America's Prophet (14 page)

I understand how Muslims decide they’re gonna die because of the power of what they believe. And I believe now, as I believed then, that I was walking in the steps, in the blood, of the folks who experienced the Exodus.”

“One of the hallmarks of the Exodus story in the Bible,” I said, “is the covenant. When you look at African American history, a similar theme emerges. What does that idea mean to you?”

“When blacks came north, into lower Manhattan, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, we weren’t well received. The covenant was the creation of self-help institutions within the church, institutions that had strict demands on how you behaved. For example, my son went to Morehouse; his great-grandmother went to Spelman right out of slavery. With his last name, he was expected to go to college and abide by a strict code of behavior, which runs counter to the inner-city neighborhood in which he was conceived and raised. He wanted to drop out of Morehouse once, and I said, ‘Westmoreland men don’t drop out of college. You have to earn the right to carry my last name.’ White America has no idea how the majority of us think, and we got it from the Exodus.”

“So from your point of view, blacks coming out of slavery understood the full dimensions of Exodus. Not just ‘We want to be free’ but the idea that with freedom comes responsibility.”

“All of this began with the black churches in the nineteenth century. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was one of the feared institutions of its time because of its demands. And it continually reminded people that the Jews went through a period of renewal, celebrating Passover and the pain of the past. Rather than saying the Exodus was the flight of a desperate people, they drew a moral parallel and turned the paradigm inside out. We were once a people of flight, and now we’ve become a people of shelter. Instead of sitting on your high horse, do what John Parker did, row back across the
Ohio, and bring more people to freedom. Parker was the
sixth-richest person in Ripley
. I’ve read the will of his banker! And Parker was obviously influenced by the central tenet of the Old Testament.”

“So what is that tenet?”

“Freedom is the right to be free, and then the obligation to accept responsibility. If you don’t understand that, then ugly stuff happens. And when you do understand that, you’re prepared to meet the obligations straight-on.”

JOAN SOUTHGATE HAS
a rule: It may be rude to reveal a woman’s age, but it isn’t when that age is your own. Joan tells me minutes after meeting her in Cleveland that she was born in 1929. She says it in a voice rich with wisdom and warbled with a slight quiver—imagine Carol Channing reborn as a gospel singer—as we head out one morning to the last few of Ohio’s one hundred Underground Railroad stations. Joan knows these sites well, because at age seventy-three, the grandmother of four, a retired African American, inner-city-school teacher, set out on a solo, 519-mile walk retracing the Underground Railroad through Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Canada. She’s a modern-day pilgrim, made even more appealing by her size, four feet nine.

“For some reason, I had really been thinking about slavery a lot,” Joan said of the day she came up with the idea. “I was always eager and articulate as a student. I was a teacher’s pet. But when slavery was the lesson, I was suddenly ashamed of the people I came from. Then one day a few years ago I was taking my usual, stay-healthy walk, and I kept thinking, ‘Who were those amazing people who walked to freedom? How could they do it? And how should I praise them?’”

With the approval of her doctor, Joan began fourteen months of training alongside her black cat, Nelson Mandela. She mapped her route and arranged safe houses in every town. And one April morning she climbed Rankin Hill and began making her way. Her goal was to walk ten miles a day. “I rarely feel old,” she said, “but that first week I functioned like an old lady. Napping in the morning. Letting people take care of me.” At one point she had a panic attack when she thought her damaged foot would require surgery, but one of her conductors arranged for an after-hours visit to a shoe store to get something more comfortable to walk in. “I really did hear heavenly organ music playing when I strode pain-free around the store.”

For the better part of a day, Joan and her friend Fran Stewart, a journalist who cowrote Joan’s memoir of her journey,
In Their Path!,
drove me from small town to smaller town, from preserved safe house to crumbling safe house. We visited the Burrell House, a semi-restored two-story home in Sheffield Village, where Captain Jabez Burrell housed twenty students from nearby Oberlin College in the 1830s. He also kept runaway slaves in his barn, where a recently unearthed tunnel led them to the Black River and north to Lake Erie, across which lay Canada. We strolled through Oberlin, an antislavery bastion, where some students recently erected an Underground Railroad Healing Garden consisting of eight railroad ties surrounded by herbal plants used by African Americans during the journey. These included catnip for insomnia, hives, diarrhea, and menstrual cramps; evening primrose for tumors, coughs, depression, and rashes; butterfly weed for insect bites and poison oak; and black cohosh for heart trouble, bronchitis, and when times called for it, an aphrodisiac. I couldn’t help wondering how many of those on the Underground Railroad with heart trouble and bronchitis really had the need for an aphrodisiac.

Then Joan told me something that stunned me and made me realize how close these events still were to our day. She had a personal connection to the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, a woman known in her time as “the Moses of Her People.”

The future Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland, in 1822. In 1844 she married a free man, John Tubman. Five years later, fearing that she was about to be sold, Tubman tapped into a local network, received two names of safe houses from a white neighbor, and fled north toward Philadelphia. The journey was terrifying and mystical. She navigated using the North Star; she may have
followed the drinkin’ gourd,
a code name for the Big Dipper; and in a clear homage to the Israelites’ flight from Egypt, she recalled that she felt led by an “invisible pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night.”

