Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom

HARRIET TUBMAN

In the Eastern Shore of Maryland Dorchester County is where I was born. I remember, I prayed to God to make me strong and able to fight and that's what I've prayed for ever since.

NARRATOR

In 1822, an enslaved couple named Ben and Rit welcomed a little girl named Araminta. The new baby was born in Maryland. In the states to the north, slavery was already outlawed, while Maryland and the states to the south relied on enslaved labor.

ERICA DUNBAR

Maryland was in transition in the 19th century and more specifically on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where enslavers typically had smaller plots of land, smaller numbers of enslaved people working their farms. It really created a different kind of economy. One that required many enslavers to rent out the people they called their property. Harriet Tubman, by the time she's five, six years old she becomes caught up in that web of being hired out. Hmmmmm, Hmmmmm, Ohhhh

MARISA FUENTES

A childhood experience in slavery is not a childhood. The idea here is that slavery was a profit driven industry and slave owners extracted the most profit from all of their enslaved people throughout their lives. Well, I wonder will I ever get back home again

MIA BAY

Harriet Tubman's experience of a child was particularly hard. She did things like work in the swamps catching muskrats, where she got very sick and contracted measles and eventually became so ill, she had to be sent home. Well, it must have been a devil who put me here, Yeaaa

KATE LARSON

She was required to clean the house at six years old. Um, she didn't know how to clean a house. She also had to babysit a colicky baby who would cry a lot. And every time the baby cried, then the mistress would whip um, six-year-old Minty. Yeaaa, Oh Lord

CHERYL LAROCHE

Life indoors can be dangerous. You know this whole business about people in the house having privilege, people in the house are exposed to the slaveholder constantly. When Tubman talks about being with these white women who are enslaving her, it's the wrath and the violence of these women that are visiting upon this child.

FARAH GRIFFIN

We certainly have myths of white mistresses being the kind slave owner-- are, you know, aren't as cruel as their husbands. In truth...oftentimes, women were just as cruel, if not more so. They identified with their husbands. They identified with white supremacy, with white men. And they had the access which allowed for a greater kind of intimate cruelty on a day to day basis.