1913 if you build it right if you know the trees if you make it sweet enough for your parents and big enough for your community and soon enough to live in it yourself the old folks home can be a spaceship


1922 somebody thinks they can fix the cosmos get black history down in writing fix your image keep you there somewhere the first and last astronomer laughs


2022 and laughs


ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS’ poetry and fiction appear in many creative journals and have been honored with inclusion in Best American Experimental Writing, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and honors from the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and the Firefly Ridge Women of Color Award.


Harriet Tubman, Astronomer Extraordinaire BY CHANDA PRESCOD-WEINSTEIN THE DRINKING GOURD IS NOTABLE BECAUSE OF ITS easy-to-identify shape, which simplifies finding Polaris, the North Star, so named because it always points toward true north. Polaris was thus a natural compass, especially for enslaved people who were self-liberating, including Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman. The story appears repeatedly throughout popular representa- tions of Tubman: She used the North Star to liberate her- self. Then, like a superhero, she went south over and over again, using the North Star to liberate both family and strangers. I cannot imagine a more noble use of astronomical


knowledge than to liberate people from the violent horror of chattel slavery. Yet finding Harriet Tubman, as- tronomer, in the archives is not a straightforward endeav- or. There is currently one known instance of this story being recorded during Tubman’s lifetime. In Sarah Hopkins Bradford’s 1869 Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, the story is told like this: “And she started on her journey, ‘not knowing whither she went,’ except that she was going to follow the north star, till it led her to liberty.” An argument against Bradford’s rendering of Tubman’s


history is rooted in an unwillingness to believe that en- www.msmagazine.com


SPRING 2022 | 35


“I cannot imagine a more noble use of astronomical


knowledge than to


liberate people from the violent horror of chattel slavery.”


—CHANDA PRESCOD-WEINSTEIN


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