19th century AD

Ebony, March, 2005 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

SILENTLY, stealthily, with revolver cocked, she slipped across the Mason-Dixon line and headed for a rendezvous point behind enemy lines. *

From time to time, she froze in her tracks, forewarned by a personal radar that never failed. A broken twig, a cough, a sneeze: these said danger ahead. And so she halted, listening, waiting, her body tensed for attack. There was a price on her head, some $40,000, dead or alive, and the slightest mistake could mean death. Slave patrols, guards, planters--eyes--were everywhere, and all were on the lookout for fugitive slaves in general and Harriet Tubman in particular.

On and on she went, deeper and deeper into the slave South, traveling by night and hiding by day, moving closer and closer to a rendezvous point on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where a group of slaves, forewarned by a code letter to a sympathetic free Black waited with terror and hope.

Suddenly, without warning, Tubman announced herself, rapping her code on a chosen door in the slave quarters or standing deep in the woods and singing a few bars of a Spiritual code:

   I'll meet you in the morning
   Safe in the promised land,
   On the other side of Jordan,
   Bound for the Promised Land.

Waiting ears, hearing the code knock or the code song, perked up and word raced through the cabins of the initiated: "Moses is here."

After hurried preparations, Moses, as she was called, led the fugitive slaves through Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New York into the Promised Land of Canada. Nineteen times she made this dangerous round trip; 19 times, single-handedly, she baited the collective might of the slave power--and 19 times she won, never losing a passenger on her Underground Railroad.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson said that what she did was "beyond anything in fiction." Frederick Douglass said she and John Brown were America's greatest Freedom Fighters. John Brown said "she was the most of a man, naturally, that I ever met." Biographer Sarah Bradford said she was greater than Jeanne d'Arc, Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale, for "not one of these women, noble and grave as they were, [showed] more courage, and power of endurance, in facing danger and death than the woman known to posterity as Harriet Tubman, 'the Moses of her people.'"

Born in battle in 1820 or 1821 in Dorchester County, Md., near Cambridge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, one of 11 children of Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, she was working full-time at the age of 5, cleaning White people's houses during the day and tending their babies at night. When she fell asleep, she was whipped mercilessly.

"I grew up," she said, "like a neglected weed--ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it ... Every time I saw a White man I was afraid of being carried away. I had two sisters carried away in a chain gang--one of them left two children. We were always uneasy ... I think slavery is the next thing to hell."

From the beginning, she opposed the steel of her being to the hell of that fire. She was, by all accounts, the despair of White overseers who couldn't break her rebellious will. On one occasion, an overseer attacked a male slave and called on Harriet for aid. The young slave rebel who was only 13, ignored the order and went to the aid of the slave. The overseer, enraged, picked up a two-pound weight and threw it at the escaping slave. The weight struck Harriet, tearing a hole in her skull and pressing a portion of her skull against her brain. Ever afterwards, she suffered from what was called a "stupor" or "sleeping sickness." Four or five times a day, she would suddenly fall asleep, regaining full consciousness after a short spell and continuing the conversation or her work at the precise point where she left off. This problem led White people and some slaves to believe that Harriet was "half-witted"--an assumption the wily Harriet encouraged.

Day and night, during this period and afterwards, in the field, in the cabins, everywhere, Tubman thought constantly about escape, and dreamed repeatedly of a "line" that separated freedom from slavery and life from a living death. After her marriage to a free Black named John Tubman, the dreams increased in frequency and intensity. When she learned that her new master planned to sell her and two of her brothers, she decided to run away. She begged her brothers to come with her. When they refused, she set out alone in the summer of 1849, traveling at night through Maryland and Delaware and finally reaching Philadelphia. She went with a threat in her heart. "For," said she, "I had reasoned this out in my mind; there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other, for no man should take me alive ..."

When she crossed the "line" between slavery and freedom, she was overwhelmed by a sense of fulfillment. "I looked at my hands," she said, "to see if I was the same person now that I was free. There was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields ... "