The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

factory manufactured locomotive engines—Caesar wondered whether they would one day be used by the underground railroad.

“There’s a train in a few days. If we want to take it.” He said that last part as if he knew her attitude. “Perhaps the next one.”

they talked for hours over whether it was wiser to depart the dark south immediately or see what else South Carolina had to offer.

Cora agitating for the train and Caesar arguing for the local potential.

The third train came and went, and now this fourth one would, too. “Maybe we should stay for good,” Cora said. Caesar was silent.

“Maybe we should stay,” Caesar repeated. It was decided.

Cora

on her way home when she witnessed an incident.

For an instant, Cora was back on Randall and about to be educated in another atrocity.

“My babies, they’re taking away my babies!” The onlookers sighed at the familiar refrain. They had heard it so many times in plantation life, the lament of the mother over her tormented offspring.

it was a long night for Cora as her thoughts returned to the woman’s screams, and the ghosts she called her own.

Two days after the incident at the social, Cora was still troubled. She asked after the screaming woman. Miss Lucy nodded in sympathy. “You’re referring to Gertrude,” she said. “I know it was upsetting. She’s fine.

She’d seen the Museum of Natural Wonders many times on her strolls but never knew what the squat limestone building was

Inside, she was taken through a door that was off-limits to the public

she saw her first microscopes. They squatted on the tables like black

frogs. Then she was introduced to Mr. Fields, the curator of Living History.

“Been eating better since you came, I see,” he said. “To be expected, but you’ll do fine.”

He explained the business of museums. In this one, the focus was on American history—for a young nation, there was so much to educate the public about. The untamed flora and fauna of the North American continent, the minerals and other splendors of the world beneath their feet.

Like a railroad, the museum permitted them to see the rest of the country

And to see its people. “People like you,” M...

Scenes from Darkest Africa. A hut dominated the exhibit, its walls wooden poles lashed together under a peaked thatch roof. Cora retreated into its shadows when she needed a break from the faces. There was a cooking fire, the flames represented by shards of red glass; a small, roughly made bench; and assorted tools, gourds, and shells.

Life on the Slave Ship evoked the Atlantic sky. Here Cora stalked a section of a frigate’s deck, around the mast, various small barrels, and coils of rope. Her African costume was a colorful wrap; her sailor outfit made her look like a street rascal, with a tunic, trousers, and leather boots. The story of the African boy went that after he came aboard, he helped out on deck with various small tasks, a kind of apprentice.

Typical Day on the Plantation allowed her to sit at a spinning wheel and rest her feet, the seat as sure as her old block of sugar maple. Chickens stuffed with sawdust pecked at the ground; from time to time Cora tossed imaginary seed at them. She had numerous suspicions about the accuracy of the African and ship scenes but was an authority in this

room. She shared her critique.

Typical Day’s wardrobe, which was made of coarse, authentic negro cloth. She burned with shame twice

a day when she stripped and got into her costume.

Also recruited from Miss Handler’s schoolhouse, Isis and Betty were similar in age and build to Cora. They shared costumes.

The children banged on the glass and pointed at the types in a disrespectful fashion,

The patrons sometimes yelled things at their pantomimes, comments that the girls couldn’t make out but that gave every indication of rude suggestions.

THE exhibits opened the same day as the hospital, part of a celebration trumpeting the town’s recent accomplishments. The new mayor had been elected on the progress ticket

Have you considered birth control?”

Dr. Stevens explained, to educate folks about a new surgical technique wherein the tubes inside a woman were severed to prevent the growth of a baby. The procedure was simple, permanent, and without risk.

Teaching the surgery to local doctors and offering its gift to the colored population was part of the reason he was hired.

“The choice is yours, of course,” the doctor said. “As of this week, it is mandatory for some in the state. Colored women who have already birthed more than two children, in the name of population control.

But nobody wanted to speak on the true disposition of the world. And no one wanted to hear it. Certainly not the white monsters on the other side of the exhibit at that very moment, pushing their greasy snouts against the window, sneering and hooting.

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.

rate, but created equal was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn’t understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men. Not if they snatched away what belonged to other people, whether it was something you could hold in your hand, like dirt, or something you could not, like freedom.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that’s what you do when you take away someone’s babies—steal their future.

Caesar didn’t know why the station agent wanted to see them. Sam had signaled as he passed the saloon and told him, “Tonight.”

“Is there a train coming in?”

“I know you don’t want to take it,” Sam said. “It’s no matter.” “We decided to stay,” Caesar said.

“It made me happy to see you skipping the trains and making a go of things here,” the station agent said. “But you may reconsider after my story.”

His patients believed they were being treated for blood ailments. The tonics the hospital administered, however, were merely sugar water. In fact, the niggers were participants in a study of the latent and tertiary stages of syphilis.

“They think you’re helping them?”

“It’s important research,” Bertram informed him. “Discover how a disease spreads,

The syphilis program was one of many studies and experiments under way at the colored wing of the hospital. Did Sam know that the Igbo tribe of the African continent is predisposed to nervous disorders? Suicide and black moods?

What if we performed adjustments to the niggers’ breeding patterns and removed those of melancholic tendency? Managed other attitudes, such as sexual aggression and violent natures? We could protect our women and daughters from their jungle urges,

America has imported and bred so many Africans that in many states the whites are outnumbered. For that reason alone, emancipation is impossible. With strategic sterilization—first the women but both sexes in time—we could free them from bondage without fear that they’d butcher us in our sleep. The

Controlled sterilization, research into communicable diseases, the perfection of new surgical techniques on the socially unfit—was it any wonder the best medical talents in the country were flocking to South Carolina?