The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible.

Not long after it became known that Cora’s womanhood had come into flower, Edward, Pot, and two hands from the southern half dragged her behind the smokehouse. If anyone heard or saw, they did not intervene.

By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without.

Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night.

the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.

James rarely addressed his niggers, who had been taught by the lash to keep working and ignore his presence.

If 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 slave mothers said, Mind yourself or Mister Ridgeway will come for you. The slave masters said, Send for Ridgeway.

30 DOLLARS REWARD will be given to any person who will deliver to me, or confine in any gaol in the state so that I get her again, a likely yellow NEGRO GIRL 18 years of age who ran away nine months past. She is an artfully lively girl, and will, no doubt, attempt to pass as a free person, has a noticeable scar on her elbow, occasioned by a burn. I have been informed she is lurking in and about Edenton. BENJ. P. WELLS MURFREESBORO, JAN. 5, 1812