The following is a sample profile from the book Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints by Daneen Akers.

Harriet Tubman

The year is 1828, the place is Dorchester County, Maryland on the plantation of Anthony and Mary Thompson. The sun isn’t even up yet, but a young Black girl of about nine is already hard at work. She already has lit a fire, split firewood, and hauled pails of water inside. Now she is nervously shushing the little Thompson baby she is supposed to care for. She rocks his cradle and sings softly to him.

Her name is Harriet. Her grandmother had been kidnapped from her home in West Africa and endured a long trip across the Atlantic Ocean in the hold of a ship. When she arrived, she was sold to a White plantation owner in Maryland. Harriet feels the unfairness sharply. The waking baby just wants to fill his belly with milk after a long night’s sleep, but if he cries, his mother will blame Harriet. And being blamed means the baby’s mother, Mary Thompson, will whip Harriet. One morning Mary whipped Harriet five times before breakfast. Harriet can still feel the scars and remember the searing pain.

This wasn’t right. She knew deep down that it was wrong for her and her family to be forced to work for free every day of their lives. They lived in fear of violence with little to eat, little to keep them warm at night, and no hope of any change, just the fear that they could be sold to another plantation where the situation could be worse.

This young girl will later be known as Harriet Tubman. At nine years old, however, she was called, Araminta, or “Minty,” for short. Harriet was actually her mother’s name that she adopted after she escaped slavery. Little Minty would grow up to become one of the most famous Americans of all time, known for many daring and dangerous trips helping other enslaved people escape the cruelties of slavery through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.

Minty’s mother encouraged her to smile and be polite to slave holders, hoping to keep her little daughter working the somewhat easier jobs indoors. “Just smile and be polite to Master and Missus, no matter what they do,” Harriet’s mother advises her. But Harriet can’t bring herself to pretend to be happy at all times in the house. Her older sister can play that part without revealing her true feelings, but Harriet always had a spark deep in her bones that resisted. The law might say she is the property of Anthony and Mary Thompson, but she knows it isn’t right for any person to be owned by another person. She knows she should be free, even though she doesn’t have the words for that idea yet. The slave holders can sense this resistance in Harriet, and they keep finding reasons to punish her to break her spirit. But her spark only grows brighter.

When she was about 12, Harriet was sent to work in the plantation fields. The work was physically exhausting, and even though she was small, she became incredibly strong. She could drive a team of oxen all day long. To help find a rhythm to work to, Harriet and the other enslaved people would sing. The overseer usually didn’t pay attention to the words of their songs. But many of the songs were actually based on the stories from the Hebrew Scriptures that tell of Moses leading the Jewish people out of slavery in Egypt, with God’s help.

One of her favorites was “Go Down, Moses:”

Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt’s land.
Tell old Pharaoh,
Let my people go.
When Israel was in Egypt’s land,
Let my people go.
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let my people go.
No more shall they in bondage toil,
Let my people go.
Let them come out with Egypt’s spoil,
Let my people go.

Another favorite song was also about freedom:

Didn’t my lord deliver Daniel,
Didn’t my lord deliver Daniel?
Didn’t my lord deliver Daniel,
And why not every man?
He delivered Daniel from the lion’s den,
Jonah from the belly of the whale.
And the Hebrew children
From the fiery furnace.
Why not every man?

When Harriet sang these songs with dozens of other enslaved people working hard under the intense sun, she vowed to herself that one day she would be free. She later said, “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.”

Harriet’s father Ben could see what Harriet was thinking. He also knew the entire situation was unjust and cruel. He also knew how dangerous it was for an enslaved person to try to escape. If she was ever going to have a chance to survive, she needed to know how to navigate in the woods. She especially needed to know how to go north because the northern states were free states. He began taking her on long walks on Sundays in the woods that he had been working in since he was a small boy. “Look at the moss on that tree,” he told Harriet. “The moss grows on the north side of trees.”

