As Cora, a fugitive enslaved person in Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, attempts to make her way to freedom via the clandestine antislavery network—depicted by the author as a subterranean train system—a remark follows her through the tunnels. “Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll see the true face of America,” a station agent told her as her train departed. The statement appears pat at first—an aphorism that clashes with the gravity of Cora’s flight. But it later proves instructive: Both the railroad and the nation as a whole are under construction.