<p>Harriet Tubman was born enslaved on a farm in Maryland, with no name of consequence and no right to her own life. She could have remained invisible, like millions of other enslaved people. Instead, she became known as Moses, the woman who made her way back to find those she had left behind.</p>
<p>Born around 1822 under the name Araminta Ross, she was separated from her family as a young girl and hired out for hard labor. Around 1835, an overseer threw an iron weight at another enslaved man and struck her head instead. The injury stayed with her for the rest of her life.</p>
<p>The injury brought headaches, sudden fainting spells, and visions she interpreted as direct messages from God. Raised on Bible stories told by her mother, she found in the book of Exodus a mirror of her own story: a people held in slavery whom God chose to set free.</p>
<p>In 1849, threatened with being sold south, she fled alone to Philadelphia. Over the following ten years, she returned to Maryland about thirteen times and led roughly seventy people to freedom, family and friends among them, along the routes of the Underground Railroad.</p>
<p>She sang spirituals as coded signals and used disguises to throw off slave catchers. According to accounts from the time, she even threatened at gunpoint anyone who wanted to turn back partway through the journey: a single misstep could betray the whole route and everyone fleeing with it.</p>
<p>During the American Civil War, she served the Union Army as a nurse, cook, and spy. In June 1863, she helped plan and lead the raid on the Combahee River, which freed about seven hundred people, making her the first woman to command a military operation in the United States.</p>
<p>After the war, she settled in Auburn, New York, where she lived decades of poverty despite all she had done. In 1873, she was even swindled out of more than two thousand dollars in a financial scam. She remarried, to Nelson Davis, supported the suffrage movement, and in old age turned part of her land into a home for formerly enslaved people without resources.</p>
<p>Elderly and surrounded by friends and family, she died in Auburn, New York. According to biographers, her last words echoed John 14:3: she was going to prepare a place for those she loved, just as she had done her whole life on earth.</p>
Pessoa