Feb 17, 2023
National Book Award winner, MacArthur fellow, and New York Times
bestselling author Colson Whitehead visits Google to discuss his
novel, "The Underground Railroad."
The novel tells the story of Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation
in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on
the cusp of womanhood, where greater pain awaits. And so when
Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her
to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity
and escapes with him.
In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground
Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a
secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern
soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the
next, encountering strange yet familiar iterations of her own world
at each stop.
As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum
era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction
of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The
Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will
to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the
history we all share.
Originally published in September of 2016.
Visit YouTube.com/TalksatGoogle to watch the video.