The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (45 page)

One can only imagine the terror of this young woman as she tore stealthily through the brush and woods of nighttime Maryland—the sound of bloodhounds baying in pursuit. She had a price on her head: On October 3, 1849, the
Cambridge Democrat
newspaper published a runaway slave notice: “
MINTY, aged about 27 years, is of a chestnut color, fine looking and bout 5 feet high.” (Tubman’s birth name was Araminta: thus, MINTY.) Readers were advised that Minty would fetch $50 if she were captured in Maryland, or $100 if she were found out of the state.

By her own accounting, Harriet’s long journey out of the Maryland/Delaware peninsula was done entirely on foot—moving northeast along the Choptank River. (“The riverbank make a very good road.”) It’s most likely that she then received help from Quakers in the region—and it’s almost certain that she made contact with members of the already-formed Underground Railroad, who helped her find her way to Philadelphia.

Philadelphia was, of course, the city of brotherly love. It was a promised land for fugitive slaves, and a mecca for black reformers. Harriet settled in to her newly adopted city as best she could. She was free, yes. But she was also penniless, and in constant peril of recapture.

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The second act of this drama comes almost immediately on the heels of the first. In late 1850, after a number of months of freedom in Philadelphia, Harriet got word from Maryland that her niece, Kizzy, was about to be “sold downriver” into the Deep South—precisely the way Tubman’s sister had been many years before. This was a fork in the road for Harriet. She decided that she must put her own freedom on the line to help rescue her niece. She must go back into Maryland—a slave state where she herself was wanted as a fugitive—to help with the rescue.

Harriet did not make this decision lightly. She was awash in doubt and fear—and terrified at the prospect of recapture. But she knew that she had to act in spite of the fear. Tubman realized that her fate was tied together with that of her family and indeed that of her whole people. She came to understand that she could not have freedom just for herself. Her entire race was at risk if any one of its members was enslaved. At this point, Harriet’s own personal journey to freedom expanded vastly to include the potential freedom of her whole people. She decided that she would let herself be used by this great work.

Very little is known about Tubman’s rescue of Kizzy. It appears that Harriet’s brothers in Maryland assisted effectively in the abduction—and that Kizzy narrowly escaped the slave auction by days or even hours. Astonishingly, Tubman was able to navigate the completely alien streets of Baltimore. She managed to locate help, find a safe house, and eventually guide Kizzy to freedom with her in Philadelphia.

The success of her first rescue lit Harriet’s dharma fire. She now felt her calling intensely. She made a second trip in 1851, and on this trip rescued one of her brothers and two other friends. By this time, she had begun to make strong connections within the network of the Underground Railroad. She slowly began to master the abductor’s art: evasion, disguise, secret underground channels, forests, and riverbanks. She would become very familiar indeed with the drinking gourd.

Tubman now got to know the network of thousands of white abolitionists like Elias Frisbie who were willing to put their own safety on the line for her. This silent, intrepid volunteer army had developed a network of “stations” or “depots”—a clandestine network designed to
support the movement of fugitive slaves all the way from the Deep South to freedom in the North. The network included so-called “
stationmasters,” “conductors,” and elaborate transportation schemes for “cargo.” “Depots” could be hidden rooms in basements, like Dr. Frisbie’s, or hideaways in attics, barns, potato cellars, even caves. There were secret tunnels and fake closets. Fugitives were transported alive in coffins, crates, and barrels.

Most conductors on the Underground Railroad only conveyed slaves from one depot to the next, and they often knew little about the full extent of the network. The less they knew, perhaps, the better. There were, however, a few heroic “abductors” who ventured deep into the slave states to personally extract slaves. Tubman was one of these. Almost all of the rest were white men. But then there was Harriet Tubman: a small, quiet, uneducated woman—but a force of nature. Or we might better say, a force of dharma. Her reputation eventually eclipsed all the others’.

Harriet slowly began to dedicate her entire life to this work. She made at least one trip a year—sometimes two—deep into slave territory. She often rescued at least ten fugitives at a time. She kept to the back roads and never traveled by day. She always made her trips in the winter, when the nights were long and dark. Eventually, Tubman decided that Canada was the new Canaan. “
I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer,” she said, “but I brought ’em clear off to Canada.”

