In the "Acknowledgments", Whitehead mentions two famous escaped slaves: "Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, obviously." While in Jacobs's native North Carolina, Cora has to hide in an attic where, like Jacobs, she is not able to stand, but like her can observe the outside life through a hole that "had been carved from the inside, the work of a previous occupant".[5] Martin Ebel, who observed this parallel in a review for the Swiss Tages-Anzeiger, also observes that the "Freedom Trail", where the victims of North Carolinian lynchings hang from trees, has a historic predecessor in the crosses the Romans raised along the Appian Way to kill the slaves who had joined Spartacus' slave rebellion, written on by Arthur Koestler in his novel The Gladiators. Ridgeway reminds Ebel of inspector Javert, the hero's merciless persecutor in Victor Hugo's Les misérables.[6]
In The New Yorker, reviewer Kathryn Schulz likens Ridgeway to both Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick and the slave catcher August Pullman of the television series Underground: "Ridgeway ... and August Pullman, in "Underground," are Ahab-like characters, privately and demonically obsessed with tracking down specific fugitives".[7] Both Ahab and Ridgeway have a soft spot for a black boy: Ahab for the cabin-boy Pip, and Ridgeway for 10-year-old Homer, whom he bought as a slave and set free the next day.[8]
In Whitehead's North Carolina, all blacks have been "abolished".[9] Martin Ebel observes the parallel to the Nazi exterminations of Jews and also the parallel between Cora's concealment and Anne Frank's.[6] Another parallel to literature on Nazi Germany may be found in the erection of three gallows by Cora's plantation master. He had the three gallows erected for Cora and her two fellow fugitives to put them to a cruel death as soon as each is returned.[10] In Anna Seghers's novel The Seventh Cross, written in exile between 1938 and 1942, seven prisoners escape from a concentration camp, and the camp commander has a cross erected for each of them to be tortured there after being returned.
