“Follow the drinking gourd, follow the drinking gourd, for the old man is waiting to carry you to freedom, follow the drinking gourd,” she sang.

While the exact origins of this particular tune are debated, the song is traditionally associated with the kind of songs slaves would use to communicate on the path to freedom.

Crowell-White paced slowly under a large, white tent pitched in a field at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site, greeted the children and began her story.

Or rather, Harriet Tubman’s story. It’s one that Crowell-White has been telling through immersive, one-woman theater performances for years since she retired from teaching theater arts in her home state of Virginia. Another performance, hosted by the John Brown Farm, will be held today.

Charmaine Crowell-White greets students beside the statue of Harriet Tubman at John Brown Farm on Friday. (Enterprise photo — Grace McIntyre)

Crowell-White wove a richly detailed and emotional testimony from Tubman’s perspective to the audience, which consisted of students from Petrova Elementary, Lake Placid Middle/High School, Willsboro Central School and some homeschoolers from the area. She recounted running away from one of her enslavers after being beaten for tasting a sugar cube. It was her first taste of freedom.

“That freedom tasted sweeter than 100 cubes of sugar, and I craved it more than anything,” Crowell-White, as Tubman, said.

This is the second year in a row that the John Brown Farm has hosted Crowell-White. Martha Swan, founder and executive director of the farm’s friends group, John Brown Lives!, said they asked Crowell-White to return because the performance was so well received last year and because they wanted to create an opportunity for more children to attend. They also wanted to create an immersive experience around the Harriet Tubman statue.

“It was breathtaking,” Swan said after the performance.

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Charmaine Crowell-White, dressed as Harriet Tubman, sits beside “The Beacon of Hope,” a statue on loan to the John Brown Farm, before her performance there on Friday. She said sitting by the statue nearly moved her to tears (Enterprise photo — Grace McIntyre)

Walking where they walked

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Before beginning her performance, Crowell-White confided that she never knows how a performance will go. She sat thoughtfully at the feet of the Harriet Tubman statue. “The Beacon of Hope” is currently on loan to the John Brown Farm from North Carolina sculptor Wesley Wofford. Crowell-White patted the chains piled at Tubman’s feet.

“This venue really wakes it up for me,” Crowell-White said. “I hope my muses really show up.”

Standing just a short distance from where John Brown is buried, Crowell-White lingered on the abolitionist during her performance, saying how much Tubman admired his sense of humanity.

“When he heard about a slave child being sold away from the parents, he thought about that slave child as being his own child,” Crowell-White said. “He felt so deeply for slaves or for anybody, anybody oppressed.”

Last year, when she was at the farm for the first time, Crowell-White said she just wanted to soak in the fact that she was standing where John Brown stood.

“And I just wanted to walk everywhere so my feet could touch where he where he trod,” Crowell-White said.

With the Tubman statue here this year, she said the experience has been all the more powerful.

“I could cry sitting down there with that statue,” she said. “It just brought my emotions and my feelings to the absolute surface, and I just had such a deep desire not to disappoint — not to disappoint the people who brought me here, not to disappoint these children and not to disappoint myself.”

The children were not disappointed. After the performance, many hands flew into the air to ask questions. As they dispersed into a picnic lunch on the farm grounds, more students approached Crowell-White with questions and to request pictures.

“I would like to tell you how much your performance resonated with my heart,” one student said.

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Marching on

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The first historical figure that Crowell-White studied and began to portray in her acting was Sojourner Truth, another abolitionist who later fought for women’s rights.

She said it is easier for her to embody Tubman, since she is closer to her stature, but that she deeply relates to all the women she portrays, which also include civil rights activist Rosa Parks and entrepreneur Maggie Walker. She performs in largely educational settings: schools, museums and churches.

Her work of storytelling has gotten more complicated, Crowell-White said, as new laws have tried to dictate how history can be taught. But in her days of working as an educator, “I have made acquaintances with many a brave librarian,” she said, laughing.

Personally, she is driven not only by a desire to bring to life important stories from our country’s complex history, but also by the many other benefits live theater brings. She hopes students learn to sit respectfully and listen and that they are inspired to tell stories of their own.

“It’s for the Harriet Tubman story, and it’s for the women’s story, and it’s for the courage story,” Crowell-White said.

After weaving a tapestry of narration and song, the last beats of the performance were a short refrain: “Emancipation, the freeing of.” Most people know that Harriet Tubman was called “Moses” by the people she led to freedom. Fewer people know that she was offered no pay from the Union army for her invaluable services during the Civil War, or that she faced ongoing discrimination in a country reeling from the conflict around abolition.

“Emancipation, the freeing of,” Crowell-White repeated emphatically, as if to say that the fight for justice continues.

Tubman was born in Maryland around 1820 — the exact date of her birth is unknown — and around 1849 she ran away from her enslavers, eventually making her way to Pennsylvania. She returned to the slave states around 20 times, helping other slaves escape. She worked for the Union Army as a cook, nurse and spy during the Civil War and later made her home in Auburn, New York until her death in 1913.

Crowell-White will give one more performance today at 2 p.m. at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site. This free performance will take place behind the barn, weather permitting, or under the big tent if needed.