May 9 was the birthday of the abolitionist John Brown. To the extent that his soul is marching on, he is 222 years old.

I spent a little time reading about Brown’s brief but deep friendship with the liberator Harriet Tubman. According to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Brown biography, Brown and Tubman met in April 1858 in St Catharines, on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, while Brown was planning his raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Tubman, for her part, had freed herself from a Maryland plantation nearly a decade earlier and had been shuttling fugitives north in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. Her reputation preceded her.

Brown was raised Calvinist and Tubman spent time in the Methodist church, but by the time they met, they had both arrived at theologies of liberation beyond anything their pastors would have preached. Reading contemporary descriptions of Brown and Tubman, I recognize a common strain of fearlessness and intense spiritual conviction — so intense, in fact, that friends and enemies questioned their sanity. “Neurodivergent” wasn’t a word or category at the time, but in retrospect I have to wonder.