

“It’s not something I have to hit the reader on the head with, it’s there,” Whitehead told Scroll.in at the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival, where he was speaking about his novel. Rogue blacks who did not surrender could be shot.” In another incident, evocative of public shootings such as in Charleston, North Carolina in 2015, a room full of black people is attacked by a whooping group of white men with guns. In North Carolina, as Cora hides in the attic of a house, Whitehead writes: “Free blacks carried proof of manumission or risked being conveyed into the clutches of slavery sometimes they were smuggled to the auction block anyway. Reading about the horrors of racial violence in the book, it’s hard to miss the parallels to present-day America, particularly the brutality of law enforcement. Through the brutality of Cora’s life on the plantation and her harrowing yet fiercely tenacious quest for freedom, chased at every step by a terrifyingly cruel slave catcher, Whitehead presents a damning portrait of a period of American history. In Whitehead’s hands, the Underground Railroad – as the secret network of escape routes and safe houses for black slaves was known as in mid-19th century America – becomes a physical train. When it was finally published in 2016, the inventive and sensitive historical novel about Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia and her escape to the North, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The American author first thought of writing the story in 2000 but felt he wasn’t a good enough writer to pull it off.

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