The Underground Railroad is a historical phenomenon of humanity's desire to escape the inhumanity of slavery at great risk and has been the topic of many artistic mediums. Students will compare two children's storybooks and a children's video that all tell the story of the Underground Railroad. Students will learn that the conductors on the Underground Railroad were white sympathizers, escaped slaves, and blacks born in freedom; women made up many of these
conductors
. One of these storybooks by painter Jacob Lawrence,
Harriet and the Promised Land
, contains his series of seventeen canvasses narrating the story of Harriet Tubman's life, focusing on her relentless efforts to rescue slaves on the Underground Railroad. Another storybook titled
Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky
illustrated and narrated by Faith Ringgold also tells Tubman's story. The children's video narrated by Morgan Freeman and titled
Follow the Drinking Gourd
is based on the song by the same name and tells the daring adventure of a family trying to escape slavery on the Underground Railroad.
In l940, at the age of twenty-three, Lawrence painted a series of canvasses, depicting the runaway slave Harriet Tubman with a price on her head, leading slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. Tubman's story was not well known in the forties, and Lawrence's series did much to begin to educate blacks and whites about her heroism. In l993, combining these dramatic and vibrant paintings with the rhyming verse that accompanied them, he created a children's storybook,
Harriet and the Promised Land
, which won several awards. It quickly becomes clear why Lawrence, the painter, is known as a social realist.
Faith Ringgold, famous for her painted story quilts that combine painting, quilted fabric and storytelling, wrote and brilliantly illustrated in her children's book,
Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky
, another version of Harriet Tubman's valiant rescue of slaves from the South, based on a recurring dream about flying to freedom that Tubman is said to have had when she was ill and near death. Thus, Ringgold's storybook is a dream variation of Tubman's rescue work, and Tubman appears in a conductor's uniform on the train in the sky. She proceeds to tell the story of slavery to a young black girl named Cassie, and Cassie actually travels an imaginary route on the Underground Railroad. Ringgold manages to infuse a poignant history lesson full of facts into her storybook such as: slaves worked long hours for no pay; runaway slaves who were caught might be sold away from their families and never see them again; neither legal nor church marriages were allowed among slaves; it was against the law for slaves to learn to read or write; gatherings, even to hear the word of God, were illegal, and seeing a star quilt hanging on a house on the Underground Railway meant it was safe for a runaway slave to take refuge. Her somewhat primitive illustrations are highly imaginative and colorful.
The thirty-minute children's video titled
Follow the Drinking Gourd
, written by Bernadine Connelly, narrated by Morgan Freeman, with music by Taj Mahal, and with colorful illustrations by Yvonne Buchanan richly recounts the brave adventures of a mother and her two young children trying to escape slavery, on the Underground Railroad, and reach their father. The vibrant illustrations are full of life and action. There is mystery and suspense as a traveling carpenter, a burly white man with a peg leg, comes to their plantation and cryptically signals the girl Mary, her mama, and Mary's brother Samuel that it is time to make their escape and follow the Big Dipper, known in the song as "the drinking gourd." Naturally, there is anxiety about making their get-away and what will happen to them in their flight. Like Ringgold's story,
Follow the Drinking Gourd
seems very personal because we know the children's names, and especially in the video, there seems to be real peril as they run from dogs and hide out in risky places. Along the Railroad, people intervene and help them on their journey.
The two storybooks and the video narrate the history of the Underground Railroad differently and effectively. Students will be comparing these three narratives for the details that they convey about the Underground Railroad and the function each serves. Students will explore the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, Jacob Lawrence, and Faith Ringgold on the Internet and, in a systematic way, report back on the riches and connections they find.
