by Stephen Cope
His heart was not changed. But Harriet’s was. Tubman learned a lesson: She saw that she would have to take an active role in God’s plan for her. She could no longer be only a passive supplicant. She needed to learn to skillfully combine prayer and action—a most Gita-like insight.
Harriet came to believe that she had a moral duty to free herself. She had not only a right but a duty to be free: “I had reasoned this out in my mind,” she said later. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one I would have the other.”
For years before her escape, Harriet had recurring dreams of her flight to freedom. In the dream, she was “flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them ‘like a bird,’ and reaching at last a great fence, or sometimes a river, over which she would try to fly … “It ’peared like I wouldn’t have the strength, and just as I was sinkin’ down, there would be ladies all drest in white over there, and they would put out their arms and pull me ‘cross.’ ”
This dream of flight to freedom was, of course, a central theme in African American spirituality, and often included the image of a river (usually the River Jordan) and visions of crossing that river—or of ascending into Heaven. Freedom and death were closely linked in the spiritual imagination of slaves. Their songs were filled with these images:
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
Coming for to carry me home,
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.
When Harriet was twenty-seven, she learned that her master intended to put her up for auction. This was the last straw. She decided to make her move. It appears that Harriet planned her escape very methodically, and then quietly slipped away from her master’s estate on September 24, 1850. She was immediately pursued by slave catchers.
Harriet’s escape was extraordinary by any measure. Most fugitive slaves were men, but Harriet was a woman still in her twenties. She had never been out of her home county. She knew no more than most slaves did about the path to freedom. She knew only a few pieces of slave lore: She knew to move at night, she knew to follow the riverbanks leading north, and she knew to follow the North Star. She had often heard the song filled with clues about the route to freedom: “Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.” The drinking gourd referred, of course, to the constellation we call The Big Dipper—whose two end-stars point to the North Star.
When the sun come back and the quail calls,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd.
For the old man a-waitin’ to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinkin’ gourd.
The riverbank make a very good road.
The dead trees show you the way.
Left foot, right foot, travel on,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd
There’s another river on the other side,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd.
When the great river meets the little river there,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd
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:
“When God becomes our guide he insists that we trust him without reservations and put aside all nervousness about his guidance. We are sent along the path he has chosen for us, but we cannot see it, and nothing we have read is any help to us. Were we acting on our own we should have to rely on our experience. It would be too risky to do anything else. But it is very different when God acts with us. Divine action is always new and fresh, it never retraces its steps, but always finds new routes.”
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.”
One of the most difficult aspects of faith is the suspension of one’s own preconceived ideas about how to proceed. The willing suspension of preconceived plans and schemes is absolutely required, as Harriet Tubman discovered. These plans—our plans—are then gradually replaced by a growing trust in moment-by-moment guidance.
Harriet’s trips were characterized by this very “shroud of darkness,” and also by stunning acts of creativity all along the way. When Harriet and her current band of fugitives finally reached the suspension bridge that led her party across the Niagara into Canada, she would routinely lead the party in songs of thanksgiving, great spirituals, and hymns of praise. She understood that a successful trip was not her doing. She saw clearly that she was “not the Doer.” Thanks should be given!
6
Remember our friend Brian the priest? When last we left him, he was on the floor of his own particular chariot. He was, you will recall, caught in long-standing inner conflict: Should he make a belated choice for what he knew was his true calling as a church musician? Or should he remain in the now-familiar role of rector of his small parish church? It was not a black-or-white choice by any means, as you will recall. He was in many ways well suited to the role of rector. He knew that he was being useful in the role. His family was proud of him. But his deepest aspirations had not been realized. He felt empty, dissatisfied, and deeply afraid he would die without having fully lived. Brian had lived with a quiet sense of self-betrayal for twenty years. As he reached his forty-fifth year, he could begin to see that his life would at some point end. And he wondered more and more frequently: Is there still time for me to be who I really am?
Around the time of his forty-fifth birthday, Brian became seriously depressed. He was paralyzed—like Arjuna—in the face of two courses of action, both of which now seemed difficult. The more he thought about it, the more impossible the situation seemed. He became more and more paralyzed. He started to drink heavily.
Finally, out of desperation, Brian did something very wise. He requested a leave of absence from his post as rector. His depression was his “second sense” kicking in. Something in him simply refused to go on. This refusal was a wise inner move: When you are enveloped in doubt, it is sometimes best just to stop. When in doubt don’t! Instead of moving forward in a daze, can you allow yourself to stop and experience the pain of the doubt? Can you investigate the doubt itself? This is precisely what Arjuna had to do. The entire dialogue of the Gita happens in a kind of “time-out” for Arjuna, as he explores his doubt. All forward movement is suspended, and an intense inquiry takes place.
“Suspending forward movement” was not that easy for Brian. The bishop had a shortage of good priests upon whom to call, and he was not pleased to le
t Brian go. The bishop, like Brian’s mother, wrote Brian’s doubts off as a midlife crisis. “Priests have these crises of faith,” said the bishop. “He’ll get through it.”
In spite of the resistance, Brian entered into a time of inquiry. This was itself a pivotal act of faith. Sometimes just stopping can be the act that allows the solution to emerge. Brian spent three months at a Jesuit retreat center. I had given him de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence before he left, and also one of my old copies of the Gita.
I visited with Brian after he had been at the retreat center for a month. We had lunch together in the refectory. He’d been studying de Caussade’s book, and he’d vigorously underlined this passage in it: “Now it is surely obvious that the only way to receive [guidance] is to put oneself quietly in the hands of God, and that none of our own efforts and mental striving can be of any use at all.”
None of our own efforts and mental striving can be of any use at all. At all? Brian had come to feel the wearying truth of this.
De Caussade nails this point: “This work in our souls cannot be accomplished by cleverness, intelligence, or any subtlety of mind, but only by completely abandoning ourselves to the divine action, becoming like metal poured into a mold, or a canvas waiting for the brush, or marble under the sculptor’s hands.”
Brian had to surrender his will. He had to be willing to do what he was called to do. And he had to put everything on the table. Nothing held back. This meant that he had to be willing to continue being rector if that was the guidance he received, and he had to be willing to bring everything he had even to that vocation.
Several weeks into his retreat, Brian made another smart move: He entered into a relationship with an old priest/confessor at the center. (Notice once again what a pivotal role mentors play in dharma decisions.) Father Bede had been a monk for forty years, and he was now the chief spiritual director at the retreat. Bede was sanguine about Brian’s situation, but forceful. He gave Brian the same message repeatedly: “For the sake of God, boy, let go of all this obsessive worry and fretting. You are powerless over such a mess.” Bede had faith that Brian would be guided. And Brian, who had much less faith, was able to hitchhike on Bede’s. Slowly, and as a result of pure desperation, Brian began to loosen his grip on the outcome.