Empathize With Cora From The Underground Railroad By Colson Whitehead

I can never fully empathize with Cora from The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. A slave, Cora compels the reader to ponder the horror of slavery in our nation’s history. Cora’s trials and tribulations could not be more foreign from my life, thankfully. Nonetheless, Cora’s unthinkable courage in the face of adversity has made me reflect on my my role as a first-generation young man in the American saga. I see echoes of my parents’ odyssey to the States in both Cora’s and Mabel’s journeys to freedom. When Mabel escaped the Randall plantation, she reluctantly kept “her eyes forward because when she looked back she saw the faces of those left behind” (Whitehead 291). Many years later, Cora laments the deaths of Lovey and Caesar

When she arrives at Valentine Farm, a seeming utopia for blacks in Indiana, she immediately receives flak from Mingo, a long-time resident. Mingo argues that in order for the racially uplifting project of the Valentine Farm to last, the farm must do with a “severe reduction in those they sheltered: the runaways, the lost. People like Cora” (Whitehead 249). And some residents agree with him. Even within the comfortable, idyllic confines of the Valentine Farm motto “Stay, and contribute” (Whitehead 253), Cora is undesirable and unworthy by the residents who claim to follow that motto. In “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin indicates that a dissonance between a nation’s ideals and praxis leads to marginalized communities, particularly blacks, “becoming schizophrenic” (Baldwin 679). On one hand, “he pledges allegiance to that flag which guarantees ‘liberty and justice for all,’” but on the other hand, “he is also assured by his country… that he has never contributed” (Baldwin 679). Baldwin’s statement a half-century ago rings true in my life as well: I learn that I am as equal and as free to express my speech as any white American, that my immigrant heritage makes me no less of an American than Bill Gates, that my exercise of Muslim faith is as equally valid as a Protestant’s. But if I use my freedom of speech to express remorse at our military-industrial complex, if I use my heritage to advocate for fair