Harriet’s father also taught her which berries and roots in the woods were safe to eat. He taught her how to hide in the undergrowth and be perfectly still. He taught her how to read the animal tracks and how to walk in a creek to avoid leaving a scent that dogs can follow. Most importantly, he taught her which star in the sky was the North Star. Harriet began to think of the North Star as a special sign set in the heavens by God to guide her. To her, the North Star meant that God wanted her—and all enslaved people—to be free. “Moss by day and the North Star by night,” her father kept telling her. “You can always find your way north that way.”

When Harriet was a young teenager, she almost died from a head injury. She was in the local dry goods store on an errand, and an angry overseer came in because one of the enslaved men from the plantation he worked on was in the store without permission. The overseer yelled at Harriet: “Hold him!” But Harriet did the opposite. She stepped in between the angry overseer and the enslaved man. The over-
seer’s anger boiled into rage, and he picked up a two-pound weight and threw it. Harriet was struck on the head. Blood began gushing from her wound, and she passed out. Her skull had been cracked by the attack. Her slave holders just kept her in a corner without any medical care for two days. Eventually, someone carried Harriet to her parent’s small cabin, thinking surely she would die.

Fortunately, she lived. Harriet’s mother gradually nursed her back to health over several months, giving Harriet most of her own food rations and making herbal remedies brewed from roots she knew had medicinal properties. While Harriet survived her injuries, they left her permanently disabled. For the rest of her life she suffered from severe headaches and sudden sleeping spells called narcolepsy. She could fall asleep at any time—while sweeping the floor or mid-conversation—without any warning. Later on, wanted posters advertising for her capture included the description: “Has a habit of abruptly falling asleep.”

Harriet returned to the fields, knowing that the plantation owners did not like her and would sell her if they could. After a while, she married a free Black man named John Tubman, but he didn’t share her passion for going north. He thought it would be impossible for Harriet to escape, and he did not have that fire burning inside of him like she did.

Then something happened in the summer of 1849 to speed up Harriet’s plans: Her plantation owner died. Harriet knew that now she would be sold.

Harriet had heard from other enslaved people that some White people also knew that slavery was wrong. They were called abolitionists because they wanted to abolish slavery. At first, Harriet was astonished. Then she learned more about them. Most abolitionists lived in the northern states—and there’s a reason for that. Growing cotton, tobacco, and other plantation crops required lots of workers. If those workers had been paid even a small wage, southern plantations could not have made money. So southern White people who reaped huge financial benefits from having an unpaid, enslaved work force were rarely willing or able to acknowledge that slavery was an unjust, evil practice.

But even in the South, Harriet had heard there were abolitionists who practiced the Quaker religion. At that time, Quakers dressed very simply, usually in gray and white. They also had a more formal style of speech that used “Thee” and “Thou.” One day at the market, Harriet spotted a Quaker woman. She decided to risk going to the woman’s house to see if she could find out if she might be a safe White person to trust.

The first thing the woman said when Harriet knocked on her door put Harriet at ease: “Thee is most welcome here.”

“If I were Thee,” continued the Quaker woman, “I’d first follow the Choptank River to its source. Then I’d walk inland and break my travels with a rest at Ezekiel Hunn’s house in Camden. His house is set back from the road with green shutters and a red chimney.”

In this manner, the Quaker woman taught Harriet about the Underground Railroad, which wasn’t a physical train or tracks but a network of safe houses and people (called “conductors”) who would help escaping slaves on their journey with a place to rest, a warm meal, clothes, and directions to the next location or “station.” This was a secret collaboration to help escaping slaves originally started by William Sill, a free Black man whose parents had escaped enslavement. Now everyone involved, including this kind Quaker woman, risked being imprisoned and fined large amounts of money if they were caught. They were breaking the law, but they knew it was an unjust one.

Harriet left a few nights later, nervous but determined. She was going north to freedom! It was a perilous journey. Several times she got lost and found herself accidentally walking in a big circle. But she quieted her panic by remembering her father’s instructions: “Moss by day and the North Star by night.” She traveled by night as much as possible, looking up whenever she was in a clearing to find that bright, beckoning North Star.

