From Your Minister
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I wanted to see Harriet Tubman’s grave.
I wanted to see it enough that I drove from Boston, Massachusetts, to Rochester, New York, about 400 miles, for a speaking gig I ordinarily would have flown to. Tubman is buried in Auburn, New York, close to Rochester.
This was in 1993. At the time, I had a picture of Harriet Tubman on the wall behind my computer screen. Her courage and tenacity spoke to me as I was becoming visible in ways I had never dared before, inspired to free my own people.
I was then Director of the UUA’s Office of Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay (and later Transgender) Concerns. In that capacity, I had discovered the somewhat invisible entity called “The Religious Right” and had suddenly catapulted into the public eye for exposing their homophobic agenda as based on bad religion. This is what I would do in Rochester, as I was all over the country. It is what I was doing, not only for UUs, but also for universities, secular gatherings, and media. I was terrified, in over my head, and Tubman’s life story and her image helped me to be braver.
The drive to Auburn took longer than I’d expected. When I arrived, on a cold, snowy, muddy, winter afternoon, it was almost sunset. I parked and walked to the graveyard’s office, hoping for a map to Tubman’s gravesite. But it was locked up; I was on my own.
I looked around and began walking into the hilly graveyard. I had broken my leg the previous winter, falling on ice and snow, and I was nervous and hesitant. But still I was determined to use the remaining light to see if I could find Tubman’s grave. I hoped there would be signs guiding my way.
Suddenly a huge gathering of crows swooped through the air, seemingly out of nowhere, and landed in a tree about fifty feet in front of me. They began hollering so loudly that I stared at them for a moment, and decided to head for their location. Why not? They were not the kind of ‘sign’ I had in mind, but I had no better plan. As I neared the tree where they sat, they all leapt up off their branches and flew another fifty feet to a different tree. I followed them. They flew on to another tree just a little ahead. And so we went, deeper and deeper into the graveyard, into the final minutes of the day, the sky itself deepening to a brilliant peacock blue.
As I neared the crest of yet another hill and gazed up towards them, the crows unmistakably circled around a particular monument in the valley before me. They perched in not just one tree beside it, but four or five. No yelling and cawing here; they became very still. As did I, looking in fear at the way before me. This monument was at the bottom of a long hill. A long, slippery hill. The kind where it would be easy to break your leg.
But I was so close! So I laid back on my winter coat in the snow, and I coasted down that hill like a small child on a sled. I wore a parka — it was slippery. I slid down that hill looking up at the sky and when I stopped at the bottom, I saw hundreds of black wings ascend and noisily disappear.
I sat up, still on the ground, in an altered state from all of it — the crows, the sliding, the twilight — and I bowed my head in awe before the monument. I looked up in the last moments of light. The stone was large, shiny white marble, looming before me. I squinted into the shadows for the name, “Tubman,” or “Harriet Tubman.”
I could not make out that name, because it was not there. Instead, in elegantly carved letters, in a clean square font, was a different name. MOORE.
I fell back as if someone had punched me. I gasped, sputtered, and finally began to weep, lying flat on my back in the valley. Moore is a family name. My mother’s father’s name. My southern, slave-owning family name.
The crows were gone. It was me, in the dark, with a muddy coat, and falling snow and tears and this family name. After a while I stood up and somehow found the way back to my car.
I know Unitarian Universalists value reason highly, and this is a story about something else. Some of you will say this was all sheer coincidence. Make what you want of it. I’ll tell you what I made of it then and make of it still. While Harriet Tubman’s courage and tenacity are the world’s to admire, each of us must lead our own selves out of bondage. There is no abstract, universal, trek to freedom that we can access historically and gracefully, out of time and place. This process of freeing ourselves and each other from bondage is the work of our lives. Sometimes it takes us places we would never choose to go. What is ours to do is precisely ours to do, but when we are engaged with our work and our healing, there is support available for us that we might not even imagine or believe.
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