The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (44 page)

Grandma’s story worked its intended magic. Dr. Frisbie—and Harriet Tubman and her network of freedom fighters—captured my imagination. And the lesson I took from the story could have come from Krishna himself: A guy has got to do what a guy has got to do.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve become intrigued with Elias Frisbie’s interactions with the near-mythic figure of Harriet Tubman. Grandma didn’t know enough about Frisbie’s relationship with Tubman to include the details in her official story, but I’ve learned as much as I can about them, and I now weave these nuggets into the original story when I tell it to my nieces and nephews. This, I suppose, is how a family’s dharma story evolves.

2

Harriet Tubman—a diminutive, unprepossessing, and mammothly determined fugitive slave—was the most famous rescuer of slaves in the American South in the decade between 1850 and 1860. She carried out a string of at least nineteen daring raids into slaveholding territories—leading her enslaved family and friends (and practically anyone who dared to come) out of bondage in the South and all the way to freedom in Canada. Her hair-raising journeys became the stuff of legend—and
were made more notorious by the fact that Tubman was herself a fugitive slave and subject at any time to recapture and the horror of reenslavement. (Actually, Tubman would most likely not have been reenslaved had she been caught. She would have just been hung. By the time the Civil War erupted there was a price of $40,000 on her head—and she was hated and feared by Southern slave owners.)

Stories of Tubman’s raids into the South are toe curling. By all accounts, she had an uncanny ability to evade danger. She could evaporate into thin air with a whole troop of fugitives (and she sometimes led as many as ten or twelve out at a time). She had a second sense about when to move and when to stay under cover—hunches that often defied common sense. She had an unerring sense of which riverbank to follow, which house might be safe, which house might harbor danger. There are edge-of-your-seat accounts of her accidentally coming face-to-face with former masters during her forays south—once on the very plantation from which she had herself escaped. These stories always end with her avoiding recognition through some clever spur-of-the moment disguise: pulling a bonnet down over her face, or putting her nose in a newspaper (though she could not read a word).

When one drills down into these tales, one finds that they flesh out in vivid fashion one critical component of dharma: the issue of “guidance.” Harriet was widely believed to have been guided directly by God—called by him, and guided by him every step of the way. Within months of her near-miraculous escape from a plantation in Maryland, she had the distinct sense of a call, a voice inside that said, “Harriet Tubman, I want you to help free others.” Tubman answered back to God, “Find somebody else. Can’t do it. You kidding?”

The stories of a “call” such as Harriet received are omnipresent in the spiritual and religious world: Jonah and the whale, Moses in Egypt, St. Paul on the road to Damascus. “The Call” is an archetype of the spiritual imagination. It is nothing less than the call to be absolutely yourself.

The call to Harriet was repeated over and over again—as it has to be in these stories, since the first response is always “no.” Of course, in this particular story Tubman finally said yes, but very reluctantly. Doubt and indecision are always a central aspect of “call” stories, and Arjuna is our antiheroic example. Harriet decided that if she were going to respond to
this nagging call, she would have to put herself in God’s hands, because she had no idea how to pull it off by herself. “If you’ve called me to this, Lord, then you’ll damn sure have to do it, ’cause I can’t.”

Harriet followed her guidance. She prayed. She listened. And she found the guidance she received stunningly reliable. Eventually, Harriet learned to walk by faith, not by sight. And her faith was, apparently, contagious, for everyone else began to trust her as well. Fugitives whom she helped free soon enough learned: If she says go, go. If she says stay, stay.

A moment-by-moment trust in Divine guidance is central to Krishna’s teaching. He teaches: “
To know when to act and when to refrain from action, what is right action and what is wrong, what brings security and what brings insecurity, what brings freedom and what brings bondage: These are the signs of a pure mind.”

To know when to act, and when not to act
.

Harriet Tubman’s dharma story allows us to examine the question of guidance. How does Divine guidance actually work? Is there really such a thing? Is it from God, or is it from an ineffable Inner Self? Is it available even to us?

