March 20, 2024 – The Spirit of Harriet Tubman was alive and well at Northwest Middle School last week as educational actress Diane Faison helped eighth graders see the trailblazing abolitionist in a new light with her one-woman show.
Born into slavery in Maryland in 1822, Tubman spent decades experiencing unthinkable brutality before she escaped to Pennsylvania on the Underground Railroad, a network of anti-slavery activists and safehouses used to rescue slaves in the south and help them flee north. Not content to taste freedom by herself, she continued working with the Underground Railroad and eventually helped free approximately 70 enslaved people across 13 missions. Later in life, she became the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States through her work with the Union Army during the Civil War, and she was also an instrumental figure in the fight for women’s suffrage.
Faison’s portrayal of Tubman is personal and well-researched, relying on accounts from Tubman’s direct descendants. Her act spends most of its time following the activist before she did her most famous work, zeroing in on personal details like the head trauma she suffered from being beaten by slaveowners as a child, the fraught and complex behaviors her parents taught her to keep her safe in terrible situations, her conflict with her first husband about whether escaping slavery was worthwhile, and the way she came to associate freedom with having finished floors in the house, an amenity that would mean the world to her when she finally got her own home. Faison feels that her show allows her to be a vessel for Tubman, and her passion for the role was evident to the audience at Northwest.
A retired teacher with over 30 years of experience, Faison originally devised her show as a way to help students engage more with history than if they just read these stories out of a textbook. She says it’s essential that these students make a connection with Tubman and other figures who have fought for their civil rights throughout history to provide them with a foundational understanding of the world they live in. Just as Tubman lived through the horrors of slavery and Faison grew up amid the fight for civil rights in the mid-20th century, students today have their own societal conflicts to reckon with, and they’ll be better prepared to take a stand when the situation demands it if they know their history.
“It’s like building a house – if you don’t have a foundation, then you don’t even know what direction to build in,” Faison said. “By knowing your history, you can have that foundation.”