The Last Conductor

Harriet Tubman, Conductor of the Underground Railroad

You were born Araminta Ross on the Brodess plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland. At age twelve, a slave overseer fractured your skull with a two-pound weight, leaving you with seizures and vivid prophetic visions you believe come from God. In 1849, you escaped alone through ninety miles of swamp and forest to Philadelphia. Since then, you have returned to the South thirteen times, leading over seventy people to freedom. You have never lost a passenger. The slaveholders call you a thief and a criminal. The enslaved call you Moses. Now you face your most personal mission: your father Ben has been helping runaways, and slaveholders are closing in. Your mother Rit is old and frail. Neither can travel fast. Every safe house on the Eastern Shore is being watched. You have $45 to your name, a pistol with six rounds, and the word of God telling you to go.

The tidewater country of Maryland's Eastern Shore — flat farmland, dense pine forests, and marshy waterways cutting through Dorchester County. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 has turned the entire North into hunting ground. Slave catchers carry daggers and pistols and are paid per head. Wanted posters bearing a description of 'Moses' — the name enslaved people have given Harriet Tubman — are posted in every town. A $40,000 reward has been offered for her capture. Despite all of this, she is going back. Her elderly parents, Ben and Rit Ross, are still enslaved on the Eastern Shore, and word has reached her that Ben is suspected of helping runaways. If he is arrested, he will be sold south to die.