Saint Harriet?

This is the beginning of Hallowe'en, All Saints, and All Souls in the Christian calendar and on Sunday many congregations will celebrate the "superstar" saints and the regular folk who have been Christ's "saintly" people in our lives.

I suppose it's appropriate that a new film called Harriet, a docu-drama about the life of slave-turned-abolitionist Harriet Tubman which will be released tomorrow, on All Saints Day. Harriet portrays this courageous woman as something other than the elderly woman in the few photographs which exist or the rather dour figure on the proposed US  dollar bill. 

Tubman escaped to freedom but returned to slave states repeatedly to help others do the same -- roughly 70 in total. She was an integral part of the Underground Railroad which led to Canada. I've written about the little church called Bethel Chapel in St Catherines, Ontario, which was where Tubman worshiped during a nearly ten year residency in that community.



As a child she was called Minty and took on her middle name, Harriet, when she was married. Here is a paragraph from a review of the film in the New Yorker which reminds us of the importance of her faith and the biblical stories which give her strength: 

Guided by her prophetic visions, Minty declares her intent in code, singing by night a song of farewell, with reference to a journey to the Promised Land and an escape from Pharaoh’s yoke, that holds a magnificent symbolic place in the movie; it’s a vision of cultural resistance and its elusive complexities. With its Biblical references, Minty’s song can “pass” in white society as abstractly beautiful and politically neutral, but for those who share her experience it’s a personal declaration, a collective affirmation, an act of revolt.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-stunning-achievement-of-kasi-lemmonss-harriet

I do hope that Harriet comes to a "theatre near me" in the not too distant future. I want to learn more about the witness of this "saint" who has a strong Canadian connection.