“The problem, then, is not the stories we tell; it’s the stories we don’t tell.”

Kathryn Schultz in the New Yorker, 22 August 2016

I just finished reading Colson Whitehead’s stunning new novel, Underground Railroad. It was a birthday present, and once I began reading, I couldn’t put it down. It’s fiction, but it is so real. The humanity and the brutality. It’s all there, told through Cora, a slave who takes on a trek north toward freedom in which she experiences and witnesses every horrific act humans are capable of. And for some reason I found myself not turning away or putting the book down. Because I cared what happened to Cora. And because the book was just that good.

Though there have been many powerful movies and books about slavery, I admit that I avoided most. I haven’t seen 50 Years a Slave. I told…