We Walk with Harriet: A modern-day retracing of Harriet Tubman’s footsteps
Few folks have traveled with more purpose than legendary Underground Railroad conductor, abolitionist, suffragist, and human rights activist Harriet Tubman. You may have learned in school that Tubman ferried 300 strangers to freedom during 19 trips or read recent scholarship revising that number to 70 friends and family members over a dozen trips, still at unimaginable personal risk. If you count the over 70 self-liberators she advised on how to navigate forests, swamps and secret safe houses to freedom, her decades on the abolitionist speaking circuit and her armed wartime expedition into Confederate territory, where she rescued another 700 enslaved Africans, it’s probably safe to say that few individuals have personally walked more Black Americans to freedom. Two-hundred years after her birth, she continues to do so.
In 2020, two years before Maryland declared the Year of Harriet Tubman, jazz singer/songwriter Linda D. Harris, 67, felt decidedly unfree. In a year that had seen the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, the recently retired real estate agent said she felt “more deeply hurt than I’ve ever been.” She picked up a book that her father had given her as a child, about Tubman’s decade on the Underground Railroad, and everything changed. “I realized, I gotta find freedom the way Harriet did,” Harris said. “By putting one foot in front of the other.”
With national interest in Tubman growing, thanks to bicentennial celebrations, a feature film, several statues and plans for the $20 bill redesign, many have talked the talk. Harris resolved to walk the walk. Literally. To put herself in Tubman’s shoes and retrace her journey by foot.
She drove to nearby Dorchester County, Maryland, where Tubman was born Araminta “Minty” Ross around 1822, to meet with docents and historians and learn about Tubman’s role in planning a slave rebellion and work as a Union spy. Starting with the 125-mile Tubman Byway, a self-guided driving tour through 45 Underground Railroad sites, they helped her map Tubman’s route from the Brodess Plantation, her childhood home, through Kent County, Delaware, to Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, a hotbed of abolition with large free Black and Quaker populations. When Harris posted on Facebook asking if anyone wanted to join her, seven other Black women responded. Calling themselves We Walk with Harriet, the group of strangers, aged 38 to 65, spent every Saturday for half a year training together.
In September 2020, the eight set out on a six-day, 116-mile journey that attracted the attention of local news and national press, like the Washington Post and Afar, and was eagerly monitored by nearly 10,000 followers on Facebook. They walked 20 miles per day, stopping at landmarks like the Bucktown General Store, where Tubman was injured as a teen during an early act of resistance. During the time spent training together, a strong sisterhood formed, which intensified on the road as they communed with the spirits of their ancestors and Tubman, herself a deeply spiritual individual. “We were walking off our woes,” Harris explained, “the men that broke our hearts, the kids that drive us crazy, the nasty boss. We were just living in the moment. To me, that’s freedom.”
On 9/11, the women strode into Kennett Square, cheered on by a crowd of 200, and paid their respects to a large Tubman mural. According to Harris, though Pennsylvania was a free state, Tubman didn’t realize she was free. After a brief stop, she continued on to Philadelphia. The eight also stopped, reconvening two weeks later to walk the remaining 41 miles to the Philadelphia home of prominent abolitionist William Still, who directed the Underground Railroad for over a decade. They were joined by Ken Johnston, a walking history artist from Philadelphia and now-frequent walking partner of Harris’s who has done civil rights walks from the U.S. to Northern Ireland.
As someone who’s walked the ancient European pilgrimage route, the Camiño de Santiago de Compostela, and done walking meditation in Thailand as a Buddhist nun, I recognize the glow of someone who’s been transformed on the road. Like Tubman, Harris clearly found her purpose. “This walking thing,” she told me, “walking in the steps of our ancestors, on the blood-soaked ground they walked upon, sacred ground, changed my life forever. An incredible being – Tubman – paved the way for me to pave the way to others.”
After the first walk, Harris used her retirement savings to purchase a house in Dorchester County. Her dream for Camp Harriet, as she calls it, is to create an educational center that can house walking pilgrims. She also started working part-time as director of events at the Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center, leading short bimonthly trips and researching more ambitious ones. “I was just answering the call to tell the story,” she explained, “to talk about freedom, and why we still don’t have it, and why we have to work hard to get it.”
A year later, in October 2021, she was ready to lead a second We Walk with Harriet trip. This time she was joined by a multiracial, multicultural group of eighteen people from all over the country. Harris was surprised but noted that, “All the folks who walk with me, including children, are in search of something. They are able to free up things that have been holding them back. I think it’s changing them and encouraging them to think differently about who they are, what they are, and what freedom means.” She took the same route but incorporated additional modes of transportation that Tubman would have used after her first escape. An African American sailing group lent them three boats, and they departed from the Cambridge Long Wharf, where slave ships used to dock, sailing the Choptank River into the Chesapeake Bay. The seven hours it took to go 42 miles demonstrated how difficult the task must have been for Tubman and the sailors who had to navigate by night with only the aid of sails and the stars. They took horse-and-carriages for 30 miles into Delaware, then walked the rest of the way to Pennsylvania. As with the first group, Harris noticed a change. “I keep in touch with all of them,” she says. “They say they feel different. They feel good all the time.”
Harris’ next big walk, originally planned to commemorate the Tubman bicentennial, which started this spring with celebrations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and the New York Finger Lakes region, will happen in April 2023. The ambitious 5-day, 150-mile journey takes a northern route to Canada, the last stop on the railroad. Like her muse, Harris takes her role as guide seriously. Each trip requires hundreds of hours of preparatory research, consultations with historians, and multiple reconnaissance trips. Once participants register, Harris holds a series of Zoom meetings to build community and share information like maps, equipment and reading lists and photos. Those who live locally can train with her. Others are encouraged to meet up and send in progress reports.
Walkers will depart from Auburn, New York, where Tubman purchased a homestead after the Civil War and spent the last 54 years of her life, when not traveling the country raising money for schools for newly freed people and lobbying for female suffrage. Her final humanitarian act was to establish a home for the aged and indigent, where she herself died indigent at the age of 91. She is buried in Fort Hill Cemetery, a pilgrimage site not far from her home and church. The walk will end at St. Catherines, a town on Lake Ontario just across the Canadian border, where Tubman relocated her efforts after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 allowed traffickers to sell Blacks into bondage and made it a crime to assist freedom-seekers in the U.S.
Eighty of the 150-mile route will entail walking; the rest of the journey will be via boat, horse-and-carriage and train, replicating Tubman’s experience. Historians and scholars will give talks at restored safe houses, while Harris will provide mini-lessons on spirituality, music and nature appreciation. “After walking,” she confided, “I meditate, I sing, I hug a tree.” She has started adding music, her other great passion, to the walks, and she and her partner have just released a CD of classic Negro spirituals, like Get on Board, Follow the Drinking Gourd, Motherless Child, Go Down Moses and Wade in the Water, that conductors used to send info. “The code songs were key to the success of the mission,” she pointed out. “If you heard someone sing, Go down, Moses, that meant Harriet was on her way. You need to get ready.”
Part of getting ready is freeing your mind, which Harris calls “finding the Harriet in you. “Harriet was a superhero, a humanitarian, a politician, a freedom fighter,” Harris said. “So I tell people, find one aspect of her story, embrace it, and it will change you forever.”
She grinned, proof positive. “It changed me. I feel free. I feel completely free.”
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This story was originally published July 26, 2022 at 9:00 AM with the headline "We Walk with Harriet: A modern-day retracing of Harriet Tubman’s footsteps."