Astonishingly, the funds for Tubman’s trips came almost entirely from her own work as a cook and a domestic. She worked to save money during the spring and summer, and then during the fall, she would plan her trips—carrying them out when the nights became longest.

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Tubman came to believe that she would be guided by God at every step along the way. The images she used in talking about her “journeys” were saturated with spiritual archetypes. She used bible stories of the Exodus to create a context for her journeys. She used the great spirituals as cues for “troops” to move or stay put, to show themselves or hide themselves away. She prayed regularly with her fugitives. Though as we’ve seen, Harriet was illiterate, nonetheless she could quote extensively and accurately
from the Bible, and was keenly aware of the significance of characters and incidents from both the Old and the New Testament.

Harriet Tubman was widely believed to be protected by angels. Over the years, an air of mystery and awe began to grow up around her. Said fellow abductor Thomas Garrett, “
Harriet seems to have a special angel to guard her on her journey of mercy … and confidence that God will preserve her from harm in all her perilous journeys.”

Most of the really dramatic accounts of Harriet’s “guidance” came from others—not from Harriet herself, who was remarkably quiet about her methods. Garrett said, “
I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul.”

Harriet’s so-called “second sight”—her reliance on guidance—would become legendary among fugitives, and among the network of conductors and stationmasters on the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slaves whom she freed later told remarkable stories about their adventures with her. In the midst of a flight, Harriet would suddenly insist that the troop of fugitives stop and hide themselves away. Then she would start out again in an entirely new direction. Later, they would discover that they had narrowly escaped capture. Tubman said about these moments, “
When danger is near, it appears like my heart goes flutter, flutter.” She told a friend that she believed that her uncanny “second sight” was a gift that she inherited from her father, who was apparently known for prophecies and guidance.

Her biographer, Catherine Clinton, gives us a classic Tubman story: “During one trip aboard a boat, a ticket collector asked Harriet and her companion, a fugitive named Tilly, to step aside while he took others’ tickets. Tilly was wild with fear, but Tubman kept calm and prayed, ‘Oh, Lord, you have been with me in six troubles, don’t desert me in the seventh.’ She kept murmuring prayers, and to Tilly’s great surprise, the incantation worked: The ticket collector let them proceed, and they made it to their destination without further interference.”

It was fitting that Tubman came to be called “Moses,” for the Old Testament Moses underwent remarkably similar trials, and the Moses story is likewise full of conflicts between doubt and faith, and eventual reliance on God’s usually inconvenient will.

How, precisely, does this experience of guidance work? The great seventeenth-century Jesuit writer, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, speaks directly to this question in his spiritual classic
Abandonment to Divine Providence:

Divine action is always new and fresh
. This is a startlingly accurate insight by de Caussade. Responding to the “freshness” of divine guidance requires a certain docility of the will, flexibility, and a kind of radical trust. This trust is particularly required, because, as de Caussade says frequently,
when we are led by the spirit, the guidance we receive is often shrouded in darkness. Krishna grasped this same point. He says to Arjuna: “
These actions are enveloped in smoke.”

The yoga tradition is full of teaching stories about divine guidance, and in these stories, sure enough, this guidance is always enshrouded in darkness, in “a cloud,” or in “smoke.” In one of the greatest of these yoga tales—told in countless versions—a pilgrim is on an important journey. He travels only at night, and carries a lantern, but the lantern only illuminates the path just a few feet ahead of him. He knows that this slim illumination is all he needs. He does not need to see the whole path ahead. He trusts that he can make the entire journey seeing only the immediate next steps.

De Caussade picks up the theme: “When we are led by this action, we have no idea where we are going, for the paths we tread cannot be discovered from books or by any of our thoughts. But these paths are always opened in front of us and we are impelled along them. Imagine we are in a strange district at night and are crossing fields unmarked by any path, but we have a guide. He asks no advice nor tells us of his plans. So
what can we do except trust him? It is no use trying to see where we are, look at maps or question passersby. That would not be tolerated by a guide who wants us to rely on him. He will get satisfaction from overcoming our fears and doubts, and will insist that we have complete trust in him.”