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slaved folk had the kind of knowledge necessary for scientific thought. To these people, the idea that Tubman could have used astronomy is to project wish ful- fillment on a woman who was insufficiently educated. As if enslaved people— who never had any formal education—were not midwives, farmers, builders and chefs who had expertise in aspects of human biology, agriculture, engi- neering and chemistry. Tubman, an extraordinarily skilled soldier for freedom who often had to


work at night, would of course have sought out and taken advantage of a re- source such as Polaris. Tubman herself reported that during her at least 13 journeys below the Mason-Dixon line to rescue freedom seekers, “I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.” Only with extensive tech- nical skills, including an intimate familiarity with the land, and an incredible level of persistence could Tubman have had this kind of success rate. I believe that Tubman, as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and


general expert on the social technology of liberation, understood and used this cosmos that includes Black people and freedom. This knowledge makes her one of the greatest astronomers in American history. There is a great cosmos beyond the horrors of slavery and its wake. We have


always been a part of it, and it has always been a part of us. I firmly believe we will one day launch a Harriet Tubman Space Telescope, sending out a memo- rial to the best of humanity to meet our most glorious cosmos.


CHANDA PRESCOD-WEINSTEIN is a theoretical physicist and feminist theorist at the University of New Hampshire and author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.


A Life Beyond Myths BY KATE CLIFFORD LARSON


IT IS REMARKABLE THAT WE KNOW TUBMAN AT ALL. BUT WE DO because, as a self-liberated woman with a fierce mission to free others, she attracted influential and powerful people. Liberty or death, she told them. Her insatiable drive to rob enslavers of their “property,” and willingness to die try- ing, motivated the most influential Black and white abolitionists and civil rights progressives to seek her out. Her powerful presence and intellect kept them in her orbit. They listened to her, and she inspired them. She demanded that they do more, give more, be better allies, and they did. They wrote about her—to each other and for the press—preserving her story for generations. They did not always preserve the facts, though. When Tubman was alive,


she relied on amanuenses to record and interpret her words. While some of them recorded her faithfully, particularly in their private correspondence, oth- ers were baldly reckless and careless with the information she gave them; they did not respect her because they saw her as illiterate. They did not worry about the truthfulness of what they reported, and in some cases deliberately obscured her truths. They could not imagine that Tubman had great literacy. Her education,


borne out of self-preservation necessitated by extreme oppression, consisted of learning to read the night sky, the rivers, streams and marshes, woods and fields. She could read people and discern character. Those tools, those literacies, shaped her intellect, nurturing a genius that fomented incredible change. If those documentarians had recognized her gifts, they would not have fashioned false narratives as substitutes for her actions. As a result, her story, and her ac- complishments, have become fortified by myths, half-truths and misinforma-


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tion for generations. Tubman followed rivers that


snaked northward. She used the stars and other natural phenomena to in- form and guide her. Contrary to the stories, she carried a pistol, not a rifle, for simple protection more than to threaten freedom seekers into contin- uing on the journey. She trusted her literacies and felt fortified by her deep faith. She never said, “I freed a thou- sand slaves. I could have freed a thou- sand more if only they knew they were slaves.” She did say, “Slavery is the next thing to hell.” She knew that not everyone could escape, and that African Americans employed multiple strategies to resist, survive and pursue freedom in small and large ways. We erase her own words—we disre-


spect her—when we substitute them with modern self-help phrases like, “Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world,” which was first attributed to Tubman in 2007. Hillary Clinton summoned Tubman’s image as a strong, pioneering woman while on the campaign trail in 2008 and again in 2016 with a fake quote from the 1950s popularized during the civil rights movement: “If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torch-


“Understanding Tubman as a ‘disabled’ fgure can help us to see the powerful intersections between disability and strength.”


—DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS www.feminist.org


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