Introduction
Araminta Harriet Ross was born a slave to enslaved parents in Dorchester County, Maryland. She never knew the exact year of her birth, but it was estimated to be between 1820 and 1825. Her father was owned by one man, and her mother was owned by a woman whose son Edward was whom Harriet referred to as “Master.” Like many who were enslaved, Harriet, who was referred to by her family and friends as “Minty,” started her life trying to simply blend in and survive in the situation that she was born in. But she took her steeled determination in learning how to persevere to change the trajectory of history for many.
This story was written as an example to educational professionals and elected representatives of short historical fiction stories that, in my belief, should be placed within high school history textbooks. It would allow students to be given the rare opportunity to receive insight into history that only a first-person narrative can offer. All of the information below has been compiled from painstaking research to preserve a true accounting (as close to fact as possible) of a story that must be told in order for future generations to understand more completely the cost that many had to pay for the freedom of all. It is my sincere hope that the story of Harriet Tubman makes an impact on your heart and perspective, just as it has on mine.
Harriet Tubman: On Freedom
“I grew up a neglected weed. Ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.”- Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross)
They say that freedom is a place in your mind. But even before I was free, I knew that wasn’t true. When you close your eyes, knowin’ you are going to open them when the person that owns you tells you to, and do what they tell you to when your body can’t do no more, there ain’t no place in your mind that’s free. But sometimes I go to the lights of my memories, to the days of being so young, where laughter was treasured by my sisters and me, often with a stolen giggle that the masters couldn’t hear after the light from the moon faded across the burlap blanket that covered us at night. But even in the light of those memories, the shadow lurks just on the outside that chokes my heart from beating regular and breaks my soul piece by piece. I can never remember the night of giggling with my sisters to the light of the moon without hearing their screams the next morning when they were led away in chains. Their screams roar inside my head and mix with so many—the screams of my mother begging Master not to take her babies—the screams out to God by the women being flogged, praying for deliverance and mercy—my own scream right before Master struck me in the head with that rock, knocking me cold onto the concrete floor of that store. The screams are locked forever in my mind. There is no freedom there.
I gazed out the paint-chipped window of the home for the aged, named after me, and watched the auburn-tipped weeds blow in succinct harmony. I remember first bringing my parents here. The wanting of them to taste freedom for the very first time driving our every step. Hundreds of miles, with two aged and partially crippled parents, but what drove them through the dark nights with the hounds baying in the distance, searching for our scents, was the hunger to know what free felt like.
When I first came to Philadelphia, freedom seemed bigger than I could soak into my head. It almost made me feel lost and small inside of it. I never felt lost in the woods, but in the beginning, I did feel lost in freedom.
I didn’t tell no one outright that I was leavin’ except for my husband and my brothers. My husband wouldn’t go. His papers stated his freedom, but his willingness to fall into step always said something different. My brothers were going to go, but they went back scared. They knew they was going to be sold to the chain gang, but what laid in the dark unknown to them scared them more than the whip and a lifetime of chains. I knew I had to tell the others goodbye, but slaves weren’t allowed to talk to each other, so I stepped out in the shaded cool of the open door of my Old Cabin Home and pitched my deep souled sound into the blackness of the night, hoping they would know.
When that ole chariot comes,
I’m going to leave you, I’m bound for the Promised Land.
Friends, I’m going to leave you.
I’m sorry friends to leave you,
Farewell, oh farewell!
But I’ll meet you in the morning.
Soon my brothers were gone, and I was alone, the darkness of night swallowing me whole. All I could do was face north and run.
As I laid my head back on the wood of the chair, the knots of the afghan that was tossed over the back, soft under my head, I heard the old barn dog’s raucous bark outside the window. My eyes may be clouded with age, but the vision in my memory is always clear. When I closed my eyes, in the blackness of that space, I saw the jagged outline of the pine trees against the light grey sky. The barks of the dog in the barn multiplied in my head as the sounds drifted to the memory of the deafening echo of the dogs that hunted me that night.
I laid face-up in the lukewarm mud of the swamp for two days, hiding from those dogs. I heard them circling the swamp, searching for my scent, their barks cutting throughout the dark while I breathed through the reed of bamboo that I cut in haste on the bank when I knew they were closing in on me. I felt the padded web of frogs’ feet perching on my eyelids briefly in their wanderings across the rubbery textured top of the swamp muck. Even the frogs didn’t know I was there. I hoped that immersing myself in mud rather than water would protect me from the cottonmouths. It was one of the many tricks I learned as a slave that kept me alive through my many escapes out of the South. I learned all about the hazards in swamps when I was six years old and sent out to check muskrat traps. I almost died when master sent me into the swamp while I was sick with the measles. But Mama nursed me back from the gates of death, like it often seemed she had to do, when I got beatings and when sicknesses caused from a child doing a man’s work came upon me.
