Emma’s Reviews > The Underground Railroad > Status Update

Wow, this book. It shows how enslaved people might escape a plantation only to be put under new oppressive systems. They’re treated as some sort of curiosity or experiment, not autonomous human beings. Also, Cora’s job at the museum is so angering 🙄

“Truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach” (119).

“Every dream a dream of escape even when it didn’t look like it. When it was a dream of new shoes” (57).

“By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without” (28).

“Then it comes, always—the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude” (29).

“And before the slave part of her caught up with the human part of her…” (34).