BIOGRAPHY from Harriet Tubman CONDUCTOR ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Ann Petry How much should a person sacrifi ce for freedom? QuickTalk How important is a person’s individual freedom to a healthy society? Discuss with a partner how individual freedom shapes American society. Harriet Tubman (c. 1945) by William H. Johnson. Oil on paperboard, sheet. 29 ⁄" x 23 ⁄" (73.5 cm x 59.3 cm). 496 Unit 2 • Collection 5 SKILLS FOCUS Literary Skills Understand characteristics Reader/Writer of biography; understand coherence. Reading Skills Notebook Identify the main idea; identify supporting sentences. Use your RWN to complete the activities for this selection. Vocabulary Biography and Coherence A biography is the story of fugitives (FYOO juh tihvz) n.: people fl eeing someone’s life written by another person. We “meet” the people in from danger or oppression. Traveling by a biography the same way we get to know people in our own lives. night, the fugitives escaped to the North. We observe their actions and motivations, learn their values, and incomprehensible (ihn kahm prih HEHN see how they interact with others. Soon, we feel we know them. suh buhl) adj.: impossible to understand. A good biography has coherence—all the details come The code that Harriet Tubman used was together in a way that makes the biography easy to understand. incomprehensible to slave owners. In nonfi ction a text is coherent if the important details support the incentive (ihn SEHN tihv) n.: reason to do main idea and connect to one another in a clear order. something; motivation. The incentive of a warm house and good food kept the Literary Perspectives Apply the literary perspective described fugitives going. on page 499 as you read this selection. dispel (dihs PEHL) v.: get rid of by driving away. Harriet tried to dispel the travelers’ fear of capture. eloquence (EHL uh kwehns) n.: ability to write or speak gracefully and convinc- Finding the Main Idea The main idea is the central idea or ingly. Frederick Douglass was known for message of a nonfi ction text. To fi nd the main idea, look for key his eloquence in writing and speaking. statements made by the writer and for details that point to an important idea. Then, think about the meaning of all the details. Into Action As you read the biography, write down details that seem important. When you have fi nished, write the main idea. Roots The Latin root loqui means “to Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad speak.” What word in the Vocabulary list Important detail: “It was the largest group that she had above comes from this root? How is its ever conducted.” meaning the same or diff erent from that of the Latin root? Important detail: Th ink as a Reader/Writer Find It in Your Reading In this biography, Ann Petry turns Learn It Online historical facts into a dramatic story. As you read, record in your Get a sneak peek of this story with a video Reader/Writer Notebook objective, or factual, passages and sub- introduction at: jective passages, which reveal the writer’s feelings and opinions. go.hrw.com L8-497 Go Preparing to Read 497 Learn It Online MEET THE WRITER Get more on the author’s life at: Build Background go.hrw.com L8-498 Go In the Biblical Book of Exodus, Moses is chosen by God to lead the people of Ann Petry Israel out of slavery in Egypt. Moses (1908–1997) takes his people on a long, perilous desert journey and leads them to the “A Message in the Story” Promised Land. As you read this biog- A native of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Ann Petry was the raphy, look for reasons why Harriet granddaughter of a man who escaped from slavery on a Tubman was called the Moses of her Virginia plantation and went north by way of the Underground people. Railroad. She earned a Ph.D. in 1931 and worked as a pharma- cist in her family’s drugstore before moving to New York, where Preview the Selection she became a writer of books for young people and adults. This excerpt from a biography relates About her writing she said: how Harriet Tubman led a group of “My writing has, of course, been infl uenced by the eleven people out of slavery in 1851. The books I’ve read but it has been much more infl uenced fugitives traveled by night and slept by by the circumstances of my birth and my growing up, day, always on the alert. The risk of cap- by my family. ture was constantly on their minds. “We always had relatives visiting us. Th ey added excitement to our lives. Th ey brought with them the aura and the customs of a very diff erent world. Th ey were all storytellers, spinners of yarns. So were my mother and my father. “Some of these stories had been handed down from one generation to the next, improved, embellished, embroidered. Usually there was a message in the story, a message for the young, a message that would help a young black child survive, help convince a young black child that black is truly beautiful.” Petry grew up listening to stories. How might this have shaped the way she wrote? 498 Read with a Purpose Read to discover how Harriet Tubman led enslaved people to freedom. from CONDUCTOR ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Ann Petry THE RAILROAD RUNS TO CANADA in the woods, close by, late at night. Th ough long the Eastern Shore of Maryland, it was the wrong season for whippoorwills. in Dorchester County, in Caroline Sometimes the masters thought they had A County, the masters kept hearing heard the cry of a hoot owl, repeated, and whispers about the man named Moses, who would remember having thought that the was running off slaves. At fi rst they did not intervals between the low moaning cry were believe in his existence. Th e stories about wrong, that it had been repeated four times him were fantastic, unbelievable. Yet they in succession instead of three. Th ere was watched for him. Th ey off ered rewards for never anything more than that to suggest his capture. Th ey never saw him. Now and then they heard whispered rumors to the eff ect that he was in the neighborhood. Th e woods were searched. Th e roads were watched. Th ere was never anything to indicate his Use this perspective to help you explore historical context. whereabouts. But a few days aft erward, A nalyzing Historical Context When applying this per- a goodly number of slaves would be gone spective, you view a literary text within its historical context. from the plantation. Neither the master nor Specifi cally, you notice historical information about the time the overseer had heard or seen anything in which the author wrote, about the time in which the text is unusual in the quarter.1 Sometimes one set, and about the ways in which people of the period saw and thought about the world in which they lived. History, in this or the other would vaguely remember hav- biography, refers to the social, political, economic and cultural ing heard a whippoorwill call somewhere climate of the American South in the time period before the Civil War, when many African Americans were enslaved. As you 1. quarter: area in a plantation where enslaved blacks read, use the notes and questions in the text to guide you in lived. It consisted of windowless, one-room cabins using this perspective. made of logs and mud. Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad 499 that all was not well in the quarter. Yet, when In December 1851, when she started out morning came, they invariably discovered with the band of fugitives that she planned that a group of the fi nest slaves had taken to take to Canada, she had been in the to their heels. A vicinity of the plantation for days, planning Unfortunately, the discovery was almost the trip, carefully selecting the slaves that always made on a Sunday. Th us a whole day she would take with her. was lost before the machinery of pursuit She had announced her arrival in the could be set in motion. Th e posters off ering quarter by singing the forbidden spiritual2— rewards for the fugitives could not be “Go down, Moses, ’way down to Egypt printed until Monday. Th e men who made Land”—singing it soft ly outside the door of a living hunting for runaway slaves were out a slave cabin, late at night. Th e husky voice of reach, off in the woods with their dogs was beautiful even when it was barely more and their guns, in pursuit of four-footed than a murmur borne on the wind. B game, or they were in camp meetings saying Once she had made her presence known, their prayers with their wives and families word of her coming spread from cabin to beside them. cabin. Th e slaves whispered to each other, Harriet Tubman could have told them ear to mouth, mouth to ear, “Moses is here.” that there was far more involved in this “Moses has come.” “Get ready. Moses matter of running off slaves than signaling is back again.” Th e ones who had agreed to the would-be runaways by imitating the call go North with her put ashcake3 and salt her- of a whippoorwill, or a hoot owl, far more ring in an old bandanna, hastily tied it into involved than a matter of waiting for a clear a bundle, and then waited patiently for the night when the North Star was visible.