The Underground Railroad: Motifs 5 key examples

During Cora’s escape, dogs represent an oppressive, predatory order of surveillance. They introduce fearsome, feral connotations associated with their use in hunting. Ketchum’s dog has “slave-catching in his blood,” while Cora and Caesar make their escape with hounds and “every spare hand in the county” trailing at their heels. A brown mutt meanwhile dozes in the park outside Cora’s window, where the North Carolina town convenes each Friday to hang captured Blacks. The proximity of dogs to the slave-catching profession—within the novel and in history—reflects their equally close associations to violence. Not even the enslaved community is immune to this primal, retributive impulse embodied by dogs. Blake adopts his dog during a trip to town and promptly replicates the imperial logic of his white enslavers, taking over Cora’s patch of garden before setting up his doghouse. Through repeated references to America’s beloved canine pets, the novel reveals the animal’s historic connections to a more brutal form of power.

Strung against the barn walls, these shackles and cuffs assume their familiar connotations of subjugation and restriction. They are the disturbing instruments of limitation, aimed at prevention, discipline, and control. Later descriptions add a systemic quality to these chains. While modeling for the museum, Cora responds to the taunts from onlookers by glaring at them:

The weak link—she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it, chipping away at weak links wherever she found them, it might add up to something.

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Through Cora’s discovery that injustice is the product of many separate actors, chains and shackles take on a meaning beyond the familiar tropes of slavery. Here, the metaphor of chains calls attention to the deeply social nature of racism. In quite explicit terms, the novel shows how individual “links”—perhaps harmless on their own—can each contribute to a “mighty iron” of oppression. Chains and shackles provide a poetic representation of collective social failings. Like the shackles built upon a collection of weak links, slavery and injustice are the intricate sum of many broken parts.

This interconnectedness sets the motif as the underground railroad’s destructive opposite. Whereas members of the railroad dig tunnels and lay down tracks to guide the runaways towards freedom, shackles and chains instead tend towards total repression and order. Unlike the railroad and its network of faith, chains come to represent a violent web of control—it is only fitting that Ridgeway grows up on a forge, watching molten iron cool. By adding a social dimension to a familiar symbol, shackles remind the reader that injustices can’t be solved by any individual alone.

In this passage, music is a respite from reality. The guests at Jockey’s birthday party have been liberated through the process of making art, while the unforgiving conditions of the Randall plantation recede against the pleasures of dance and melody. The novel notes this ironic reversal of relation, as fiddle and drum make “instruments of those who play them.” For a moment, the enslaved have set aside their shackles now in “servitude of the song.”

The subsequent stops along Cora’s journey strengthen music’s association with creative liberty. At the South Carolina dormitories, those who make music are suddenly free to “attack the melody” as they like. Cora observes how the fiddler from “one state” and the banjo man “from another state” invent new forms of “rag” during the social dances. New songs come alive as musicians and dancers share their tunes or copy each other. The novel frames music as a process of exchange and innovation, sustained by the stories of those who meet along a shared migration towards freedom. Music and its spirit of experimentation are made possible by the pursuit of liberty.

On the Valentines' farm, music combines with language to articulate a vision of the ideal America. Sheltered by the Valentines’ farm, Cora experiences the Declaration of Independence for the first time as music in written form. In Georgina’s classroom “music lived in the words now, the melody asserting itself as each child took their turn, bold and confident.” The Underground Railroad joins song to words, expressing its hope for a future that lives up to the fullest measure of its promises. Music is a retreat from reality but also a commitment to reform it. By offering escape to the enslaved and a blueprint for a better future, music might be the closest approximation to true freedom.

The comparison to an oak emphasizes Blake’s strength. It draws upon the tree’s associations with sturdiness and stability to describe his imposing physical abilities: he conquers his buddies in wrestling matches, and his voice booms through the cotton rows as he works. Oaks speak to the pure, virile power that gets forced under the yoke of a white master. At other instances, the novel’s trees seem to suggest a feeling of freedom or some kind of purer, natural essence. During her stay in Martin’s North Carolina town, Cora notices that:

Colored labor had erected every house on the park, laid the stones in the fountain and the paving of the walkways. Hammered the stage where the night riders performed their grotesque pageants and the wheeled platform that delivered the doomed men and women to the air. The only thing colored folks hadn’t built was the tree. God had made that, for the town to bend to evil ends.

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Trees are the only entities excluded from Cora’s grim inventory—the “only thing colored folks hadn’t built”—and therefore come the closest to embodying any kind of freedom. They exist outside the realm of institutionalized slavery, apart from “colored labor” and its backbreaking cruelties. Created by “God,” the town trees elude the calculus of slavery and testify to the promise of some divine justice.

The last half of the final sentence, however, is equally crucial. Though the trees defy slave labor, the novel offers plenty of other instances in which they get bent “to evil ends.” Like Blake, and like all those enslaved, they get coopted by white society and forced against themselves. Trees are natural creations; they also furnish an all-too-convenient gallows for public hangings. Louisa, Martin, and Ethel each meet their end beneath the town park’s oak tree. Trees get coerced to fit brutal ends, even in their cut form. The same wood that offers Caesar a craft also gets used to make the stocks in which Big Anthony smokes away.

This constant abuse—of nature and people—leads to a kind of inevitable weariness. Along their trip Cora and Ridgeway discover that homesteaders had set fire to the trees, now ashen and blackened. They pass stands of “stunted black arms,” as though even nature’s most distinctive creations can no longer stand the destructive cycles of exploitation and enslavement.

