybody can identify with the characters.
5. Things about my own life and personal anguish were brought to the surface by The Underground Railroad, but I never lost sight of the fact that, while I could identify with portions of this tale, it was not my own.

Jenkins acknowledges that this is a narrative about humanity, and he allows you the opportunity to discover yourself in it without detracting from the story’s central theme – even if you don’t like what you see.

For an adaptation of a great novel by an acclaimed filmmaker,The Underground Railroadsure acts like a TV show. Good.

Ridgeway, played by Joel Edgerton, is a slave catcher who is relentlessly on Cora’s trail, until he is killed by her. Atsushi Nishijima/Amazon Studios is the photographer. When a brilliant filmmaker creates a television program, he or she is all too frequently content to merely extend their usual storytelling approach across a longer period of time than they would otherwise. A reason why Drivedirector Nicolas Winding Refn’s 10-episode Amazon seriesToo Old to Die Youngdidn’t make much of a splash when it premiered in the summer of 2019, despite the fact that it was directed by one of the most exciting young directors working today: The whole thing moved at the speed of molasses.

• This difficulty is mostly eliminated because to the Underground Railroad.
• Cora goes from place to place via an actual subterranean railroad — complete with train and everything — in an attempt to determine exactly what is wrong with each new locale she encounters.
• It’s not like Whitehead sits you down and says, “The South Carolina portion is all about the promise and final withering away of Reconstruction,” and the South Carolina chapter (the second episode of the series) is about much more than that.
• Whitehead’s concept is tied together by the following: In the series, Cora is being relentlessly chased by a slave catcher named Ridgeway (played by Joel Edgerton), who is determined to pull her back into slavery despite the fact that she is sort of going forward in time.

It is always possible for the country’s racist past to be linked to its racist present, and Whitehead’s use of Ridgeway is a far more compelling exploration of this idea than any big, heartbreaking speech Cora could give on the subject (although several of the series’ characters deliver some incredible speeches).

Each episode of the series may reasonably easily be read as a stand-alone story, with casual viewers having just the most rudimentary comprehension of the main characters and their position at the time of viewing.

They were also included in the novel, but Jenkins and his colleagues have made them a significant part of the overall experience by focusing on them as palate cleansers.

For example, the camera may zoom in for a God’s-eye view of a burning hamlet, or an episode might progress mostly without speaking until it reaches a long, gloriously talky sequence near the conclusion.

However, binge-watching The Underground Railroadwould run the risk of reducing it to the level of a pulp thriller — typically, the best shows to watch in a marathon have clearly defined episodic stories that connect up into longer, serialized stories — but binge-watching this series would run the risk of reducing it to the level of a pulp thriller.

• For comparison, Steve McQueen’s 2020 anthology series Small Axe is similar in that it introduces new people in each episode, although The Underground Railroad does not.
• The first episode has some graphic depictions of slavery, but it picks and selects which pictures to include.
• Despite making it plain that no one should ever see what is going to be seen, the sequence’s build helps the spectator to mentally prepare themselves for what they’re about to witness.
• When these tropes are in the hands of others, they might feel stale.
• The slave, a guy we’ve scarcely known up to this point, keeps his humanity at the same time as people who aren’t especially disturbed by what’s going on retain their humanity in a different sense, thanks to the efforts of the Master.
• The sound design for The Underground Railroad is likewise deserving of particular mention.
• For example, when we hear a door swinging on its rusted hinges or a blacksmith pounding away in his shop, we hear that sound a little louder in the soundtrack than we would if we were in the same setting in real life.

While Cora is standing in an apparently deserted building, the sound of a chain jangling somewhere in the background quietly disturbs her, recalling the shackles that were placed on slaves in the first episode.

TheUnderground Railroadtells a universal story about moving through PTSD — but it is still a very specific version of PTSD

Cora finds herself in several really dark situations, both physically and metaphorically. Image courtesy of Kyle Kaplan/Amazon Studios In contemplating The Underground Railroad’s frequent use of metallic sounds, I began to get why I found the series so compelling, for reasons other than its tale and storytelling. Cora’s journey struck a chord with me because it mirrored my own recent experiences of attempting to fight my identity away from a history that was threatening to swallow it whole. My whole adult existence has felt like a process of peeling back layers of rotten, awful stuff, some of which was placed upon me at my conception.

1. However, this is where the conundrum I described at the outset of this review comes into effect.
2. After all, we’ve all experienced discomfort at some time in our lives, right?
3. Wow!
4. (At least, that’s how this type of critical argument works.) It is also feasible to go in the other direction.
5. For example, John Singleton’s 1991 classicBoyz n the Hood is an incredibly well-made coming-of-age drama set in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyz n the Hood.
6. Singleton had little influence over how Boyz n the Hood would be accepted into mainstream society once it had begun to spread.
7. In this way, watching the correct movies might be seen as a form of gradual self-vindication: I am vicariously feeling the sorrow of others, and that makes me a decent person.

