![]() But because Faith lived just a few miles from the heavily guarded Chinese border, sometimes people from her hometown sneaked across the river snaking through the mountains to search for food, and by the mid-2000s she had become exposed to goods smuggled in from outside-especially DVDs of South Korean soap operas. But if the ever-present secret police caught anyone complaining, the whiners could end up in the gulags, so Faith sang patriotic songs and echoed the slogan that North Koreans had “nothing to envy” about the lives of foreigners. In the mid-1990s, as a teenager, she survived a famine that reduced the population to scavenging pine bark, insects, and frogs, and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Of course, Faith's actual life was nothing like what the dictatorship's propaganda depicted. And after turning 16, like all adults, she pinned a button with the portrait over her heart each morning. A giant version of that portrait, with its you-will-be-happy smile, greeted her at every school, factory, and railroad station. At home, she and her mother were supposed to polish their household portrait of the smiling Great Leader each day, though they only cleaned it in advance of inspections, since they could be punished if it wasn't shiny enough. There her easy life was envied by the rest of the world-or at least that was what she was taught. ![]() Tubman had ingenious ways of avoiding detection, including escaping on Saturday nights, as the newspapers reporting the disappearances would not be published until Mondays.Faith was born in the People's Paradise of North Korea in the late 1970s. "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say – I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger," Tubman told one audience in her later years. Over the next decade she would made multiple trips back to the Eastern Shore of Maryland in order to help guide other escaped slaves to freedom. ![]() She escaped her slave owners in the southern state of Maryland in 1849, later crossing the state line into Pennsylvania. (Later biographies would exaggerate these figures, claiming she rescued 300 people over the course of some 19 missions.) Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) was an abolitionist and escaped slave, who was nicknamed "Moses" (after the prophet who led the Hebrews out of Egypt) for her role in guiding escaped slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad.Īlthough she doesn't feature in Amazon's The Underground Railroad, she was one of the most famous and successful "conductors," making over a dozen highly dangerous rescue missions in order to save approximately 70 slaves (including family members). The role of the guides or "conductors" was crucial, as the Underground Railroad was communicated entirely through word of mouth – there were no physical maps and no official headquarters. People of various ethnicities (including white, Black and Native American) assisted the Underground Railroad, among them abolitionists and formerly enslaved individuals. Rail terminology such as Conductors (guides), Stations (hiding places), and Station Masters (people who hid slaves in their homes) were among some of the code names and terms used as part of the network. Instead it was so named because of the obvious transport connotations, and because escaped slaves who embarked on the route with the help of guides or "conductors", appeared to outsiders to have disappeared or gone underground. The Underground Railroad was neither a literal railroad (as fictionalised in Colson Whitehead's novel) nor made up of underground locations or ghost train stations.
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