“…Two days later, a slave working beside Harriet in the fields motioned to her.  She bent toward him, listening.  He said the water boy had just brought news to the field hands, and it had been passed one to the other until it reached him.  The news was that Harriet and her brothers had been sold to the Georgia trader, and that they were to be sent South with the chain gang that very night.

“Harriet went on working but she knew a moment of panic.  She would have to go North alone.  She would have to start as soon as it was dark…

“…That night when John Tubman was asleep, and the fire had died down in the cabin, she took the ashcake that had been baked for their breakfast, and a good-sized piece of salt herring, and tied them together in an old bandanna.  By hoarding this small stock of food, she could make it last a long time, and with the berries and edible roots she could find in the woods, she wouldn’t starve…

“…Once she was off the plantation, she took to the woods, not following the North Star, not even looking for it, going instead toward Bucktown.  She needed help.  She was going to ask the white woman who had stopped to talk to her so often if she would help her.  Perhaps she wouldn’t.  But she would soon find out.

“When she came to the farmhouse where the woman lived, she approached it cautiously, circling around it.  It was so quiet.  There was no sound at all, not even a dog barking, or the sound of a voice.  Nothing.

“She tapped on the door, gently.  A voice said, ‘Who’s there?’  She answered, ‘Harriet, from Dr. Thompson’s place.’

“When the woman opened the door she did not seem at all surprised to see her.  She glanced at the little bundle Harriet was carrying, at the quilt, and invited her in.  Then she sat down at the kitchen table, and wrote two names on a slip of paper, and handed the paper to Harriet…

“…Thus Harriet learned that the Underground Railroad that ran straight to the North was not a railroad at all.  Neither did it run underground.  It was composed mostly of a loosely organized group of people who offered food and shelter, or a place of concealment, to fugitives who had set out on the long road to the North and freedom.”