Elliott, curator of American slavery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), was a source of “lingering heartbreak” for Tubman. Of her immediate family members still enslaved in the southern state, Tubman ultimately rescued all but one -Rachel Ross, who died shortly before her older sister arrived to bring her to freedom. Between 18, she returned to Maryland some 13 times, helping around 70 people -including four of her brothers, her parents and a niece-escape slavery and embark on new lives. Tubman dedicated the next decade of her life-a period chronicled in Harriet, a new biopic starring Cynthia Erivo as its eponymous heroine- to rescuing her family from bondage. I was a stranger in a strange land and my home after all, was down in Maryland because my father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were there.” “I was free,” she recalled, “but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. The future Underground Railroad conductor’s next thoughts were of her family. There was such a glory over everything the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.” As she later told biographer Sarah Bradford, after crossing the Pennsylvania state boundary line in September 1849, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. Harriet Tubman’s first act as a free woman was poignantly simple.
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