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Bridges: Harriet Tubman and Women of Color Tales of Resistance

2022; Feminist Studies; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/fem.2022.0013

2153-3873

Reanae Mcneal,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Bridges:Harriet Tubman and Women of Color Tales of Resistance Reanae Mcneal (bio) bridge one: the beginning Harriet's feet bleed and her gut churns. Under the stars, she draws near to God. Lord, don't let nobody turn me 'round; I'd rather die than be a slave. harriet, keep going. you have already glimpsed the future. She recalls dreams where she flew like a bird, sank, and was lifted by ladies in white who pulled her north. Fly, Harriet. Your faith has wings. —Carole Boston Weatherford, Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom1 you are born into a social order that labels your humanity and determines that you are expendable through meticulous stratifications. You learn at birth that in this social order, you are the wrong race and gender. As you grow in awareness, you question the categories that mark your difference and their necessity in the first place. You are an oddity in a system that wants you to be enslaved inside and out. Its quest is to domesticate you so that you never question what activist-scholar AnaLouise Keating calls status-quo stories: "worldviews and beliefs that [End Page 249] normalize and naturalize the existing social system, values, and norms so entirely that they deny the possibility of change."2 These status-quo stories have been spun at the expense of your humanity, the people you love the most, and the planet. Fortunately, something goes wrong. Something happens and you don't learn your place. Instead, you become deeply aware of your own agency and power. The scales fall off your eyes, and you see through the toxic ideological stronghold that has positioned itself as superior while leaving death in its path, a woven web of destruction composed of status-quo stories. The basic problem that we have had was believing somebody else's story about us—what we can and cannot do, who we can and cannot be. —Luisah Teish, This Bridge Called My Back3 You don't like the ideological chains that have attempted to keep you in bondage, which include fictitious stories that stereotype and demonize you. Stories that maintain narratives that continually seek to justify and legitimize devaluing you and even killing you in multiple ways. These stories that perpetuate limited expectations of you based on notions of your inferiority while dishonoring your humanity are violent weapons shot at your personhood through daily aggressions. The enemy is our urgent need to stereotype and close off people, places, and events into isolated categories. —Andrea Canaan, This Bridge Called My Back4 You grapple to survive in a world that is not of your own making. Sometimes you feel like you are drowning because in order to survive you must learn to navigate a system you didn't create. You are born with tears in your eyes, and you carry the collective grief of your ancestors who [End Page 250] struggled, resisted, and even died trying to get free from the pain of a colonial global system that eats its victims alive and spits out their bones. You still grieve for this country's original trauma—the most massive act of genocide in the world's history, the mass murder of Indigenous peoples. . . . You mourn the devastation that the slave trade cost Africa and the United States. You lament the loss of connection to the Earth, a conscious being that keens through you for all the trees felled, air poisoned, water polluted, animals slaughtered into extinction. . . . now let us shift. —Gloria E. Anzaldúa, this bridge we call home5 Somewhere in this grief that covers generations, you learn to keep your inner and outer eyes adjusted to ancient ways of being despite the overcast of this trauma that leaves collective soul woundedness and no apparent room for a worldview that sees the interrelatedness of all living beings. you make a space for your humanity to grow and bloom. Like Harriet Tubman, you would rather die resisting than be a slave. You learn how to resist annihilation through counter-stories that speak to your value. As an act of survival, resistance, and transformation, you take your beautiful Chocolate Mocha hands...