What Am I Reading – Chapter Forty-One

Hi Everybody,

I hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving! I sure did with family and friends as we yelled at the Lions and cheered on the Wolverines! Because I did so much, I haven’t had much time to read, yet I finished The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson today.

However, I did start a new book fairly recently, and I would like to share it with all of you today.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is a unique take on the famous network used by slaves in the early- to mid-19th century to obtain freedom. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is terrible there, but even more so for Cora since she’s considered to be an outcast by other Africans. Additionally, she’s coming into womanhood, where greater pains are to come. When Caesar arrives on the plantation from Virginia, he tells her about the Underground Railroad – a secret network of tracks and tunnels that engineers and conductors operate beneath the Southern soil. They decide to take the risk and leave. Things don’t go as planned since Cora kills a white boy as he tries to capture her. In addition, they travel to South Carolina – a state that may not be as friendly to black people as it seems. And finally, they are chased by Ridgeway – a relentless slave catcher. Nonetheless, Cora still embarks on the literal railroad to freedom.

I’m only about 50 pages in, and even though I’m having a hard time getting into it, I find it interesting so far. I’m in where the book explains Cora’s backstory in great detail. She became an outcast among her own peers through a combination of what her mother had done and what she had to do to ward off people from getting her land on the plantation. This is all to explain why she decides to escape. Because of this exposition, it’s pretty slow. That’s why I’m having a hard time being invested in the story thus far. I hope that will change once Cora and Caesar travel through the literal Underground Railroad.

We have now come to the end of the forty-first chapter of “What Am I Reading?”

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