In other echoes of the Exodus, she described her feeling upon reaching freedom as solemn and lonely. “I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land.” The Mosaic theme of estrangement that had captivated both William Bradford and George Whitefield, that would influence Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Statue of Liberty and would shape the scholarship of Harvard’s Peter Gomes and the Institute for Advanced Study’s Michael Walzer, here appears almost verbatim in the words of an uneducated slave woman from the Maryland shore. What ensured Tubman’s reputation was how she reacted to her feeling of alienation. The following year she trekked hundreds of miles back into slave territory to free her sister and her sister’s children. A few months later she returned to rescue her brother Moses and two others. On a third trip she intended to bring back her husband, only to find he had taken up with another woman. She vowed at first to
create “all the trouble she could,” but quickly resolved, “if he could do without her, she could do without him,” and freed two others on that trip.

“The Moses of Her People,” Harriet Tubman, as photographed by H. B. Lindsley, c. 1860–1875.
(Courtesy of The Library of Congress)

Harriet Tubman made as many as thirteen expeditions into “Egypt land,” guiding seventy slaves to freedom and giving instructions to dozens more. She became infamous across the South, her name plastered on posters, and rewards offered for her capture totaled forty thousand dollars. Frederick Douglass said that with the exception of John Brown, “I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people.” Brown himself described her as “one of the bravest persons on the continent.”

From her earliest days as a conductor, Tubman employed the Exodus story. At times she used it as code to communicate with slaves still in captivity. In 1854 she wrote to her brothers that they should be ready to climb aboard “when the good old ship of Zion comes along.” To avoid detection by white postmasters, she sent the letter to a free black, Jacob Jackson, and signed it “William Henry Jackson.” Jacob Jackson was grilled by authorities but pointed out that he knew no one by that name. Jackson then relayed the plot to its intended subjects. Tubman also used spirituals to communicate in the middle of an operation. Once at the meeting point, she would sing one verse to announce her arrival and another to signify that the coast was clear. But she reserved one verse to warn that there was danger in the area and the slaves should stay put:

As her fame grew, Harriet Tubman adopted the alias Moses to keep her identity anonymous. The name became renowned across the South—beloved in the black community, cursed in the white. Newspapers reported on the clandestine activities of “Moses.” The
Liberator
reported in 1860 that “Moses” spoke before an antislavery gathering in her “quaint and amusing style.” Posters appeared across the upper South bearing the name “Moses” in large letters and a description of Tubman. I can think of few images more vivid in the evolving role of the Exodus in American life than the idea of posters tacked up on fence poles and shop walls across slaveholding territories of the United States saying
WANTED: MOSES, DEAD OR ALIVE
. Decades earlier, Washington had been hailed as the American Moses; now Americans wanted Moses locked back into shackles.

Late in her life, when Tubman was suffering financial hardships, her friends commissioned an authorized biography to help her generate some income. Originally published in 1869 as
Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman,
it was republished in 1886 as
Harriet, the Moses of Her People
. The author, Sarah Bradford, wrote that the title might seem a little ambitious “considering that this Moses was a woman.”

During these later years, Tubman lived in Auburn, New York, near where Joan Southgate was born. “My mother knew Harriet in
those years,” Joan explained. “When ‘Aunt Harriet’ would go through the town, sometimes she would fall asleep while driving her carriage. The horse would stop, and my mother and her friends would sit on the curb and wait for her to rouse. They made sure it was just one of her sleeping fits.

“But when I was growing up,” she continued, “I thought ‘Aunt Harriet’ meant the same as my Aunt Val or Aunt Pauline. I thought, ‘Great! I’m related to Harriet Tubman.’ That part turned out not to be true.”

I asked Joan why she thought Harriet Tubman was so famous, especially considering she didn’t save that many people when compared with others.

“Probably because she was a woman. She was bold. She risked her freedom to save others. But since she was a woman, few people thought she was smart enough. During one trip, she watched some men putting up a wanted poster for her that said she was illiterate, so she just sat down in their presence and read a book because she knew they’d never suspect her!”

We reached our final destination, the terminus of the Black River, where it flows into the Erie Canal. A sign identified the spot as Station #100, the last stop on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. On the far side of the lake is Canada, the real land of freedom for many slaves, since there they could not be claimed by bounty hunters. I had been thinking all day that Joan, an ordinary person by her own account, was connected by family, and now through her own journey, to an extraordinary chapter in American history. I was reminded how young America is. The connections that link the Puritans with the Revolution, with the Great Awakening, with the Underground Railroad—and all of these events with today—took place in less time than the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt.

But what I found most stirring is how alive these connections still
seemed to people like Jerry Gore, Carl Westmoreland, and Joan Southgate. Their ancestral slaves in America were as close to them as the enslaved Israelites had been to their ancestors. For those in pain, biblical time becomes any time. Now becomes then. And the longer I thought about it, the more I realized that a similar message echoes in the Jewish commemoration of the Exodus. A chief message of the Passover story is that the Exodus is perpetually now. As the Passover liturgy puts it, “In every generation, a person should look upon himself as if he personally had come out of Egypt.” We all are in pain. We are all strangers in a strange land. And the proper way to acknowledge that suffering is to relieve the suffering of others. “Befriend the stranger,” says Deuteronomy 10:19, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”