As much as I hated everything I went through as a slave, I knew that it prepared me for those trips. The beatings toughened me so that I could detach from the hunger pains in my stomach and the burning of my blistered feet from walking day after day. And the ability you learn as a child to blend into the landscape of the walls and dip your eyes to the pattern of the floor so that you wouldn’t be noticed when someone came to rip you out of your mama’s grasp was a technique I used for many years in every trip North I had.
So as I laid there in the muck of ponds and swamps, my eyes fixed on heaven, I prayed and imagined a life of freedom while breathing through the hollowed straw of the bamboo.
I can’t even imagine the sight I must have been when I finally peeled myself out of the grip of that mud. When I stood up and felt the breeze hit the cool of the mud still caked on my face, I remember scratching hard on my forearm to remind myself that she I was still alive. The mud suctioned to every opening of my body, until I was able to dip into a shallow pool of the creek just north of the swamp. It was there that I watched as the clumps dissolved through the rock bed. The mixture of the air and clean water on my face that day was a feeling like nothing else.
I wrapped my fingers around the arm of the rocker, my knuckles now pale and swollen from arthritis and the lines of age and dry northern air through the years. I caressed the wood underneath the arm, where I rested my fingers as my eyes started to open. It was often a bit of a chore to see through the milky haze that covered my eyes now. But through it I could just make out the details in the drapes from the ribbons of light feeding through the window.
I never learned to sew or weave. As hard as my mother tried to teach me, it was just no use. She pleaded with me by the nickname she gave me, “Minty, please just try one more time.” But my four-year-old fat fingers would just fall all over each other. I always tried desperately to please her, but I could never pull the lines straight enough. I leaned my head back on the headrest, my heart heavy with the images of my mother trying desperately to teach me how to sew. I didn’t understand her urgency then as I did now. Mother knew that teaching her young daughter to sew and cook early would secure my working in homes instead of enduring back-breaking field work. Mama was right. It wasn’t much after that when Master rented me out to James Cook, whose wife was a weaver, to teach me the trade of weaving. It was no use. That was when Cook sent me out to the muskrat traps in the swamps late at night. I was so scared of those things, their beady eyes staring back at me when Cook shined the light at them. But he held the lash on the shore, and Cook had a heavy hand with the lash. I could hear it coming at me, the air being slashed in two, till it fell in a hard slice across my back. It only took a couple of times to realize that when you got open wounds and you have to wade into a swamp with the cuts wide open, then the cleaning and scrubbing that had to be done to the wound afterward just wasn’t worth it.
It wasn’t much after that when Mistress Susan rented me out from my master as a child nurse. I was nothin’ but a child myself. But a child nurse I became because Master needed the money, Mistress didn’t have much of it, and young girls run cheap. So they took me from Mama, and I went to work at Mistress’s house.
Mistress didn’t have much patience, and I didn’t know how to keep a house. I didn’t even know what a child nurse was until I learned it was rockin’ the baby to sleep all night long. That durn baby couldn’t rightly sleep unless it was being rocked, and I couldn’t hardly stay awake all night long. So when my eyelids felt heavy as lead and the force of the floor seemed to be pulling my head down, I rocked as the baby slept. The second I stopped rockin’ it, that baby would start to yelling. Mistress kept the whip on a shelf above her bed, and she didn’t like to be waked. By the time I heard the crack of the leather in the air, she had already laid it down in a line across the back of my neck. She finally gave me one of her husband’s old black workshirts to wear, because she said she didn’t like looking at the blood that stained my collar. I can still feel the lines she drew on the back of my neck in bulbed fleshy lines. Sometimes I try to cover them with my collar; other times I don’t even care. Even when I would try to steel myself when I knew the lash was about to split my skin again, my mind would go often to the dog tied up in the yard. I would sneak food out to it whenever I could, and if no one was looking and it was tied, I would loosen the rope around its neck. I knew we weren’t much different, him and I. You couldn’t see my rope like you could his, but it was still there. Mistress couldn’t relate to either of us, and to her, the only difference between him and me was that I stood on two legs and he stood on four.
