Cora's Journey

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To be free means to be at peace mentally and physically, and live without fear. Cora’s quest for freedom illustrates these ideas as she travels state by state, experiencing different ways of life with the ultimate goal of being free. She not only seeks physical freedom, but mental, spiritual, and bodily freedom as well as the ability to speak her mind without punishment. Cora’s journey is an impactful exploration of what it means to be free. The author, Colson Whitehead, brings these ideas to life in his story The Underground Railroad in which he connects slavery of the 1800s to historical events throughout America and relates to today's society. Whitehead uses historical allusions and magical realism to show how systemic racism continues today …show more content…
It was hard for the slaves to get any kind of medical help on most of the plantations they were on, “On the Randall Plantation, the doctor was only called when the slave remedies, the roots and salves, had failed and a valued hand was near death” (Whitehead 102). Due to being poor, the slaves had little to no access to health care as the owners of the plantations didn’t want to use money on them. Usually, “There was nothing for the doctor to do at that point but complain about the muddy roads and receive his payment” (Whitehead 102). The doctors had no care to help patients; they were focused on getting paid and leaving …show more content…
Doctors wanted to purposefully treat patients with a disease without them knowing, “The syphilis program was one of the many studies and experiments underway at the colored wing of the hospital” (Whitehead 124-125). The doctors would deceive the African Americans using false authority and act as if they were being treated when the doctors were killing them. This experiment is an allusion to the Syphilis experiment that took place in real-time, “From 1932 to 1972 the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) traced the nonmedicated course of syphilis, a disease that is caused by the bacterium treponema palladium, among 399 patients and 201 controls at Tuskegee institute.” (Tuskegee Experiment). When the patients realized they were infected, they were denied treatment, “When penicillin became the therapeutic agent of choice, study participants continued to be denied access to this known cure and their unmedicated infections progressed” (Tuskegee
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