Celebrating an Icon Who Embodied Freedom

It’s someone’s 200th birthday! But how do you celebrate an icon, an embodiment of freedom? The answer is, “All year long.”

A nine-foot statue of the trailblazer was unveiled at the start of the year. Harriet Tubman – The Journey to Freedom sculpture by Wesley Wofford was on display for months at Philadelphia’s City Hall. A traveling exhibition, Wofford said the statue will make its way through parts of New York through the end of the year.

The “City of Brotherly Love” is also where Tubman gained her freedom in 1849. Speaking of the Mason-Dixon line, Tubman said, “I had crossed the line.” She would cross that line another 13 times to save others who were enslaved from the insufferable misery of American slavery.

Frederick Douglass said of her that besides John Brown, he could think of “no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people.”

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Harriet Ross on, or around, March 1822 in Maryland’s Dorchester County. Unfortunately, she was born into slavery and her owner, Edward Brodess, did not keep accurate birth records.

But her record of sacrifice and service speaks for itself. Her family called her “Minty” but those she led to freedom called her Moses. It turns out that Moses is a girl’s name too.

Conductor of the Underground Railroad, an understood agreement between those who were enslaved and antislavery activists, Tubman helped hundreds of people escape using secret routes and safe houses.

This was before the Civil War, which began as an argument over slavery or the issuance of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which only freed those enslaved in states not controlled by the Union.

It was a tactical move — not a moral decision. But Quakers and other abolitionists had already decided that this was the right thing to do.

I used to think that Christians were more like these abolitionists and less like Tubman’s oppressors. Sadly, the North American church continues to perpetuate narratives of dehumanization and domination rather than the liberating message of Jesus’ gospel.

“Whom the Son sets free is free” (John 8:36) if socially colored white, male and heterosexual is the tainted gospel many professed Christians have proclaimed.

It is no surprise then that Tubman sticks out like a North Star. She is my guiding light, and this year I wanted to follow in her footsteps literally.

Recently, I went to Dorchester County in Maryland to cross paths with the woman who has left an indelible impression on my life and understanding of Christianity.

Maryland, along with Delaware and Pennsylvania, are the official border, known as the Mason-Dixon line, that separated the free North from the slave-holding South.

An hour and a half drive from my home, I was in Harriet Tubman country. The Chesapeake Bay greeted me, and I wondered “how (she) got over.”

Her face was all over the place – highway and street signs, murals, and a museum.

I visited the Harriet Tubman Memorial Garden, the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitor Center and Malone AME Church where she had met her first husband, John Tubman.

The home of her father, Ben Ross, was discovered last year, but it is not open to the public.

Now cornfields and capitalist ventures, it was a strange meeting of past and present. She had been here.

Tubman said of her Maryland dwelling, “My home, after all, was down in the old cabin quarter, with the old folks, and my brothers and sisters. … They should be free also.”

With no sign of freedom, Tubman became her own. She had been defiant of American slavery’s conditions from the start.

“In her own way, Minty (Tubman’s childhood nickname) has challenged the limitations and margins of the system that enslaves her. By failing to learn to weave, to dust and iron properly, and to keep her fingers out of the sugar bowl, she has successfully defied her master’s wishes, and has in a way taken for herself one of the only kinds of agency open to her, that of refusal,” Beverly Lowry writes in Harriet Tubman: Imagining Life.

Tubman refused to be happy or content with her conditions. She would not accept that this was just the way things are. And I know the feeling.

Refusing to accept the sociopolitical construct of race and its categorical ways of human being and belonging, I have left its false binary reality. Neither Jew nor Greek, neither black nor white, red nor yellow, brown nor beige (that is, mixed race), I reject the dehumanizing ways that we color-coded people.

Like Tubman, I have strong visions though of a “kin-dom” coming.  This column is an invitation. Are you coming?

It was time for me to go. I pressed my feet firmly into the ground of Harriet Tubman country, took a deep breath in and out and said, “Happy birthday!”