![]() ![]() The townspeople lynch Martin and Ethel and Ridgeway recaptures Cora.Ī brief chapter tells the story of Ethel’s life. While Ethel is nursing her back to health, slave catchers raid the house. Cora falls ill after months of hiding in the attic. Cora watches these lynchings in the park across the street from her attic window. In reaction to slave rebellions, the white population sold all of its slaves to other southern states and is in the process of lynching any last black people they find within state borders. North Carolina has recently established a genocidal society. There, she hides in the attic of a white couple named Martin and Ethel. In the next chapter, Cora travels on the Underground Railroad to North Carolina. When Terrance Randall enlists him to find Cora, and he learns she is Mabel’s daughter, he becomes obsessed with finding her and eradicating the Underground Railroad from the South. He was hired by the older Randall to find Mabel when she ran away years ago, but failed. Ridgeway has built up a reputation for being the most effective slave catcher in the South, often traveling to the far northern states to recapture runaway slaves. The novel interrupts the saga of Cora’s escape to introduce Arnold Ridgeway, a feared slave catcher. Cora, however, escapes to the Underground Railroad once more. Before Sam, Cora, and Caesar can decide what to do with this news, Ridgeway, a feared slave catcher, finds them in South Carolina. Sam overhears the sinister truth of South Carolina, however, and shares it with the pair: the government program includes forced sterilization of black women and a syphilis study of black men without their consent. The two attend social dances and begin to settle in, putting off the next leg of their journey as they adjust to freedom. Under this scheme, Cora learns to read and write as she works first as a nanny for a family called the Andersons and then as a living model in an exhibit on American history in a government-funded museum. They learn that the government in South Carolina has begun buying up slaves and setting them up with jobs for a wage, rooms in dormitories, and health care, essentially allowing them to live as free people. Fletcher, who sends them on their first journey on the Underground Railroad.Īrriving in South Carolina, the station agent, Sam, welcomes them, and provides them with the alibis of Bessie Carpenter and Christian Markson. Lovey is captured and taken back to Randall, but Cora and Caesar manage to escape to the home of a white abolitionist named Mr. In the altercation, Cora kills one of them, a teenage boy, in self-defense. ![]() Shortly after, a group of pig hunters finds them in the woods. Lovey, Cora’s friend, suspects they plan to escape and insists on going with them. One night, Cora and Caesar set out to cross the swamp that surrounds the plantation. After Cora recovers from her wounds, she makes up her mind to escape with Caesar. Both Cora and Chester are brutally whipped as punishment. The slaves celebrate Old Jockey’s birthday and Cora tries to protect a boy named Chester from a beating at the hands of their master, Terrance Randall. She declines, thinking it is a joke or a trap. When Cora is a teenager, another slave, Caesar, approaches Cora with a plan to escape. She becomes a stray, growing up to suffer sexual assault and social derision at the hands of other slaves. Alone on the plantation, Cora proves her independence and determination by protecting Ajarry’s legacy, the vegetable plot, from the intrusions of another slave, Blake, and his dog. When Cora is still a young girl, Mabel escapes Randall without her daughter, who is relegated to Hob, the cabin for slave outcasts. The plot picks up with Cora, Ajarry’s granddaughter. Ajarry dies as a slave of an aneurysm while picking cotton. Ajarry’s one small act of liberation on Randall is to begin a vegetable plot on a small piece of land between slave cabins that her daughter Mabel and eventually her granddaughter Cora will inherit. She takes several husbands and gives birth to a handful of children, but none survive except one named Mabel. ![]() Separated from her family and reduced to her value on the auction block, Ajarry ends up in the southern state of Georgia on the Randall tobacco plantation. The novel The Underground Railroad opens with the story of Ajarry, a young woman who is captured by slave traders on the African continent and sold in America.
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