The biography begins in 1820 with Tubman's birth into an environment of considerable uncertainty and tension.

At this time, economic hardships plague plantation owners on Maryland's Eastern Shore, so they are selling slaves to traders farther south. The possibility of being sold in response to the current economic uncertainty creates anxiety among the slaves on Edward Brodas's plantation where Tubman is born. They want freedom, but they remain uncertain of the fate of the free Negroes who have escaped to the North.

Brodas's plantation comprises the "Big House," the cookhouse, the stables, and the "quarter" where the slaves live. Slave housing consists of a group of one-room windowless shacks, all alike and sparsely furnished, with crude fireplaces, dirt floors, and smoking chimneys. Although the nearby Buckwater River isolates the Brodas plantation, communication between slaves is so quick and efficient that they usually have advance knowledge about the arrival of...