She stood just five feet tall, weighed barely a hundred pounds, and navigated hundreds of miles of wilderness — alone, at night, through swamp and forest — sometimes blacking out without warning from a neurological condition she’d carried since childhood. And yet Harriet Tubman never lost her way. As children’s book author Caroline Brewer reveals in her stunning new work, Harriet Tubman, Force of Nature: A Biography and Poems, the secret to Moses’ power was hiding in plain sight — rooted in the trees, the rivers, the marshlands, and the stars.
With Earth Day on Wednesday, April 22, and April recognized as both Earth Month and Minority Health Month, Brewer’s book couldn’t feel timelier. Already honored with 11 national and international awards, it is the first children’s book to explore Tubman’s extraordinary relationship with the natural world and how that intimacy with the earth fueled her genius.
“Until this book, there has not been one that explored her extraordinary relationship with nature, and how that helped fuel her success on the Underground Railroad.”
— Caroline Brewer
A Daughter of the Forest
Unlike most enslaved women of her era, young Harriet chose the forest. Her father was a timber supervisor, and rather than remain confined to the fields or the Big House, she worked alongside him — felling trees, hauling lumber, and driving oxen. Those years gave her something priceless: she learned to forage, to navigate by the North Star, and to feel at home in the very terrain that would one day carry her and dozens of others to freedom.
“Her spending years in the woods with her father was extremely helpful in giving her the courage and the intelligence to navigate the Underground Railroad,” Brewer explains. She also befriended the “blackjacks” — Black sailors on the Chesapeake Bay who shared vital intelligence about the northern landscape. Their knowledge became her map.
Baltimore: A Key Stop on the Road to Freedom
Baltimore’s role in Harriet’s story runs deeper than most know. Her very first rescue mission led her here. When her niece Kessiah and two children were to be auctioned at the Dorchester County Courthouse, Harriet and Kessiah’s husband — free sailor John Bowley — hatched a bold plan. During the auctioneer’s break, John would spirit his family by boat up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, where Harriet waited in hiding. From there, she led them the rest of the way to Pennsylvania on foot — through the waterways, the docks, and the maritime networks that quietly expanded the possibilities of liberation.
A Wellness Blueprint for Minority Health Month
For Brewer, Tubman’s life carries a direct message for Minority Health Month: your life is worth saving and fighting for. Harriet wasn’t just spiritually fierce — she was physically disciplined, walking two to three weeks at a stretch, navigating at night, sometimes twice a year, all while managing what we now recognize as a disability: sudden episodes where she would lose consciousness without warning. Rather than a weakness, those spells were, in Harriet’s own words, when she and God spoke “like old friends.”
Brewer connects Harriet’s discernment — her deep listening, her gathering of good information, her faith-anchored courage — directly to the health decisions communities of color must make today. “When we are fighting for our lives, we have to be discerning,” she says. That urgency hasn’t dimmed since 1849.
Twenty Years in the Making
The book was two decades in the making — sparked by a five-year-old at the Harlem School of the Arts who illustrated Harriet seated small and serene within a vast forest under a brilliant blue sky. “That was the story of Harriet’s life,” Brewer says. “The forest was the way through the Underground Railroad.” Deep research with historians, Park Service researchers, and her own work at the Audubon Naturalist Society transformed that seed into a fully realized, award-winning work.
A former journalist rooted in a lifelong love of storytelling, Caroline Brewer has built her career on one conviction: books can show children how to reach for something extraordinary inside themselves. This Earth Day, Harriet Tubman, Force of Nature is a beautiful, necessary reminder that freedom and wholeness have always been rooted in the earth — and are, as Harriet knew with every step, our birthright.
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Michelle Petties is a TEDx speaker, Food Story coach, and the award-winning memoirist of Leaving Large: The Stories of a Food Addict. After gaining and losing 700 pounds, Michelle discovered the secret to overcoming stress and emotional overeating. Her free workbook, Mind Over Meals, reveals her core principles for losing weight and keeping it off.