Cora is a slave on a Georgia plantation. Her master is the worst kind – beating a man to death for the crime of bumping into him; thinking up cruel and unusual punishments for his caught runaways. Even life in the slave quarters is not great (except when the old-timer decides it is probably his birthday – no one really knows – and thus deems it time for an all-night celebration). Might makes right, as Cora learns trying to defend her mother’s old garden patch against a new big fellow who wants to put his doghouse there. Cora is soon excluded from the group and forced to live in “the Hob”, the worst slave cabin where the misfits live.

Part of why Cora is shunned is due to her mother, Mabel, who ran away without any warning to anyone several years earlier. If her mother didn’t take her, must be a bad egg, eh? The best slave catchers in the business are enlisted but no one is able to find Mabel, who everyone assumes must be living a life of easy freedom somewhere up North. Not all is lost for Cora though – when another slave named Caesar makes contact with the underground railroad and plans to leave, he invites Cora along as good luck. Since the mother succeeded, maybe the daughter will too.

The railroad in this story is an actual train, running through a system of underground tunnels. So, yeah, this book kind of falls more in the “magic realism” camp than “historical fiction”, I think. Kind of makes me wary of some of the other portrayals. Like the plantation master – I always thought slaves were like money in the bank, so it made terrible sense to wantonly abuse and kill them. Farmers don’t go berserk and trash their tractor when it gets a flat tire. 

Cora does get North eventually, after a few stopovers in different-yet-equally bad states.

• South Carolina: seems great at first; all slaves are property of the state who takes charge of their education and employment. But then you realize how all the jobs are menial/degrading (house servants or museum actors), and the women are encouraged to be sterilized. The mentally ill are quietly killed and given to anatomists. “All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.”
• Quite a bit better in SC than in North Carolina: they just outlawed black people, who are hung at the Friday night town festival if caught.  Afraid of a racial revolt, the masters now prefer poor white immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere. Secret police have powers to raid houses and search for blacks secretly in hiding, Anne Frank style.
• Indiana: a freed black farm owner, Valentine, makes it a haven for other free and runaway blacks. But the nearby white settlements fear an uprising, and violently make the first move.

So we end with Cora on the move again, this time to way out West in California.

And we learn what really happened to Mabel. She DID try to run … but felt guilty after only a few miles and started to make her way back. Tragically, she blundered into a cottonmouth snake and was bit and soon died on the spot. Her body was never found.

Published April 7, 2026