Behind-The-Scene Experiments In The Underground Railroad, By Colon Whitehead

In his novel, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead uses the events in his book to show his audience the difficulty that slaves experienced in their pursuit of true freedom. Through the use of fiction, Whitehead explores the imaginative possibilities beyond the conditions of the past or present (Wild). Although the story and characters are fictional, Whitehead’s use of actual historical data–slave interviews, the syphilis and population control experiments, real “wanted” ads in the beginning of chapters–demonstrates his ethos to the audience, suggesting that his characters’ feelings and experiences were shared by actual slaves.

Whitehead’s story follows Cora, a slave girl who escapes the plantation in order to find her place in the world. Even though she successfully gets away from the plantation that imprisoned her since birth, Cora realizes that she has not fully broken free from
Cora, Caesar and the rest of the colored population believed that they were finally free in South Carolina, since they were able to intermingle with whites and even make their own living from jobs. As the protagonist soon discovers, however, white people still continue their oppression, albeit now in covert ways. When Cora and Caesar find out about the behind-the-scene experiments on the black population, they are overwhelmed with a feeling of helplessness; they cannot do anything about the situation, since hardly anyone would take their word over the doctor’s behind the tests. Whitehead’s passage about human testing reinforces the recurring theme of slaves’ inability to escape oppression. Even with knowledge of the experimentation, Cora and Caesar were powerless to stop the white man’s will in South Carolina, similar to how they were unable to stop it in their days on the