Kidd’s sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world-and it is now the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey-hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor-engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
Matters do not go as planned-Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her.
When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood-where even greater pain awaits. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia.
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