The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.

niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn’t be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it’d still be his. If the white man wasn’t destined to take this new world, he wouldn’t own it now.

The whites came to this land for a fresh start and to escape the tyranny of their masters, just as the freemen had fled theirs. But the ideals they held up for themselves, they denied others.

Slaves should be submissive to their masters in everything—and be well-pleasing.”

All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

“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.

“For we are Africans in America. Something new in the history of the world, without models for what we will become.

The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.