Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman died in Auburn, New York, on March 10, 1913, in the home she had raised for aged Black neighbors when the country was finished using them. She was about ninety-one. Born Araminta Ross in Dorchester County, Maryland, around March 1822, she fled in 1849 and then turned around — not once, but through the dark, again and again — until the people she loved stood on free ground. The North Star was a tool, not a metaphor. She moved by rumor, by hymn, by the feel of a river. In the Civil War she scouted for the Union and guided the Combahee River raid that took hundreds out of the Lowcountry rice fields. Auburn was the later work: land for her parents, a roof for strangers, and a late insistence that women should vote. She wanted a soldier's grave more than a saint's. Fort Hill Cemetery gave her the honors. South Street still holds the brick house.