Colson Whitehead is the author eight novels and two works on non-fiction, including “The Underground Railroad,” which received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Carnegie Medal, the Heartland Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Hurston-Wright Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys” received the Pulitzer Prize, The Kirkus Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. “The Underground Railroad” has been adapted into a TV series for Amazon by Barry Jenkins and is now available for viewing on Amazon Prime Video. It chronicles a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South and stars Thuso Mbedu and Aaron Pierre. (amazon, 2021)

Cora is 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 novel, 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, like Gulliver, 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.

It is a fictional “alternative reality” story of people attempting an escape from slavery in the southern United States in the 1800s. In reality, “The Underground Railroad” was a network of abolitionists, hidden routes, and safe houses that helped enslaved African-Americans escape to freedom in the early to mid-1800s. In the novel and the series, it is an actual railroad complete with engineers, conductors, tracks, and tunnels.

First impression: There are a total of ten episodes, all released on May 14, 2021. After watching the first, I doubt I will watch the rest of the series. I love historical dramas, but this one has too much graphic violence for me. I have not read the book, so my opinion is based solely on the first episode of the television series. While I understand the director/producer wanted to make the African American slavery experience as real as possible on screen, for me the whipping and burning alive scenes of a slave who attempted escape were too graphic. These topics are not new to me, I have read and watched other films about them, but I think I will skip this one. If the use of gratuitous violence does not bother you, this is an interesting series on the subject of slavery.