“Just keep on following that star,” she told herself. She hummed bits of the deliverance songs she used to sing, which not only calmed her but helped remind her of her deep belief that God meant for all people to be free. Whenever she could, she walked right down the middle of a creek to help hide her scent trail because she knew that the White slave holders searching for her would use hunting dogs to try to find her.

With the instructions from the Quaker woman seared into her memory, Harriet found Ezekiel Hunn’s house, the first safe house on her journey north. He and his wife, Eliza, gladly took her in, gave her a big breakfast, and put her to bed in their guest bedroom. Harriet had never been so grateful for a bed. She slept for a full day. But she wasn’t safe yet. She still had at least two more days of traveling to get to the Pennsylvania state line where she would finally be free. But there was a reward being offered for her return, and patrollers lurked everywhere. She had to be very careful.

After a short rest at another Underground Railroad house, Harriet started off for what she hoped was the final leg of this risky trip. She knew to look for a free Black man who would be waiting to give her a ride across a bridge that was heavily guarded. Harriet tried to keep a sharp lookout, but one of her sudden sleeping spells overtook her. Luckily she was in a forested area and hidden, but she woke with a start, realizing that patrollers looking for her were nearby. They finally gave up, and she managed to find safety at the house of Thomas Garrett, another conductor on the Underground Railroad. He led her upstairs to a secret room hidden behind a bookcase. His shoe shop was underneath, so Harriet had to be as still and quiet as possible.

The next day, Harriet stepped over the line into Pennsylvania and felt her heart leap. She was finally free! Later she described how she felt in that moment: “I looked at my hands to see if I was still the same person now that I was free. There was such glory over everything. The sun shone like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.”

Harriet went to Philadelphia to find work. She worked hard every day doing laundry, baking pies, selling produce, and doing other jobs, but now she was free. Her week’s wages were hers to keep. She could decide for herself where to live, whom to work for, and what to do with her precious little free time. But Harriet wasn’t content just being free herself. She missed her family, and she worried that her siblings might get sold further south. And so, despite enormous risks, Harriet became a conductor on the Underground Railroad. She returned to Maryland in the fall of 1850 to help her brothers escape.

Ultimately, Harriet returned to the south 13 times to help enslaved people escape, and she led between 70 and 300 people to freedom. She gave countless others directions and advice on how to find the Underground Railroad’s safe houses. She was the first woman to become a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and she was also was the most successful. Later, she liked to say, “I never lost a passenger.”

Harriet became known as “Moses” because she lead enslaved people to freedom just like Moses did. She used songs commonly sung by enslaved people, songs which are now called spirituals, as secret signals. All of the enslaved people on the plantations where Harriet traveled knew these songs too: They had sung them daily as motivation, as rhythm aids while they worked together, and as symbols of solidarity. These songs never raised the suspicion of the White overseers because they thought that “singing slaves meant happy slaves.” The overseer didn’t realize that, right under his nose, enslaved people were planning their escape.

Songs like “Go Down, Moses,” “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” “Steal Away Jesus,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” all contained coded messages. The “home” or “heaven” was the north or Canada. “Egypt” meant the slave states of the South, and “Moses” was Harriet, whose reputation grew in legend on every trip. The reward for her capture grew with every trip too, so Harriet kept coming up with disguises and new ideas for escapes. She still had to deal with effects of her head injury. But she kept returning to “Egypt” to lead more people to freedom and the “promised land.” She felt that God had called her to this task and had imbued her with special gifts and protections.

She’d hide in the woods near the enslaved people’s cabins or next to a field and sing a verse from a song like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot:”

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.

Then she’d pause for a moment. A voice, sometimes two or three, would sing the next verse. Then word would spread that Harriet was ready to lead a trip north. She’d come back at night, and she’d start off again on the journey north with her new passengers.

