Parable

There was a young girl who learned about the Underground Railroad when she was in the third grade. She envisioned a sleek, black locomotive and many boxcars behind, filled with tired, brown faces all pointed toward the eager northern sun. Last stop would be the Promised Land.

When she was considerably older, she realized that it was all a metaphor for something much more severe that third graders, perhaps, would not be able to fathom. She read about Harriet Tubman and enslaved parents sedating their babies for the arduous journeys in hidden swamps and piercing thickets of foliage. And chasing dogs and being found. And of abolitionists and basement hide-a-ways. And freedom. She still wondered about the Promised Land, however. She assumed that was Canada.