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Harriet Tubman flies “like a bird”

 “She is the most shrewd and practical person in the world, yet she is a firm believer in omens, dreams and warnings. She declares that before her escape from slavery, she dreamed of flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them ‘like a bird,’ and reaching at last a great fence, or sometimes a river, over which she would try to fly, ‘but it ‘peared like I wouldn’t have the strength, and just as I was sinking down, there would be ladies all dressed in white over there, and they would put out their arms and pull me ‘cross.” There is nothing strange in this, perhaps, but she declares that when she came North she remembered this very places as those she had seen in her dreams, and many of the ladies who befriended her were those she had been helped by in her vision.”

– Franklin Sanborn, “Harriet Tubman”, in Boston Commonwealth July 16, 1863.

   
Sanborn, a New England journalist and social reformer who also knew John Brown and the Concord Transcendentalists, was Harriet Tubman’s first biographer, and his account is one of the best and most reliable sources on her gifts as a dreamer and intuitive. But Sanborn’s dialect version of her speech, though typical for his time, is irritating today (e.g. “in white ober dere”) and is mostly rendered as plain English here.