Arnold later disappoints his father by expressing his personal view that slaves who have freed themselves are people of worth while those who remain slaves are empty of any humanity. For the first time, Arnold makes his own money by supporting a group of slave catchers hunting down a runaway black man. Thus, he persuades Mack, the black son of one of the freedmen employed by his father to jump into a dead well, which causes a permanent limp. Arnold is driven by his envy of his father's self-confident black workers. Arnold is an unconfident young man who shows no talent for his father's work as a blacksmith. employs only paid freedmen and detests slavery. A forceful man of integrity, Ridgeway Sr., a pantheist, is guided by his belief in a ' Great Spirit.' Ridgeway Sr. Born in Tennessee, his father runs a farm and a forge. This episode reports on the youth of Arnold Ridgeway. A furious mob drags Martin's wife Ethel away to unjustly execute her by hanging or immolation. When Ridgeway finds out, he saves Cora from lynching by arresting her, and his associate murders Martin for protecting the railroad from Ridgeway. Cora hides in the attic of Martin Wells, the local Underground Railroad station agent, sharing the room with adolescent Grace, another black runaway. Thus any written material or image viewed as iniquitous is burnt, every black person is killed regardless of whether they are slave, runaway or freedman, and any person of Irish descent is seen as inferior. The town’s people have formed a human potential cult that eagerly eliminates any sort of ethnic or intellectual variance.

Meanwhile, Caesar is cornered by Ridgeway.Ĭora's next destination is an unnamed village in the midst of the woods. Cora is discovered by Homer, but she gets away and escapes to the Underground Railroad. Ridgeway eventually finds out about Griffin, and he and Homer go there searching for Cora and Caesar. The town’s citizens benefact the negroes only in order to engage in controlling the black community through coerced sterilization and forced drug use. But after a while they discover the reality behind the friendly behavior. Cora receives school lessons in reading and in etiquette while Caesar is offered a job as an assistant to a white scholar. Taken by an underground train to Griffin, a (fictional) city in South Carolina, Cora and Caesar are treated well in the beginning. Ridgeway boasts that no runaway has ever escaped him with the exception of Cora's mother Mabel, who had disappeared without a trace some ten years earlier. Hence, Cora and Caesar are stubbornly pursued by slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway and his underage but early-grown-up aide, a black boy named Homer. From then on she is not only a wanted runaway but a fugitive from justice for murder. On their run, Cora strikes a young man in the head, who was with a group of slave catchers. That organization consists of an unknown number of steam trains and a vast system of tunnels to transport runaways unseen to the non-slaveholding states of the US and finally to Canada. The couple sets its hopes on the mysterious Underground Railroad. Mychal-Bella Bowman as Fanny Briggs/Grace Īfter a captured runaway slave is publicly burned to death by his master Terrance Randall, two young plantation slaves Cora Randall and Caesar Garner flee from slaveholding Georgia into freedom.Peter Mullan as Ridgeway Senior, father of Arnold Ridgeway.Fred Hechinger as Young Arnold Ridgeway.Joel Edgerton as Arnold Ridgeway, a slave catcher.Cora, an enslaved woman from Georgia, joins newcomer Caesar to ride the subterranean train to freedom. In the novel and the series, it is an actual railroad complete with engineers, conductors, tracks, and tunnels. In reality, 'The Underground Railroad' was a network of abolitionists, hidden routes, and safe houses that helped enslaved African-Americans escape to freedom in the early to mid-1800s. A fictional story of people attempting an escape from slavery in the southern United States in the 1800s utilizing a key plot element that employs the literary style of magic realism.

Escape the underground