Visions of Freedom

Harriet Tubman, named the “Black Moses,” led hundreds of enslaved Black people into freedom from chattel bondage in the American South. Visions and dreams were central to Tubman’s navigation of pathways to freedom. Major uprisings, such as the liberation at the Combahee River, were attributed to Tubman’s dreams. While womanist theology has articulated the lived experiences of African-American women, the histories of African descended peoples in Canada remains an underexplored aspect of the discipline. As a person who navigated the dynamics of Black life in the United States and Canada, Tubman’s mystical biography presents the possibilities of expanding a diasporic approach to womanist theology.  In this presentation, I recover Harriet Tubman as an integral figure for a womanist approach to freedom. Building on Alice Walker’s description of womanism and Delores William’s understanding of survival, I position Tubman as a mystic who remaps geographies of freedom. I argue that Tubman’s border-crossing, mystically informed action underpins a praxis of fugitivity. A womanist approach to mystical theology, that recenters Black women’s experiences, challenges the Eurocentricity that often marks the field. Everyday mysticism, discerned from the life of Harriet Tubman, emerges as a grammar for rethinking and remapping the survival possibilities and geographies of womanist theology.

Sarah Bradford wrote her initial biography of Tubman in 1868 entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. This text, along with Bradford’s Harriet Tubman: Moses to her People, offer primary insights into Tubman’s life. Historian Jean Humez argues that “Tubman's mediated life story contains…an  essential spiritual transformation "plot" that illuminates the inner sources of her activist life” (Humez 163). Although Tubman dictates her story to Sarah Bradford, this mediation should not discredit the possibility of gleaning insight into her spiritual life.

In addition to having mystical visions and dreams and facilitating the freedom of others, Tubman also opened a home for the poor and elderly. Her commitment to social action was intimately tied to her sense of geography.

The stories of Black women remain underexplored within Christian mysticism. According to Joy Bostic, “African American women’s embodied knowledge and action, have not been widely considered as legitimate expressions within the larger tradition of Western mysticism”(Bostic, 27).  Similarly, Andrew Prevot also notes that “although a Black woman has little chance of appearing on a canonical map of mysticism, the otherness that her racial and gender identity supposedly symbolizes defines the very essence of mysticism for some thinkers”(Prevot, 603).  Given the growing responses to the paucity of scholarship on Black women’s mystical experiences, Womanist mysticism might be described as a burgeoning field. This nascency is not a result of a lack of mysticism in Africa and the diaspora but rather a symptom of the legacy of Eurocentricity with the field of Christian mysticism. By attending to the spiritual biographies and autobiographies of Black women, one learns of the intertwined connection between their commitments to social justice and their encounters with a profound sense of the sacred.  Approaches to womanist mysticism tend to highlight other nineteenth century African American women such as Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Sojourner Truth, and Rebecca Cox Jackson. Harriet Tubman is rarely included within these assessments. In addition to remaining absent in womanist approaches to mysticism, Vivian May argues that Tubman is “undertheorized and undertaught”(May, 467) within feminist studies as well.

According to Tubman,
“ ‘And all the time, in my dreams and visions,’ she said, ‘I seemed to see a line, and on the other side of that line were green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful white ladies, whos stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn’t reach them nohow. I always fell before I got to the line” (Bradford, 24).
Tubman’s mysticism must be located within the broader attention to dreams within Africana religions. Such a pivot beyond Christianity also aligns neatly with the womanist approach to theology, which is inherently interreligious and ecologically conscious.

The border-crossing, state-reading that underpinned Tubman’s visionary movement inaugurates what could be described as a nascent Black feminist geography. Focusing on Harriet Tubman destabilizes Europe as a central geography for understanding freedom.

I would like to posit that the boundary line between free and unfree spaces, the liminal meeting point could be understood as a subversive geographic upon which Tubman enacted and made possible Black survival and Black liberation. The United States, during antebellum geography constituted an uninhabitable geography. Canada, both in myth and fact, symbolized an alternative possibility for Black life.

In her life, Tubman embodied the four-fold pattern of loving the divine, herself, her neighbor, and creation. She challenged landscapes that attempted to enslave Black flesh, crafting her own sacred geographies of futurity and fugitivity. Through her dreams and commitments to social justice, she subverted legalized forms of anti-Blackness.

Tubman’s trust in a deep mystery beyond comprehension and profound sense of intimacy with the divine enabled to image alternative anthropological futures for herself and her kin.