After 30 years in bondage, she had become a human rights activist, advocating for women and speaking out against slavery and racism. The free black community at Valentine farm and the chapter about “body snatching” also take inspiration from real parts of American history.I was 14 and in my local library when I read "Ain't I A Woman?," the speech Sojourner Truth delivered to a suffragist convention in 1851. The chapter in North Carolina, meanwhile, which features the mythic “Freedom Trail,” was inspired by the mass lynching that began in the early 19th century and reached a peak between the late 1880s and 1930s.
The experiment became the basis for reform of ethical standards in medical research, including laws mandating informed consent. This part of the narrative is based on several examples of forced sterilization of black people that began during slavery and continue into the present, and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of 1932-1972, during which hundreds of African-American men were given free food, lodging, and health care, yet were not told that they were being studied and purposefully denied treatment for syphilis. In the chapter set in South Carolina, black dormitory residents who are “owned by the government” are secretly subjected to forced sterilization and are the unknowing subjects of a study in the progression of syphilis.
Tubman is probably the most famous leader of the underground railroad. One of its critics was Harriet Tubman, a formerly enslaved woman who escaped before assisting many others. This law stated that northern states had to cooperate with the capture and return of runaways to the South, and it was viciously opposed by abolitionists. In 1850, the year in which the novel is set, the Fugitive Slave Law was passed as part of the Compromise of 1850 between northern “free” states and southern slave-owning states. The novel also makes use of several other key pieces of American history, although not necessarily in a historically accurate way. While the underground railroad was mostly not a literal train network (as it is depicted in the novel), there is evidence of some physical railroad infrastructure being used in order to transport runaways to freedom. The novel takes inspiration from the real-life underground railroad, a system of networks, safe houses, and “station agents,” used to convey runaway slaves to the north.
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