Take note of how frequently he places the process of perceiving brutalities, both vast and commonplace, at the core of his argument: A scenario in which a white audience watches a whipping, for example, lingers on both the white audience and the Black audience for such flogging, watching how the white spectators treat the show as if it were nothing more than window decorating for an afternoon picnic.

• The unusual temporal dilation of Whitehead’s work also serves to keep the series from having a distancing impact on the reader.
• Upon leaving the plantation, Cora travels through a number of other worlds, many of which bear unnerving resemblances to the current day in ways that disturb viewers who would be inclined to dismiss these stories as being set in the distant past.
• Despite our numerous and obvious differences, I recognized myself in Cora.
• I, too, wish to let go of my past, but I’ve found it to be more difficult than I had anticipated.
• That is an excellent forecast.
• Then, just when it seems like you’ve become comfortable with your reading of The Underground Railroad—or with any reading, for that matter—Jenkins will clip in pictures of the various Black characters from throughout the series, each of whom is looking gravely into the camera.
• We identify with the characters in the stories we read or watch.
• However, as you are watching what happens to these individuals, they are gazing straight back at you, via the camera, across the chasms of time that separate you from them.

And what do they notice when they take a glance behind them? The Underground Railroadwill premiere on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, May 14th. It is divided into ten episodes with running times ranging from 20 minutes to 77 minutes. Yes, this is true. Believe me when I say that it works.

The True History Behind Amazon Prime’s ‘Underground Railroad’

If you want to know what this country is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails,” the train’s conductor tells Cora, the fictitious protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novelThe Underground Railroad, as she walks into a boxcar destined for the North. As you race through, take a look about you to see the genuine face of America.” Cora’s vision is limited to “just blackness, mile after mile,” according to Whitehead, as she peers through the carriage’s slats. In the course of her traumatic escape from servitude, the adolescent eventually understands that the conductor’s remark was “a joke.

• Cora and Caesar, a young man enslaved on the same Georgia plantation as her, are on their way to liberation when they encounter a dark other world in which they use the railroad to go to freedom.
• ” The Underground Railroad,” a ten-part limited series premiering this week on Amazon Prime Video, is directed by Moonlight filmmaker Barry Jenkins and is based on the renowned novel by Alfred North Whitehead.
• When it comes to portraying slavery, Jenkins takes a similar approach to Whitehead’s in the series’ source material.
• “And as a result, I believe their individuality has been preserved,” Jenkins says Felix.
• The consequences of their actions are being inflicted upon them.” Here’s all you need to know about the historical backdrop that informs both the novel and the streaming adaptation of “The Underground Railroad,” which will premiere on May 14th.

Did Colson Whitehead baseThe Underground Railroadon a true story?

“The reality of things,” in Whitehead’s own words, is what he aims to portray in his work, not “the facts.” His characters are entirely made up, and the story of the book, while based on historical facts, is told in an episodic style, as is the case with most episodic fiction. This book traces Cora’s trek to freedom, describing her lengthy trip from Georgia to the Carolinas, Tennessee and Indiana.) Each step of the journey presents a fresh set of hazards that are beyond Cora’s control, and many of the people she meets suffer horrible ends.) What distinguishes The Underground Railroad from previous works on the subject is its presentation of the titular network as a physical rather than a figurative transportation mechanism.

According to Whitehead, who spoke to NPR in 2016, this alteration was prompted by his “childhood belief” that the Underground Railroad was a “literal tunnel beneath the earth”—a misperception that is surprisingly widespread.

Webber Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons While the Underground Railroad was composed of “local networks of anti-slavery people,” both Black and white, according to Pulitzer Prize–winning historianEric Foner, the Underground Railroad actually consisted of “local networks of anti-slavery people, both Black and white, who assisted fugitives in various ways,” from raising funds for the abolitionist cause to taking cases to court to concealing runaways in safe houses.

Although the actual origins of the name are unknown, it was in widespread usage by the early 1840s.

Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, argues that the Underground Railroad should be referred to as the “Abolitionist Underground” rather than the “Underground Railroad” because the people who ran it “were not just ordinary, well-meaning Northern white citizens, activists, particularly in the free Black community,” she says.

As Foner points out, however, “the majority of the initiative, and the most of the danger, fell on the shoulders of African-Americans who were fleeing.” a portrait taken in 1894 of Harriet Jacobs, who managed to hide in an attic for nearly seven years after fleeing from slavery.

Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons “Recognizable historical events and patterns,” according to Foner, are used by Whitehead in a way that is akin to that of the late Toni Morrison.

According to Sinha, these effects may be seen throughout Cora’s journey.

According to Foner, author of the 2015 bookGateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, “the more you know about this history, the more you can appreciate what Whitehead is doing in fusing the past and the present, or perhaps fusing the history of slavery with what happened after the end of slavery.”

What time period doesThe Underground Railroadcover?

Caesar (Aaron Pierre) and Cora (Thuso Mbedu) believe they’ve discovered a safe haven in South Carolina, but their new companions’ behaviors are based on a belief in white supremacy, as seen by their deeds. Kyle Kaplan is a producer at Amazon Studios. The Underground Railroad takes place around the year 1850, which coincides with the adoption of the Fugitive Slave Act. Runaways who had landed in free states were targeted by severe regulations, and those who supported them were subjected to heavy punishments.

