For years, whenever I make my way into a new town...I find history gems. Last week, I spent a few days in Cambridge Maryland exploring Harriet Tubman’s birthplace and the area she made 19 trips to...to free the enslaved.

The store I’m standing in front of and the soil that I stood on was the place of Harriet’s first notable act of defiance. It is a story that you rarely see in textbooks. One of a teenager that knew her trajectory.

An overseer chased a small enslaved boy into the store and asked Harriet to help him tie the boy down. She flipped out and refused to help him, allowing the boy to slowly slip away. As soon as the overseer noticed the boy leaving...he took a 2 pound weight from this counter...

& threw it...hitting Harriet in the head—causing her to have concussions and narcolepsy (they called it the dreaded sleep back then) for the rest of her life.

Harriet was only 13 at the time of this incident. We also visited a courthouse that was once an auction block for the enslaved. Harriet convinced a husband to swindle the dealers—“purchasing” his wife and children and disappearing b4 they could collect.

Harriet met them at Chesapeake bay and took them further north to freedom. The mother/his wife was her niece. Here’s her niece’s bill of sale.

The seller via the bill of sale is Elizabeth Brodess, the woman who enslaved Harriet’s entire family. This is the route to her farm. To this day, there is nothing but forest. Harriet maneuvered this land NINETEEN times with others. Fathom that.

Here’s bae standing on the farm. Her mother and siblings lived here too.

I’ve always been drawn to story and they way it’s shaped for consumption. It’s why my mission in life is to decolonize curriculum. I want my students to receive all aspects of a narrative. I want them to question everything. I visit these sites looking for origins and truth.

Our tour guide’s language reminded me of what makes it into textbooks. She said, “The way you see slavery depicted on TV isn’t how it was here. We were a humble people. We didn’t have much.” My boyfriend and I were instantly uncomfortable about the scrubbing.

The farms that still stand today are owned by the descendants of the original plantation owners. Anyway you spin it...you still owned and tortured people. It is my pledge to make sure that these aren’t the stories we tell. We’ll tell the unabridged versions and allow students...

To come to their own conclusions. I’m over hearing how rectifying history and enhancing culture takes time and money that “we don’t have.” It isn’t true. The decolonization of the stories we hand down to our children, students, and ears that are listening is up to US.

I barely lifted heavy loads that she carried on her back at 16. I stared at cotton plants, sitting in corners, listening to tour guides sling conservative rhetoric that she wasn’t a victim, she was a patriot.

It is within this bootstrap dialogue that I heard your textbook pages turning. Harriet Tubman was a defender, as her name suggests. The relevancy is within her ages, 13 and 16.

It’s where you’ll find the triumphs and tribulations that will teach a scholar empathy, courage, resilience, racism, pain, and most importantly accurate history. We still truncate Harriet to a homely pop culture hero with a gun and quick feet...

...when she was a suffragist, army spy, general, cougar (2nd bae was 22 years her junior), chestnut + fine-looking (as her warrant stated) and the embodiment of freedom. Imagine how it feels to be 13 and after hearing about the horrors that happened to your people...

Deciding that you could be the end of it. There is power in that. It shows the scholar that activism and standing up for what’s right begins in the heart...not in adulthood.

I hunt for these stories and the accuracy because the materials provided are not enough. The stories are written with bias and exclusion abundant in the ink. We (everyone) are responsible for the shift. We are responsible for decolonizing. It’s time.

Also, quick edit. The information at the sites, at the time, said 19. It was most likely 11-13.