2007 Caldecott Honor
2007 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award

“I set the North Star in the heavens and I mean for you to be free. . . .”

Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman hears these words from God one summer night and decides to leave her husband and family behind and escape. Taking with her only her faith, she must creep through woods with hounds at her heels, sleep for days in a potato hole, and trust people who could have easily turned her in.

But she was never alone.

In lyrical text, Carole Boston Weatherford describes Tubman’s spiritual journey as she hears the voice of God guiding her North to freedom on that very first trip to escape the brutal practice of forced servitude. Tubman, courageous and compassionate, and deeply religious, would take nineteen subsequent trips back South, never being caught, but none as profound as this first. Harriet Tubman’s bravery and relentless pursuit of freedom are a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

This is a unique and moving portrait of one of the most inspiring figures of the Underground Railroad. Kadir Nelson’s emotionally charged paintings embody strength, healing, and hope.

Carole Boston Weatherford has authored more than a dozen children’s books, including Jazz Baby, Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins, and A Negro League Scrapbook. A minister’s wife, Ms. Weatherford makes her home in North Carolina and has roots in the same Maryland county where Harriet Tubman was born.

Kadir Nelson began drawing at the age of three, displaying artistic talent before he could write. His children’s books include Ellington Was Not a Street, by Ntozake Shange, a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner; Big Jabe: Hewitt Anderson’s Great Big Life, winner of the Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators’ Original Art show; and the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Thunder Rose, both by Jerdine Nolen. Mr. Nelson makes his home in California with his family.