In spite of the fact that it was intended to hinder the Underground Railroad, according to Foner and Sinha, the legislation actually galvanized—and radicalized—the abolitionist cause.

“Every time the individual switches to a different condition, the novel restarts,” the author explains in his introduction.

” Cora’s journey to freedom is replete with allusions to pivotal moments in post-emancipation history, ranging from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the mid-20th century to white mob attacks on prosperous Black communities in places like Wilmington, North Carolina (targeted in 1898), and Tulsa, Oklahoma (targeted in 1898).

According to Spencer Crew, former president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and emeritus director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, this “chronological jumble” serves as a reminder that “the abolition of slavery does not herald the abolition of racism and racial attacks.” This problem has survived in many forms, with similar effects on the African American community,” says the author.

What real-life events doesThe Underground Railroaddramatize?

Though they believe they’ve discovered a safe haven in South Carolina, Caesar (Aaron Pierre) and Cora (Thuso Mbedu) soon discover that their newfound friends’ acts are motivated by a conviction in white supremacy. The Amazon Studios team, led by Kyle Kaplan, When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, it was during this time that the Underground Railroad came into being. Runaways who had landed in free states were targeted by severe regulations, and those who supported them were subjected to heavy punishments.

According to Foner and Sinha, the measure, which was intended to hinder the Underground Railroad, instead galvanized—and radicalized—the abolitionist cause.

“Every time a character moves to a different state, the novel restarts,” the author noted in his introduction.

Cora’s journey to freedom is replete with allusions to pivotal events in post-emancipation history, ranging from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the mid-20th century to white mob attacks on prosperous Black communities in places like Wilmington, North Carolina (targeted in 1898), and Tulsa, Oklahoma (targeted in 1898).

According to Spencer Crew, former president of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and emeritus director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, this “chronological jumble” serves as a reminder that “the abolition of slavery does not herald the abolition of racism and racial attacks.” These challenges continue to exist in various forms, with comparable consequences for the African-American community.

”

How doesThe Underground Railroadreflect the lived experience of slavery?

“How can I construct a psychologically plausible plantation?” Whitehead is said to have pondered himself while writing on the novel. According to theGuardian, the author decided to think about “people who have been tortured, brutalized, and dehumanized their whole lives” rather than depicting “a pop culture plantation where there’s one Uncle Tom and everyone is just incredibly nice to each other.” For the remainder of Whitehead’s statement, “Everyone will be battling for the one additional mouthful of food in the morning, fighting for the tiniest piece of property.” According to me, this makes sense: “If you put individuals together who have been raped and tortured, this is how they would behave.” Despite the fact that she was abandoned as a child by her mother, who appears to be the only enslaved person to successfully escape Ridgeway’s clutches, Cora lives in the Hob, a derelict building reserved for outcasts—”those who had been crippled by the overseers’ punishments,.

who had been broken by the labor in ways you could see and in ways you couldn’t see, who had lost their wits,” as Whitehead describes Cora is played by Mbedu (center).

With permission from Amazon Studios’ Atsushi Nishijima While attending a rare birthday party for an older enslaved man, Cora comes to the aid of an orphaned youngster who mistakenly spills some wine down the sleeve of their captor, prompting him to flee.

Cora agrees to accompany Caesar on his journey to freedom a few weeks later, having been driven beyond the threshold of endurance by her punishment and the bleakness of her ongoing life as a slave.

As a result, those who managed to flee faced the potential of severe punishment, he continues, “making it a perilous and risky option that individuals must choose with care.” By making Cora the central character of his novel, Whitehead addresses themes that especially plagued enslaved women, such as the fear of rape and the agony of carrying a child just to have the infant sold into captivity elsewhere.

The account of Cora’s sexual assault in the novel is heartbreakingly concise, with the words “The Hob ladies stitched her up” serving as the final word.

Although not every enslaved women was sexually assaulted or harassed, they were continuously under fear of being raped, mistreated, or harassed, according to the report.

With permission from Amazon Studios’ Atsushi Nishijima The novelist’s account of the Underground Railroad, according to Sinha, “gets to the core of how this venture was both tremendously courageous and terribly perilous.” She believes that conductors and runaways “may be deceived at any time, in situations that they had little control over.” Cora, on the other hand, succinctly captures the liminal state of escapees.

“What a world it is.

“Was she free of bondage or still caught in its web?” “Being free had nothing to do with shackles or how much room you had,” Cora says.

The location seemed enormous despite its diminutive size.

In his words, “If you have to talk about the penalty, I’d prefer to see it off-screen.” “It’s possible that I’ve been reading this for far too long, and as a result, I’m deeply wounded by it.

view of it is that it feels a little bit superfluous to me.

In his own words, “I recognized that my job was going to be coupling the brutality with its psychological effects—not shying away from the visual representation of these things, but focusing on what it meant to the people.” “Can you tell me how they’re fighting back?

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