Cleanin’ Mistress’s house was much of the same. Young girls don’t know much about sweepin’. And what some girls may know, I didn’t know at all. It just about drove Mistress crazy. It wasn’t until Mistress’s sister Emily got tired of hearing my screams, when Mistress was beating me, that she stepped in and said that I might not have been taught. So she taught me. I guess she did me a favor, but now I don’t really know because soon I started working alongside the men.
When Master figured out that I was strong as any man and sometimes more strong than most, and was awful at housework, that was the work that I always seemed to get—the backbreaking kind. And that was when they almost succeeded in killing me.
I was husking corn that evening with all the other slaves, and one of farmer Barrett’s slaves left his work and went to the village store. His overseer set out to follow him and made me come too. I guess I just didn’t really think about how mad the overseer would be when we found him, but mad he was when we found him in the store. The overseer’s ears lit up like someone had just laid him on the fire, and that old slave’s eyes got bigger than dumplings. Overseer man said he needed tying outside for a lashing right outside the store for all to see— told me and another man to tie him to the post outside, and I said no. I set my chin out, and I said no, I weren’t doing it. As soon as the slave saw that the overseer was not focusing on me, he lit out of that store like his feet were on fire. To give him a head start because I just couldn’t bear to hear another man suffer the lash that day, I stepped in the doorway, blocking the men’s way from chasing him. That overseer had already let loose of a rock, but I never saw it. The others say I was laid out cold on the concrete floor for over two hours till Master finally figured he would bring me on home.
People ask me how I came up from the South so many times—how I found my way. They never seem too satisfied when I tell them a star. Seems too easy, I suppose—too mythical maybe that the same star that guided the wise men to Jesus led me and so many of my passengers to freedom. But it ‘twas. As simple as that. Or as complicated. I guess it’s just all how you look at it. I never lost a passenger. Came close a few times, but never lost a one.
I learned as a child to be silent, to blend in. That’s actually what the people that own you want. They want you to be part of the furniture. They don’t want to see or hear you; they just want to know you are there when they need you. This might have been one of their biggest mistakes because I knew how to hide in plain sight—how to shrink into the landscape in the darkest of shadows when it seemed there wasn’t a shadow to find. It helped me in the war too. I had already treaded so many of those forests, and I knew the land of the men that owned it far better than they did. I was a spy for the Union Army, and I gave them all I had because I knew that was the only way to set my people free for good. They promised me pay too, and I knew that I would need it to keep my home for the aged open. That’s all I want really. I just want to have a place for my people to come to and live in peace, provided and cared for until they die, just as they always cared for everyone else. Slaves come here broken in body and in mind. I think, by the looks of some that come here, that if this place was just one more mailbox further down the road that they wouldn’t make it. It took me thirty-four years to receive my pension from the Union Army. They gave me two hundred dollars for three years of service. I try not to dwell on the selfishness of others. I try to be grateful because I know that if it weren’t for so many of the things that happened to me, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
The narcolepsy that rocked me since I was laid out with that rock was the one thing that slavery gave me that made my job of keeping pace and blending in harder. One time I woke up at the base of a tree, to find that I fell asleep under my own wanted poster. Forty thousand dollars they wanted for my capture. How many slaves could I have bought supplies for with that kind of money? Lord, a many I’m sure. It was the chilren’ I worried the most about on the trips. Chilren’ sometimes don’t know how loud they are. Even they’s breathin’ is loud.
I gave the babies paregoric to keep them silent. The mamas never liked it at first, but once they realized it didn’t hurt them, and that the babies would sleep sound, they seemed to welcome it. Once I had a baby tucked under my arm when a passenger tried to turn back. I shifted the baby, freeing my grip, and held a shotgun in my other hand, telling him that if he tried to run it would be the last step he would ever take. Dead men don’t talk, and I had fifteen people to keep alive on that trip. I could have spared one to save fourteen. I think he saw I was serious when I stared him down under the reach of those black oaks that night. He didn’t open his mouth the rest of the trip.
It was the star that led us, and the star we followed. If God was going to keep that star lit for us, I was going to keep moving slaves. That’s all I could see to do. People talked about change plenty, but no one really knew what to do to make it happen. But he gave me that star, and he placed the purpose of setting our people free on my heart. So that’s what I did. People say what I did was remarkable, but I just say it was necessary.