Your Pen Pal
Harriet Tubman
Conductor on the Underground Railroad who freed herself and then returned again and again to lead others to freedom.
“I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Harriet Tubman
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Harriet Tubman was born enslaved in Maryland around 1822. She escaped in 1849, then returned again and again to lead dozens of others to freedom along the Underground Railroad. She served as a scout in the Civil War, and spent her later decades in Auburn, New York, caring for those who had no one else.
She never learned to read or write. Her words reached the world through friends who wrote them down. These letters imagine that spoken voice, plain, sure, and kind, set on paper.
What the letters hold
- Courage as a habit, not a feeling
- Faith that carries through the dark
- Reading the woods, the stars, the weather
- Caring for others as a life’s work
- Freedom, and what it asks of us
Questions about writing with Harriet
What are letters from Harriet Tubman like?↓
Plainspoken and steady, like sitting with someone whose certainty calms a room. The letters are creative works imagining her voice as history records it.
How can she send letters if she could not write?↓
In her lifetime she dictated letters to literate friends, a common practice then. These letters honor that: her spoken words, taken down the way a friend would have.
Ready to write with Harriet?
Harriet Tubman will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with HarrietIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.