Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman didn't take no stuff
Wasn't scared of nothing neither
Didn't come in this world to be no slave
And wasn't going to stay one either.—Harriet Tubman (poem) by Eloise Greenfield
Harriet Tubman was born sometime in the 1820s, a slave on an American plantation in Maryland. She started life as a house slave, and when she grew up was assigned to work in the fields and forests. One day when she was still quite young, she was running an errand at a dry-goods store and was caught in the pursuit of a runaway slave. She was left with a violent head injury, and for the rest of her life she suffered seizures and narcoleptic fits that would leave her unconscious and unable to be woken up.
In 1849, she successfully escaped from Maryland into the free state of Pennsylvania.
""When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven."
However, she soon decided that it wasn't enough to have won her own freedom: She wanted the freedom of her parents, siblings and friends. So, over the course of 11 years, she returned 13 times to the South, risking increasing danger each time, and never using the same route twice. She never once was caught nor lost a passenger. Legend tells that, when a runaway got cold feet and was about to return to his plantation, she held him at gunpoint and said "You go on or die." She became the most famous conductor that the Underground Railroad has ever known, rescuing over 70 slaves through a network of safe houses, railroads and secret paths. She survived the Civil War, and died in 1913 of pneumonia, when she must have been at least well into her 80s. Today she is rightly remembered as one of the great American heroes.
Naturally, if there are time travelers arriving in Antebellum America or you want to have present day American heroes have noble heroic ancestors, you can expect them to be giving Tubman some help.
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- Almighty Janitor: From a societal perspective, this woman started out the lowest of the low on the social rung, but exhibited astounding cunning and nerve.
- Badass
- Folk Hero
- Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death!: See the above legend.
- Handicapped Badass: The narcoleptic fits mentioned above would sometimes strike in the middle of an escape. And there was nothing that the rest of the party could do except move to a safe location and hope that Tubman would wake up soon. Clearly, she never let this stop her.
- Pint-Sized Powerhouse: She measured only around 5 feet tall.
- Underground Railroad: Its most famous icon.
- Vague Age: Like most slaves, she did not know the exact year, let alone day, of her birth.