Before escaping to freedom and leading hundreds of southern slaves north along the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman lived for nearly 30 years in slavery.
Tubman had been sent to a dry goods store on an errand and encountered another slave there, a fugitive who had left his plantation without permission.
When the slave’s overseer demanded she help restrain him, a defiant Tubman refused.
Writer Sarah Hopkins Bradford explains the incident in her 1886 authorized biography, Harriet, the Moses of Her People:.
With narcolepsy comes vivid dreams and hallucinations, and eyewitness reports substantiate Bradford’s writings that Tubman’s trance-like states would last for hours.
Bradford adds that, following a standard diagnosis of narcolepsy, there was little Tubman could do to control the effects of her condition.
Regardless of how impossible a task might seem, if it were her task she tackled it with a determination to win.”. »