3

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in 1825. (Her mother had arrived on a slave ship directly from Africa, and was bought by a Maryland family named Pattison.) As a girl, Harriet learned the central facts of slavery: Your body is not your own, your life is not your own, your labor is not your own, and your family is not your own. This last fact was a source of particular suffering for young Harriet. She learned early on that your kin can be sold “downriver” at any moment, and you have absolutely no recourse. Once sold, families were rarely reunited. Tubman watched as her mother’s family—sisters and brothers—were auctioned off in front of her, while the family stood by in horror and agony.

How would one manage the violence and powerlessness of such a life? Harriet’s mother managed it by developing a sustaining faith in God, and she taught this faith to Harriet. The entire family was illiterate,
so they never actually read the Bible, but they learned Bible stories by heart—especially the Old Testament stories of the suffering of God’s people in Egypt, and their eventual escape into the Promised Land. These stories were made vivid in Harriet’s imagination in chants sung rhythmically while at work in the fields, and in stories told at night huddled together in the slave cabin.

Harriet would need every ounce of her mother’s faith: When she was only five years old, a “Miss Susan” drove up to Pattison’s plantation and asked for a young girl to take care of a baby. Pattison sent Harriet off with “Miss Susan” that very instant—to a new and harrowing home far from her parents. This experience of sudden exile was repeated over and over again throughout Harriet’s childhood. By the time she was fifteen she had had many masters, though she eventually ended up back at Pattison’s. She said later, “
I grew up like a neglected weed—ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.”

By the time she was in her teens, Tubman had become a field hand—which she vastly preferred to being a house slave. In the fields, she developed physical and mental stamina, and enjoyed the taste of the personal power this brought her. Outdoors—where she was not so directly under the shoe of the master—she began to get a taste of freedom. She wanted more.

In 1849, Harriet learned quite by accident that for the previous decade she and her family had been held illegally in slavery, for they had—unbeknownst to them—actually been freed by Master Pattison’s will at his death ten years earlier. Pattison’s heir had conveniently neglected to inform them of this. The discovery of this outrageous betrayal made Harriet blind with rage. What to do? She turned first to her faith. She decided to begin a prayer vigil for the soul of her master (Pattison’s heir), whom she now knew to be a charlatan of the worst sort. She prayed fervently that his heart would be changed.

His heart was not changed. But Harriet’s was. Tubman learned a lesson: She saw that she would have to take an active role in God’s plan for her. She could no longer be only a passive supplicant. She needed to learn to skillfully combine
prayer and action
—a most Gita-like insight.

Harriet came to believe that she had a moral duty to free herself. She
had not only a
right
but a
duty
to be free: “
I had reasoned this out in my mind,” she said later. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one I would have the other.”

For years before her escape, Harriet had recurring dreams of her flight to freedom. In the dream, she was “
flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them ‘like a bird,’ and reaching at last a great fence, or sometimes a river, over which she would try to fly … “It ’peared like I wouldn’t have the strength, and just as I was sinkin’ down, there would be ladies all drest in white over there, and they would put out their arms and pull me ‘cross.’ ”

This dream of flight to freedom was, of course, a central theme in African American spirituality, and often included the image of a river (usually the River Jordan) and visions of crossing that river—or of ascending into Heaven. Freedom and death were closely linked in the spiritual imagination of slaves. Their songs were filled with these images:

When Harriet was twenty-seven, she learned that her master intended to put her up for auction. This was the last straw. She decided to make her move. It appears that Harriet planned her escape very methodically, and then quietly slipped away from her master’s estate on September 24, 1850. She was immediately pursued by slave catchers.

Harriet’s escape was extraordinary by any measure. Most fugitive slaves were men, but Harriet was a woman still in her twenties. She had never been out of her home county. She knew no more than most slaves did about the path to freedom. She knew only a few pieces of slave lore: She knew to move at night, she knew to follow the riverbanks leading north, and she knew to follow the North Star. She had often heard the song filled with clues about the route to freedom: “Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd.” The drinking gourd referred, of course, to the constellation we call The Big Dipper—whose two end-stars point to the North Star.