I read mostly for pleasure. I enjoy learning new things. I enjoy a good story. I enjoy spending time with characters who are going on adventures even when they are hard. But from time to time I pick up a book that I know won’t be pleasurable. I knew when I picked up “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead that it would be hard to read. But even knowing that, I underestimated it. I hated reading this book. I hated the language used, I hated the inhumanity shown, I had to force myself to return to it each time. That doesn’t mean it’s not a good book. There are things that a person should hate, uncomfortable things that need to be as real as possible to a person.

After world war 2, one thing that happened was that civilians in Germany were forced to tour the death camps. They were forced to see with their own eyes what had been happening, what they had allowed to happen. We have let the wound in America fester so long that the tours of those places is not possible in that way. We can look at the White House and know that it was built by slaves, but the evil of that is lost to history. What we see is the safe version that we have created. The one with the blood and tears washed away. I have little doubt that the Germans who toured the camps to see what they had supported hated it. But the first step in addressing a wound isn’t to cover it up with bandages, but to clean it.

For someone who has benefited in a thousand small ways from the enslavement of other people, “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead is perhaps as close to those tours as one can get. And just like the people who toured those camps, I didn’t choose that suffering. I wasn’t alive when the worst of it happened. And yet the cost of looking at it, of understanding the suffering caused, is important because it makes much more clear your obligation. That obligation isn’t guilt. Guild does no one any good. It isn’t even the obligation of reparations, though it is an argument worth having. It is the obligation to look evil in the eye and decide to fight it. The obligation that all good people had to stand up to the things that are wrong as call them wrong.

Most of the time I these reviews, I describe the plot of the book in significant detail. I will not do that here. That is because there is a cohesive story here it shows you the many types of atrocity that was committed. To show the many ways that people were oppressed and hurt. It begins with Cora, who is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Her mother escaped the plantation when she was a child, and even among the slaves she is an outcast.

But she is given a chance. One of the newly arrived slaves tells her he plans to escape to the Underground Railroad, and she goes with him. As they are trying to escape, they are nearly captured and Cora kills a white boy. This largely seals her fate. If she is captured and returned, she will not only be killed but hurt badly before she is killed. It also makes the people who are hunting her far more determined than they would otherwise be.

Each section of the book has her stopping at one part of the Underground Railroad. In some places she seems safe, and in others she is barely more than a prisoner. She discovers that safety is sometimes a lie and sometimes simply an illusion. And what makes the books so hard to read is the understanding that while the specifics of this book are fiction, the events are almost certainly all true. Whether it is medical experiments performed on black population in the name of eugenics or the all too common rape or simply not allowing people the chance to learn to read, it all happened.

“The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and rightfully so. Yet this isn’t a book you go into looking for an adventurous escape. It’s not even a book you go into to learn more about the institution and laws of slavery. Much of what happens in this book I already knew in the abstract. How can one live in America and not know? But this book makes you feel it. It reminds us of the scars, both literal and figurative, that don’t heal. Of crimes that have been committed and can never be atoned for. You can’t undo the damage. You can’t bring back the dead or even undo the economic impact. But that doesn’t absolve us of the need to try to it doesn’t give us the right to ignore it or pretend that the scars aren’t still there. So read the book. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s unpleasant in the same way that many things that need to be done are unpleasant.