How was Cora's identity portrayed throughout the book?

Cora is the protagonist of The Underground Railroad. She is described as a discerning, intelligent, and determined character. The book is largely narrated from her perspective, as she escapes her life as a slave on a Georgia plantation and makes her way on the Underground Railroad through several states and eventually to freedom. As a young girl, she is abandoned by her mother, Mabel, who runs away. Cora finds solace in tending to her mother’s garden plot even as she is relegated to the status of an outcast among slaves. She runs away with another slave, Caesar, to South Carolina. There, she works first as a nanny to white children and then as a living model for a museum’s history exhibits. She flees alone to North Carolina when she and Caesar are discovered by a slave catcher, Ridgeway, and she hides in an attic for months. Ridgeway eventually captures her there and they travel through Tennessee together. On their way back to the plantation, a group of Underground Railroad agents rescue Cora and bring her to a free black farm in Indiana, where she heals, falls in love, and lives a normal life. The farm is eventually destroyed by white settlers in an act of racial hatred, and Ridgeway finds Cora again. She pushes him to his death in an Underground Railroad station and escapes for the final time. Her story comes to an ambiguously optimistic end when she joins a caravan heading to California.