The Underground Railroad, a 2016 historical fiction novel by Colson Whitehead, chronicles the life of protagonist Cora, who is enslaved in antebellum Georgia. Interspersed in the narrative are chapters that follow other characters in the same way. These diverse characters—including Cora’s mother Mabel, an enslaved man named Caesar, and an enslaver named Ridgeway—have meaningful roles in Cora’s story.

The novel won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and its exploration of the US’s white supremacist roots places it in the company of other novels by Whitehead, including Harlem Shuffle (2021) and The Nickel Boys (2019). With its literalist interpretation of the historical Underground Railroad, The Underground Railroad also evidences Whitehead’s interest in speculative fiction, which likewise informs novels such as The Intuitionist (1999) and Zone One (2011).

Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain extensive discussion of the enslavement of Black Americans, anti-Black racism, medicalized torture, eugenics, lynching, and implied rape. In addition, the source text uses outdated and offensive slurs and epithets to refer to Black people, which are reproduced in this guide only in direct quotes.

Plot Summary

Cora is an enslaved girl on a Georgia plantation that is named “Randall” after the family that owns it. Cora’s mother, Mabel, disappeared from the plantation when Cora was 10 and has never resurfaced. When Cora is 16 or 17, Caesar, an enslaved man Cora does not know, approaches her with a proposal to liberate themselves from enslavement, and she rebuffs him.

Later on, Cora comes to the aid of Chester, a young and innocent enslaved boy. She saves Chester when Terrance Randall, one of the plantation patriarch’s sons, arbitrarily decides to interrupt a festival among the enslaved laborers by beating the boy. Cora receives Chester’s blows for him and sustains a star-shaped injury on her head, which will pain her with headaches for the rest of her life. As Terrance Randall prepares to take over management of the entire plantation, he keeps a sinister and slightly lascivious watch over Cora. Cora therefore decides to seek freedom with Caesar.

Caesar arranges a plan with a local sympathetic merchant named Fletcher, who is an Underground Railroad operative. Caesar and Cora set out but are surprised by Cora’s friend Lovey, who has decided to surreptitiously follow them. Soon after, a group of white pig hunters then waylays the trio. During the ensuing altercation, Cora slams a rock into the head of one of the hunters, but the hunters drag a screaming Lovey away into the woods.

Caesar and Cora resume their flight and eventually make it to the home of Fletcher, who informs them that Lovey’s absence has been noted and that a large-scale effort to bring Cora and Caesar to “justice” for mortally wounding one of the hunters has already begun. Despite this, Fletcher brings Cora and Caesar to an Underground Railroad station. The Underground Railroad is a network of actual locomotives that runs underground and conveys freedom seekers to various destinations.

Meanwhile, Terrance Randall enlists the services of Ridgeway, a fearsome and notoriously brutal enslaver whom Old Randall once dispatched to capture Mabel. A unique animus to track, hunt, and deliver Cora back to Randall propels Ridgeway due to having failed in that prior mission.

After a ride on the underground locomotive, Cora and Caesar arrive in South Carolina. The state, known for its investment in the “racial uplift” of Black people, is unlike anything Cora has ever encountered. She is taught and ministered to by white proctors and doctors, learns how to read, and begins living in a dormitory. However, Sam, the local Underground Railroad operative, soon informs Cora and Caesar that the doctors are performing medical experiments on the Black population: injecting men with syphilis, sterilizing women, and planning for the strategic genocide of the ancestral lines that they have deemed most incorrigible.

Ridgeway arrives in South Carolina, but Sam cannot reach Caesar to warn him: Caesar is captured, and a lynch mob later drags him from the jail and tears him apart. By this time, Cora is locked beneath Sam’s home in the Underground Railroad station. When she makes her way to the station’s entrance, she can hear and feel that Sam’s house is burning down.

Cora spends an indeterminate number of days trapped in the station until an express line happens to come in and its conductor picks her up. She is conveyed to North Carolina, where she is reluctantly taken in by a man named Martin Delany. On their way to Martin’s home, Martin bids Cora to look at the Freedom Trail: A road whose trees are heavy with countless maimed and lynched Black people. Martin has a wife, Ethel, who loathes Cora and predicts that she will get the family killed for harboring a freedom seeker.

Cora spends about four months locked in the Delanys’ attic hatch, as North Carolina has become too dangerous even to attempt the covert transport of Cora beyond state lines. From a peephole, Cora watches the white community of North Carolina give speeches about the dangerous Black “horde,” put on a racist show, and lynch a young Black woman.

Eventually, the Delanys’ house girl informs regulators of her suspicions that they are harboring a freedom seeker, and Cora is hauled out onto the porch. There, she meets Ridgeway, who has unexpectedly discovered his quarry. He takes her away in chains while the Delanys are lashed to the great oak in the middle of the park that is used for ritual lynchings. The mob descends upon them with rocks.

Ridgeway has assembled a small band consisting of a white man named Boseman and a 10-year-old Black boy named Homer. The party picks up another freedom seeker named Jasper, who refuses to communicate with anyone and instead ceaselessly sings hymns. The party travels through an area of Tennessee that has been badly scorched by a fire. When Ridgeway tires of Jasper’s singing, he shoots him in the face in front of Cora.

Ridgeway then purchases Cora a new dress and marches her, in chains, into a town to have supper. There, she is spotted by an Underground Railroad operative named Royal. Later, Royal and his partner Red, along with Justin, a freedom seeker they have rescued, ambush Ridgeway’s party. In the ensuing altercation, Red kills Boseman by shooting him in the stomach, and Homer skulks off into the darkness of the woods. The party shackles Ridgeway to the wagon, and Cora lands three kicks to the enslaver's face before leaving.

After another ride on the Underground Railroad, Royal brings Cora to Valentine farm in Indiana. John Valentine, a biracial man who can pass as white, has used his privilege to secure the farm and buy nearby land for Black farmers. A thriving Black community has therefore sprung up, and Cora finds some of the first true happiness she has ever known. She reluctantly begins a romance with Royal, and they sleep together once.

Royal also takes Cora to an Underground Railroad ghost station nearby, which contains only a handcar and a tunnel too small for a locomotive. Royal does not know who made the station or where it goes, but he tells Cora that maybe she can figure it out.

A renowned multiracial orator named Lander is a prominent presence at Valentine. He is a genius who received his education from a prestigious white institution, and he now travels the country delivering abolitionist speeches. During his turn at the lectern during a gathering at Valentine farm, he is shot by a white mob that has come to destroy the farm. Royal jumps up to aid Lander and is shot three times in the back. Before he dies in Cora’s arms, he tells her to go to the station.

Ridgeway is among the white mob, however, and he and Homer capture Cora. Ridgeway forces her at gunpoint to lead him to the station, which he does not know is a ghost station. She acquiesces but then wrestles with him on the stairs, leaving her with a serious leg wound and Ridgeway with a bleeding wound in the back of his head and a bone jutting out of his thigh. As Homer ministers to Ridgeway, Cora operates the handcar to bear herself down the tunnel, emerging in unknown territory where she is picked up by a friendly man named Ollie. This is the last readers see of Cora.