At the age of 22, I was with a man named John Tubman. John was a free man, but I was still a slave. If we had children, they would be slaves too. When my master died in 1849, the lonely wifewidow decided she wanted to sell some of the slaves on the plantation. One of those slaves was my niece Kessiah. I What I wasdidn't know what would happen next, but I was afraid to be separated from John. I realized that I had to run away. I tried to talk to John about my desires and how I wanted to flee. In my head, there were two options: go somewhere I knew and wanted to go to, or go somewhere I didn’t know and wanted to gogo to.