During the ensuing altercation, Cora slams a rock into the head of one of the hunters, a 12-year-old boy who has attempted to subdue her. However, a group of white pig hunters waylays the trio. Cora and Caesar allow Lovey to stay with them. He and Cora set out but are surprised by Cora’s friend Lovey, who has decided to surreptitiously follow them. With this change of events, Cora flees with Caesar.Ĭaesar arranges an escape plan with a local sympathetic merchant named Fletcher, who is an Underground Railroad operative. He keeps a sinister and slightly lascivious watch over Cora, whom he has clearly selected as a unique target of his violent wrath. When James Randall, the son in charge of Cora’s side of the plantation, dies, Terrance Randall prepares to take over management of the entire plantation. Cora receives Chester’s blows for him and sustains a star-shaped injury on her head, which will pain her with headaches for the rest of her life. She saves Chester when Terrance Randall, one of the plantation patriarch’s sons, arbitrarily decides to interrupt a slave festival by beating the boy. Later on, Cora comes to the aid of Chester, a young and innocent slave who has never been beaten. Cora, being of shrewd and practical nature, rebuffs the man initially. When Cora is 16 or 17, Caesar, a fellow slave Cora does not know, approaches her with a proposal about running away.

Cora’s mother, Mabel, absconded from the plantation when Cora was 10 and has never resurfaced.

The reader is introduced to Cora as a slave on a Georgia plantation named “Randall” after its masters. Even though Cora is a slave in the antebellum South, her bids for freedom from oppression and racism parallel many stories around the world. Other themes include the role of memory as well as race and slavery. The most prominent theme in this book is that Cora’s physical journey to freedom is also emotional and mental.

The underground railroad book online