More unspeakable miseries, a morass of depravity. Now Cora is a stray, living in the Hob, a shack for damaged women. We meet 15-year-old Cora, the granddaughter of Ajarry, daughter of Mabel who disappeared on a run for freedom when Cora was 11. Soon - several decades and a few pages later - we are deep inside an American slave compound, a timeless succession of miseries meted out by White slave owners and the people who work for them. There’s a once-upon-a-time quality to the novel’s opening pages, as Whitehead guides us through the initial back story of a woman named Ajarry sold in Ouidah by Dahomeyan raiders in the late 1800s. Funny how those childhood confusions stick around: decades later, the author of “The Intuitionist” and MacArthur Fellow returned to that childhood fantasy to tell a fable of life in hell. The story goes that when Colson Whitehead was a child, he thought the Underground Railroad was an actual train that ran underground. “The Underground Railroad is bigger than its operators - it’s all of you, too.
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