Strung against the barn walls, these shackles and cuffs assume their familiar connotations of subjugation and restriction. They are the disturbing instruments of limitation, aimed at prevention, discipline, and control. Later descriptions add a systemic quality to these chains. While modeling for the museum, Cora responds to the taunts from onlookers by glaring at them:

The weak link—she liked the ring of it. To seek the imperfection in the chain that keeps you in bondage. Taken individually, the link was not much. But in concert with its fellows, a mighty iron that subjugated millions despite its weakness. The people she chose, young and old, from the rich part of town or the more modest streets, did not individually persecute Cora. As a community, they were shackles. If she kept at it, chipping away at weak links wherever she found them, it might add up to something.

Cite this Quote

Through Cora’s discovery that injustice is the product of many separate actors, chains and shackles take on a meaning beyond the familiar tropes of slavery. Here, the metaphor of chains calls attention to the deeply social nature of racism. In quite explicit terms, the novel shows how individual “links”—perhaps harmless on their own—can each contribute to a “mighty iron” of oppression. Chains and shackles provide a poetic representation of collective social failings. Like the shackles built upon a collection of weak links, slavery and injustice are the intricate sum of many broken parts.

This interconnectedness sets the motif as the underground railroad’s destructive opposite. Whereas members of the railroad dig tunnels and lay down tracks to guide the runaways towards freedom, shackles and chains instead tend towards total repression and order. Unlike the railroad and its network of faith, chains come to represent a violent web of control—it is only fitting that Ridgeway grows up on a forge, watching molten iron cool. By adding a social dimension to a familiar symbol, shackles remind the reader that injustices can’t be solved by any individual alone.

For the first time in her life, the “supple” cotton cloth and “simple” design of the clothing initiate Cora into a world beyond the plantation. Her clothes come accompanied with a new name, a stable nanny job, and housing—hallmarks of a life that she could have never imagined back with the Randalls. By changing her attire, Cora has formally shed her enslaved status and slipped into a new identity. Clothing opens up a world of new possibilities that had been previously denied to her.

This focus on clothing continues throughout much of her stay in the city. Cora purchases a new blue dress from the emporium in expectation of the dance, and notes that some of the girls have spent so much that they resort to scrip. With “pleasure,” she notices how Caesar has also remade his wardrobe: her runaway companion has purchased “fancy clothes” in his attempt to imagine for himself a new life. Through clothing, both Cora and Caesar play along with the elaborate fiction of their escape.

However, clothing is twisted just as easily to crude and disturbing ends. Cora’s stint at the museum forces her to change into a “colorful wrap,” a “sailor outfit,” and “coarse, authentic negro cloth” as she models for its various exhibits. The clothing is not only grossly appropriative but also stereotypically inaccurate. Worst of all, she briefly returns to the Randall plantation while standing beside faux-chickens and imaginary seed. Just as it had helped her reimagine her identity, clothing gets manipulated by white society. During her stay in Martin and Ethel’s attic, Cora watches vaudeville performers dress up in “gaudy” and mismatched clothes in their parody of Blacks. These disturbingly insensitive exhibits and displays reveal clothing’s potential to be weaponized as a reductive instrument.

Such instances point out the ultimate limitations of clothing. However much Cora may try to escape through her new dresses, clothing fails to conceal slavery’s bald injustices. As the novel repeatedly suggests, cloth and cotton are at least partly responsible for the “insatiable demand” that supports the Randall plantation. Cora can only go so far in overcoming her past, especially when her clothing itself is created by the toil and torture of forced labor. Cora’s stay in Tennessee offers a telling instance of this: following her recapture in North Carolina, Ridgeway purchases a “medicinal”-smelling dress and wooden shoes that sexualize Cora. Like the museum exhibits, they force her into another “performance” as she attends dinner with her catcher. The things that had served her new dreams now force her to serve them.

The comparison to an oak emphasizes Blake’s strength. It draws upon the tree’s associations with sturdiness and stability to describe his imposing physical abilities: he conquers his buddies in wrestling matches, and his voice booms through the cotton rows as he works. Oaks speak to the pure, virile power that gets forced under the yoke of a white master. At other instances, the novel’s trees seem to suggest a feeling of freedom or some kind of purer, natural essence. During her stay in Martin’s North Carolina town, Cora notices that:

Colored labor had erected every house on the park, laid the stones in the fountain and the paving of the walkways. Hammered the stage where the night riders performed their grotesque pageants and the wheeled platform that delivered the doomed men and women to the air. The only thing colored folks hadn’t built was the tree. God had made that, for the town to bend to evil ends.

Cite this Quote

Trees are the only entities excluded from Cora’s grim inventory—the “only thing colored folks hadn’t built”—and therefore come the closest to embodying any kind of freedom. They exist outside the realm of institutionalized slavery, apart from “colored labor” and its backbreaking cruelties. Created by “God,” the town trees elude the calculus of slavery and testify to the promise of some divine justice.

The last half of the final sentence, however, is equally crucial. Though the trees defy slave labor, the novel offers plenty of other instances in which they get bent “to evil ends.” Like Blake, and like all those enslaved, they get coopted by white society and forced against themselves. Trees are natural creations; they also furnish an all-too-convenient gallows for public hangings. Louisa, Martin, and Ethel each meet their end beneath the town park’s oak tree. Trees get coerced to fit brutal ends, even in their cut form. The same wood that offers Caesar a craft also gets used to make the stocks in which Big Anthony smokes away.

This constant abuse—of nature and people—leads to a kind of inevitable weariness. Along their trip Cora and Ridgeway discover that homesteaders had set fire to the trees, now ashen and blackened. They pass stands of “stunted black arms,” as though even nature’s most distinctive creations can no longer stand the destructive cycles of exploitation and enslavement.