Cora is a teenager on a Georgia cotton plantation, working a patch of dirt her grandmother claimed, abandoned by a mother who ran and never sent word. When Caesar asks her to go with him, she says no, then says yes. Whitehead’s move is to make the underground railroad an actual railroad — boxcars, engineers, tunnels hacked out under the fields — and then use the stops the way a fabulist would. Each state she surfaces in is a different American experiment on Black people. South Carolina looks like uplift and turns out to be sterilization and medical trials. North Carolina has outlawed Black existence entirely and hangs the evidence along the road. Behind her the whole way is Ridgeway, a slave catcher whose fixation on her is really about the mother who got away. It won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.