Simo Häyhä: Reiven Embrador

Esther is a hero due to her courage to act even when it feels like she might be able to escape unharmed—her fear could have kept living in secrecy, yet still lavishly as a queen. But she risked her life twice to stop the genocide of the Jewish people in Persia: first, by going to speak to the king without being summoned (an act punishable by death), and secondly by revealing her Jewish origins to him (knowing he had just called for her people to be eliminated). Though her beauty is what initially places her in this position, it is her character that moves her to the status of a hero; Esther seizes agency within her circumstances and thus succeeds in saving both her people and moral standing.

Not only does she continue to pursue art, but she’s bold in her choice to depict women in a different light. In my favorite (and arguably her most famous) artwork of hers, Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612-1623), Artemisia captures Judith as strong, determined, and aggressive. Artemisia’s Judith is prepared to slay Holofernes. In other works, such as Caravaggio’s, Judith is dainty, elegant, and seemingly unfit for the job. She looks like she was pasted into the painting for the sake of being a sight to behold.

Artemisia is a hero because not only did she pursue her passion in world of scorn and sexism, she told a story of womanly strength and resilience through her art that many men disregarded. Artemisia stayed true to herself throughout hardships and fought for her internal justice.

When the American Civil War broke out, Robert was put behind the wheel of the CSS Planter, a Confederate transport ship. Now in his 20s and married, Smalls had no interest in helping slavers keep his people in chains, and wanted to get his friends and family up North to freedom. And so, with the help of the other slaves aboard the Planter, he hatched a little scheme. As the white officers left the ship to spend their nights in comfort on dry land, Smalls asked permission to allow the slave crew's families onboard, just for a little while, to boost their morale. The Confederate officers agreed, and so the CSS Planter steamed away from Charleston and to the North, where the Union navy awaited.

It wasn't easy. They had to pretend to send their families home, only to smuggle them back aboard stowing away on a smaller boat that docked with the Planter; then they had to get past several Confederate-controlled forts, which Robert Smalls, having steered the Planter for long enough to know how to get past their checkpoints by giving the right signals, was able to convince to allow them to pass. He even wore the captain's uniform and a hat made of straw that was designed to look like the captain's hat from a distance.

The CSS Planter reached the Union naval lines, raised a white flag, and presented the ship, its enslaved crew, its logbooks, his own knowledge of where the Confederates had laid mines in the waters around Charleston, and the ship's guns and ammunition for the Union to reclaim. And so Robert Smalls, his family, and his compatriots and their families were freed.

Smalls continued to serve as a pilot, now aboard Union ships as a free man, and fought against the South for the remainder of the war. Though he was never officially recorded as a member of the United States Navy, he was eventually granted - after much hand-wringing by his so-called superiors - the same pension as a retired Navy captain.

After the war, Smalls decided being a legend multiple times over wasn't enough, and proceeded to return to South Carolina, buy his former slave master's house, owned and operated a business specifically to service freed slaves, and was even elected to the House of Representatives.

Three times.

Robert Smalls was a national hero, and I wish more people knew his name.

To give an abridged history of her, Joan was born around 1412 and was the daughter of a farmer, Jacques d’Arc, and the pious Isabelle Romée, and grew up in the village of Domrémy, in northeastern France. She was illiterate but grew up faithful to God and the Catholic Church. At 13, she began to hear voices and believed them to be those of God and saints, and those voices gave her a mission (her call to adventure): save France and install Charles as its rightful king. While she did not actually fight in the battlefield, Joan served as a military strategist and leader — with cropped hair (thank her for the bob cut) and men’s clothing — and led the French to many victories, most notably fending off the Siege of Orléans in 1429. She led the French and escorted Charles to Reims, took resisting towns, and enabled his coronation in July 1429. In the spring of 1430, by order of the newly coronated King Charles VII, Joan confronted a Burgundian assault on Compiègne, where she was thrown off her horse, left outside the town’s closing gates, and taken as a captive.

She was, in a politically motivated trial, tried for 70 charges conjured up against her — these included heresy, witchcraft, and dressing like a dude — and, after a year in captivity and under the threat of immediate execution, she signed an abjuration in which she denied ever receiving divine guidance, a seeming saving grace that reduced her sentence to perpetual imprisonment. Days later, though, she defied orders by donning men’s clothing once again, which led to her death sentence. 

On the morning of May 30, 1431, at the age of 19, Joan was burned at the stake.

King Charles VII made no attempt in negotiating her release.

Twenty years later, when he felt it was safe to do so, Charles VII did eventually clear her name. She was canonized by Pope Benedict XV in 1920 and is now the patron saint of France.

Whether you see her as a dangerously devout follower of God, as a witch with demonic visions, or simply as a psychotic individual, prone to hallucinations and delusions, Joan rarely wavered in her personal convictions. Reared in a strict Catholic household and society, her story was hammered into my head, with the moral lesson, of course, being, “Stay faithful to God.” What I got from it, though, was to find a good green hill to die on. So she is one of my heroes not strictly because of her devotion to God but her devotion to what she believed was a good cause, and because of her willpower to not just see her percieved mission through but hold onto her beliefs after conviction, ostracism, and as she burned at the stake. In a structural sense, she can also fit very well into the Hero’s Journey, as defined by Joseph Campbell: she accepted her call to adventure (though she did do so without much reported debate); she left the familiar (an actual farm, in this case — amazing) and ventured into the unknown, unconscious realm of war; she was captured and imprisoned (her first ordeal, step eight); finally, she passed her final test by recommitting to her beliefs in the cross-dressing that led to her death sentence, she literally died, and she was then resurrected in the clearing of her name and eventual canonization, returning to the world with the elixirs of faith, feminism, and fearless conviction.