I won an award once for an essay that I wrote about Harriet Tubman, which I now invite you to enjoy:
"One night on a plantation in Maryland a brave black girl sang softly as she passed the many cabins of the other slaves. The other slaves came to their doors to listen. They knew the deep voice of Harriet Tubman well, and as they listened they learned what she was planning.
'I'm sorry friends, to leave you,
Farewell! Oh, farewell!
But I'll meet you again in the morning.
Farewell! Oh, farewell!'
That night as the slaves went to sleep on the floors of their cabins, they thought about Harriet's song. They knew it meant she would be gone in the morning, that she had run away to the North to be free. They said, 'If anyone can make it, Harriet can!'
Harriet was small but very strong. She did a man's work in the fields. She chopped down trees, split logs, and hauled lumber. And Harriet knew the woods. She could see in the dark like an owl.
In the morning, Harriet was gone. As the days passed, the slaves waited nervously. They knew that Harriet would be hunted by men with guns and bloodhounds. If they caught her she would be brought back and beaten.
Posters offering a reward for her capture were put on trees. But the weeks passed, and she wasn't brought back.
'Harriet must be in the North,' the slaves whispered to each other. 'Harriet must be free!'
They were glad of course, but at the same time, they were sad because they thought they would never see Harriet again, and also that they would never be set free themselves.
They were wrong about that!
One night over a year later, a strange young man passed through the slave quarter. He was singing softly. The next day, several slaves were missing. They never came back.
It happened often after that. One night the slaves heard an owl tooting in the woods that sounded different than the rest. Not so different that the master could tell, but the slaves noticed it. They knew it was Harriet out there, waiting to help someone escape.
Sometimes a strange old lady would come by singing a song, but the voice was Harriet's. It was her way of letting them know that she was there. She would see that they would get to the North safely, because now she knew the way.
It was dangerous for a runaway slave to go back to the very same plantation she had run away from. Yet Harriet took that chance. It was good to be free, but not good enough, because her parents, her brother and sisters, and all of her friends were still slaves.
Harriet found that there were many people in America who thought that slavery was wrong and who were glad to help runaways. They helped her get to the North. They called themselves the 'Underground Railroad.'
Harriet herself was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and saved her mother and father and about 300 more slaves become free. Sometimes she led slaves all the way to Canada. She never got caught. She never stopped making these dangerous trips until President Abraham Lincoln declared that all slaves were free.
Harriet lived a long life. She lived to be a very old lady in a little town in the North where she sold vegetables door to door. People liked to ask her in for tea to hear the stories of her adventures as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
'I never ran my train off its tracks,' Harriet told them proudly, 'and I never lost a passenger along the way.'
By: Julie D-
Grade 5, Age 11
March 1, 1985."
You may ask how I knew so much about Harriet Tubman, or why I seemed to have exclusive access to the Top 40 songs sung by slaves (and apparently, also owls) in the 1860s. That's a fair question, and one I thought that someone, a teacher perhaps, might ask me, but no one ever did. Anyway, it's a pretty nice little essay, and unbeknownst to me, Sr. Helen submitted it to a contest at the public library, and I won. I got my picture in the paper and a $25 check.
But I wasn't proud of my achievement, and I never cashed the check. Here is why: I copied the essay verbatim from a children's encyclopedia, Volume T, that my mother got for me at Fazio's, a grocery store in Akron, Ohio. I hadn't set out to pirate the essay. It wasn't my plan.
Sr. Helen was always making us write reports on stupid things, like, say, Nebraska.
We'd have to go to the library and read the encyclopedia and re-create a map of Nebraska and write about what kind of things were in Nebraska (hay bales) and what the average annual precipitation is there (it is 100%, because everyone is crying ALL of the time in Nebraska), and so on.
[Nebraska only has two cities]
When we had to do these reports, it was always tricky, first of all, because Sr. Helen put us into groups to write our reports, and we had to figure out how to divide the work -- who would do the drawings and who would do the typing up of the report and who would be the cute kid in the group who lucked out because I offered to do his part for him. The second reason these dumb reports were tricky was, we were too young to understand how to take the information from the encyclopedia and make it into our own work product. We never could figure out how to take the sentence "Nebraska has 1,875,493 hay bales per mile of I-80" and put it into the report. Most of our time would be spent sitting around the library table reading Sweet Valley High books and trying to find another way to say that sentence. So our reports sounded like this: "1,875,493 hay bales per mile of I-80 Nebraska has." Sr. Helen must not have ever read these reports, because we got an 'A' no matter what the fuck we wrote.
So what happened with Harriet Tubman was, my family had gone on vacation and we got back on a Sunday night and the report was due the next day. The library was closed and my mom said I'd have to make do with the Fazio's encyclopedia we had in the house. There really wasn't much I could do with what was in there about Harriet Tubman, and I remember thinking, well, there's nothing I can do but just re-type this whole thing. So I plugged in my mom's old typewriter and got down to thieving.
My mom's old typewriter was really really old. It was so old that there was no plastic coating around the electrical doo-hickey, so every time I plugged it into the socket, I got a shock, which numbed my fingers momentarily and zip-zapped my brain. I don't know why I never asked my mother, "Hey, ma. Is there, perchance, any way to plug in this antiquated typewriter without electrocuting myself?" I just accepted it as part of my writing process. I started writing little stories using my mom's old typewriter when I was 8 years old, so by the time I was 11, I had probably been moderately electrocuted at least 200 times.
Back to Harriet, I did try to add my own flourish to the paper. I believe that the tell-tale "They were wrong about that!" was a touch of my own. And I probably added or substracted some commas. But for the most part, that essay came straight out of the book. Also, as you may have noticed, there's not even one actual fact in that article about her. I mean, there is not even a date. And how the hell do you think the Fazio's "encyclopedia" writers knew the lyrics of the song that Harriet Tubman was singing in the bushes at night? And why would Sr. Helen or the library contest judges or anyone at all really, think that an 11-year-old would come up with a story like that? But I was such a good student, they totally ate it up and no one ever accused me of cheating. When I won the award, I got called down to the Principal's office. I thought I was going to get interrogated, that Sr. Teresa would be sitting there with the entire set of Fazio's encyclopedias and dare me to show her where I got my essay from, but I went into her office and she told me she was proud of me and gave me instructions on when and where to go to get my picture taken.
So, no matter the reasons I got myself in this position, the fact is, I totally lifted an essay, won an award, didn't get caught, and I have had to live with it for a quarter of a century. In fact, when I won this award for, basically, re-typing something out of a story book, my parents were out of town and I was staying at my friend's house. Her mother got me dressed up and took me to the library to get my check and have my picture taken, and my poor friend had to tag along and watch me getting all these accolades and she didn't get any awards at all. I felt really shitty, especially when, afterwards, we went to Colonial Ice Cream Parlor to celebrate my new local celebrity status -- I was sitting there eating my turtle sundae knowing I was a cheater. I was totally old enough to know that I had done a bad thing, and in those days, I believed in hell and I knew that I was going there.
I have done some really crazy shit in my life, but this is the thing of which I am most ashamed. When I've told this story to my boyfriends over the years, they just laughed, but, as you'll notice from my previous post, I am not married, and I think that me being a dirty rotten no-account plagiarist is the main reason why no one wants to marry me. So, I've decided to come clean.
[My $25 award-winning plagiarized
essay, and now that I have disclosed this,
I will probably never get a book deal.]