When the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passed, it became law in the entire U.S. that an escaped slave in any state could be taken back to the south. That meant Harriet had to conduct her passengers all the way north to Canada.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Harriet immediately offered her services to the Union Army. At first she was a cook and a nurse. Her knowledge of herbal remedies that she’d learned from her mother and used frequently in the woods while leading people to safety helped her to save countless Union soldiers who were ill from infections and injuries. Soon, she was able to use her immense knowledge of the woods and ability to gain valuable information as a spy and a scout. She became the first woman to lead an armed raid for the U.S. when she led Union soldiers along the Combahee River deep into Confederate territory in South Carolina where 700 enslaved people were freed, many of whom joined the Union Army as soldiers.

After the war, Harriet settled in Auburn, New York. She cared for her aging parents as well as anyone who was in need, even though she herself had very little money. She grew produce to sell and took any other job she could to earn income. Her time working in the army had not been documented formally, so while she deserved a veteran’s pension, she had to fight for more than 30 years to get paid all that she was owed by the U.S. government. It finally took an act of Congress and the influence of many friends with government connections to get even part of what the government owed her.

Harriet never stopped working for equality and freedom for everyone. After the Civil War, she worked to give women the right to vote and to improve the lives of newly emancipated, formerly enslaved people, especially those who were elderly. In 1896, with the help of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, she purchased land near her house to open the Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Negroes. When she became too old to live on her own, she moved into the home herself.

Harriet died in 1913, surrounded by people who loved and appreciated her. Even on her deathbed, Harriet was thinking of others. As she neared death, Harriet told the gathered group, “I go to prepare a place for you.”

Harriet is buried in Auburn, New York at the Fort Hill cemetery and received full military honors. She’s become a symbol of astounding courage and determination. In 2016, the U.S. Treasury announced plans to put Harriet’s portrait on the $20 bill. She would be the first African-American person ever to be on paper money in the U.S. and the first woman in 100 years.

Use your imagination: What are some ways you could help others to be free?

Glossary Terms

Abolitionist
A person who speaks out against slavery or other injustices; most often refers to a person who worked to abolish (that is, to end) slavery in the U.S. before and during the Civil War.

Called/Calling
The sense that God, or a messenger of God, has specifically assigned a person a certain job; often applied in religious job settings, such as, “I was called to become a minister.”

Civil War
A war between political groups or regions within the same nation; the American Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865 between the Northern (Union) and Southern (Confederate) states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery.

Confederate
A supporter of the Confederate States of America, 11 states (later 13) in the Southern U.S. that formed their own separate government in 1860 and went to war with the Northern states, or Union, to preserve slavery and states’ rights relating to slave holding.

Emancipated
Freed; as in freed, emancipated, from slavery.

Equality
The idea that everyone should be treated the same under the law; many social movements are about helping government systems and laws treat all people equally.

Hebrew Scriptures
The holy text of Judaism which describes the promise between God and the Jewish people; the Christian Bible uses the same texts but often calls them the “Old Testament,” but for Jews, there is nothing outdated or “old” about these texts.

Herbal Remedies
Medications prepared from plants to treat a variety of illnesses.

Jewish/Judaism
A person who follows Judaism, which is likely the world’s oldest monotheistic religion (belief in only one God). Judaism was formed nearly 4,000 years ago by the ancient Hebrews. Jews believe God formed a special covenant with Abraham to form a great nation from his descendants if he followed God’s directions. Judaism is one of the three Abrahamic faiths and emphasizes living a just and compassionate life that respects all people as made in the image of God.

Military Honors
Formal funeral or burial of someone who served in the U.S. military.

Quaker
A member of The Religious Society of Friends, a movement within Christianity that was founded in 1650 and whose values include peace, integrity, and community; known for being Abolitionists, key members of the Underground Railroad were Quakers.

Spirituals
A type of religious folksong closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South; famous spirituals include “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Go Down, Moses.”

Underground Railroad
A network of secret routes and safe houses established in the U.S. in the 1800s that were used by enslaved African American people to escape to freedom in the Northern states.

Union Army
During the American Civil War, this side fought to preserve the Union of the United States and to abolish slavery.

Read another sample chapter from the Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints book by Daneen Akers.