The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

one might think one’s misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.

Cora didn’t know what optimistic meant. She asked the other girls that night if they were familiar with the word. None of them had heard it before. She decided that it meant trying.

The only thing colored folks hadn’t built was the tree. God had made that, for the town to bend to evil ends.

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

“And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes—believes with all its heart—that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn’t exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

Perhaps they were on the verge of some new order, on the verge of clasping reason to disorder, of putting all the lessons of their history to bear on the future. Or perhaps time, as it will, lent the occasion a gravity that it did not possess, and everything was as Lander insisted: They were deluded.