Harriet Tubman Goes Back Thirteen Times

The pine needles under my knees were wet through before the moon rose, and still we waited. Somewhere off past the tree line a dog barked twice and went quiet, and I did not breathe until it stayed quiet. My brother's hand found my shoulder in the dark, and neither of us spoke, because she had told us: no talking once the signal comes, no matter what.

I had grown up hearing her name spoken low, the way you speak of weather that might turn bad or might turn to blessing, you never know which until it is on you. Moses, some called her. Others just said she, and everybody in Dorchester County knew who they meant. She had been a girl here once, hired out to trap muskrats in the marsh at six years old, whipped for not learning to weave, struck in the head with an iron weight thrown at another slave and catching her instead, so that for the rest of her days she would fall asleep sudden and hard, standing up, mid-sentence, and come back to herself as if she had only blinked.

I never saw that happen to her on the road. Whatever visited her in the daylight hours left her alone at night, when the work was hers to do.

She had gone north herself the year before the trouble with the Fugitive Slave Act got bad, in 1849, after word came that she and her brothers Ben and Henry were to be sold. Sale was always the threat hanging over a Dorchester County slave the way frost hangs over a late garden, and everybody understood it could come without warning, the way it had already come for three of her older sisters, Mariah Ritty and Linah and Soph, sold away south and never heard from again by anyone who loved them. She ran with her brothers first, the three of them together, but the brothers turned back. One of them had a baby new in the world and could not make himself leave it. I understood that. I did not blame him for it. But she went on alone after that, through Delaware, into Pennsylvania, and she told people afterward that when she understood she had crossed that line she looked down at her own hands to see was she still the same woman, because everything had gone to gold around her, sun coming down through the trees like something poured, and she said she felt she was already in heaven walking on the earth.

Then she came back. That was the part nobody could account for. A body escapes bondage once, you call that fortunate. She came back, by my best counting and what I have heard traded around fires and church pews since, thirteen separate times over about ten years, and every time she came back it was into the same slave country that had already taken so much from her, and every time she brought people out with her, and never once, not one single time, did she lose a passenger on the road.

Her father, Ben Ross, had taught her things a woman was not supposed to need to know — how to read the sky for weather, how to walk without leaving a clean track, which stars held still through the whole turning night so a lost person could find north even under cloud. He had worked the timber for Anthony Thompson, been promised freedom in the old man's will, and finally got it, some five years after the promise, the way promises to Black men on that shore were kept slow if they were kept at all. I think she carried her father's woodcraft in her like a second set of bones. But when you asked her straight out how she found her way in the dark, past patrol and dog and river, she did not talk about the stars first. She talked about prayer. Thomas Garrett, the Wilmington man who helped hide so many of us moving through Delaware, said he never met a soul who trusted the voice of God speaking direct into her more plainly than she did, and he had met a great many people by that point in his life.

The 1850 law had changed the whole shape of the risk before I ever laid eyes on her. Before that year, a runaway who reached a free state might still be looked for, but the law up north was not required to hunt so hard for you, and plenty of free people looked the other way without breaking any statute to do it. After the act passed, that was finished. Any person could be seized on suspicion alone, protections stripped away, and money put down as bait for anyone willing to catch a Black man, woman, or child and swear to a magistrate they had once been property. Freedom did not stop at the Mason-Dixon line anymore. It had to be walked all the way to Canada to mean anything solid. She knew that better than anyone, and she went back into Maryland anyway, again and again, into the teeth of a law built specifically to make her kind of work into a hanging risk for everybody who touched it.

The night she came for us, the signal was a hymn, sung low and off in the trees the way a person might sing to keep themselves company walking home late, nothing in it that would catch a white ear as anything but a tired field hand humming. When it came, my brother's hand tightened on my shoulder and we rose up out of the wet pine needles together, and there she was, small, a kerchief tied close over her head, a pistol I never saw her use but always knew she carried, because she told us once, plain, that any man among us who lost his nerve halfway and wanted to turn back and go tell what he knew, he was going to go on to freedom or he was going to go on to the grave, one or the other, because a live coward could hang every soul in the party.

Nobody turned back that night. We went on our stomachs through part of the marsh with the mud sucking at us and stars caught trembling in the black water, and she moved ahead of us like she already knew where the ground gave way and where it held, because she likely did know, she had lived and moved through that country the whole of her life before she ever thought of leaving it. Twice we lay still long enough that a horse went by close enough I could hear the leather of the saddle creak, and both times she had us down before I even understood there was a horse coming at all.