hunted like animals, with dogs trying to pick up
their scent, they are propelled by the immensity of
their suffering, which fuels their desire for free-
dom and gives them a power that belies their
apparently powerless state. The final line of the
poem, with its triple repetition, drives home the
determination they show in their quest. They are
never going to turn back; they are totally commit-
ted to gaining their freedom. They are thus given
the final word.
Overcoming Fear
The fear experienced by the hunted slaves per-
vades the poem. It is particularly emphasized at
the beginning, when they are fleeing at night and
imagine that any shape they see in the darkness
might spell danger for them and lead to their
capture. However, the slaves are not defeated by
their fear. They show great courage and resource-
fulness in their bid for freedom, although in one
incident, dramatized in section II of the poem,
they falter. One night when the light from the
moon makes it difficult to hide, and the shouts
of their pursuers and the baying of their dogs cuts
the air, the slaves are fearful and begin to lose
heart. But then their leader, Harriet Tubman,
seeing that the situation is desperate, aims her
pistol at them and tells them to keep moving or
she will shoot them. This is based on a true inci-
dent involving Tubman. As Catherine Clinton
reported in her biographyHarriet Tubman: The
Road to Freedom, sometime in the 1850s Tubman
was guiding a group of twenty-five fugitive slaves
to the North. They had to hide in a swamp all day
and long after nightfall, and they began to lose
their fortitude. One man said he was going to
return to the plantation, and despite persuasion
by Tubman and the other slaves, he refused to
move on when the time came. Tubman drew her
pistol, aimed it at his head, and said, ‘‘Move or
die!’’ The man was persuaded, and the party
moved on. Within a few days he was in Canada,
no longer a slave.
After the section that describes the wanted
poster for Tubman, the constant presence of fear
is again emphasized. Every shadow, every sound,
in the night might spell the doom of the slaves,
and they must fortify themselves with their reli-
gious faith, their spiritual songs, and their hope
for a better future.STYLECollage
The poem is like a collage. This term is usually
applied to artwork in which a number of different
parts, such as paper or photographs, are glued or
otherwise attached to a flat surface. The poem
achieves this collagelike effect by combining
many different elements that are ‘‘stuck’’ to the
white space of the printed page. The elements
include snatches of, and sometimes direct quota-
tions from, Negro spirituals, hymns, advertise-
ments for the recapture of fugitive slaves, a
wanted poster (for Harriet Tubman), and other
poetic passages. These elements are all clearly dif-
ferentiated typographically on the printed page,
with variations in line length and spacing, both
between lines (use of double spaces) and in the
placement of individual lines, only some of which
begin at the left-hand margin. The effect is that the
poem speaks in many different voices, including
first-person singular, first-person plural, and
third-person plural voice, each expressing a differ-
ent point of view. The voices range from slaves to
slave owners, slave catchers, and Harriet Tubman
herself.Harriet Tubman(The Library of Congress)
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