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HARRIET TUBMAN
MYTH, MEMORY, AND HISTORY
By Milton C. Sernett DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4073-7
Chapter One
"Minty"
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the American basketball sensation, tells of a teacher friend who tests students during Black History Month at an elementary school outside Atlanta. "Her kids," Abdul-Jabbar writes in Black Profiles of Courage, "know so little about black history that they answer Harriet Tubman for everything." We might read Abdul-Jabbar's disclosure as symptomatic of the failure of American educators to integrate the culture and history of peoples of African descent into school curriculums. We could also interpret the children's ready naming of Tubman as illustrative of a high-water mark in the canonization process of Tubman in the American memory. Earlier generations of children might have called to mind Martin Luther King Jr. or George Washington Carver, if students of the twentieth century, and Booker T. Washington or Frederick Douglass, if queried about nineteenth-century African American heroes. If we must judge by the plethora of books about Tubman in the field of juvenile literature as well as by the many other ways in which young people are taught about her, Harriet Tubman is the all-comprehending black hero of our time.
Listen to the stories adults create for children, and you gain access to the contents of a society's treasure house of memory. In cultures without books as well as in literate ones, the stories passed down to children winnow that which is thought worth preserving from that which fades away as one generation succeeds another. In traditional West African cultures, including the one from which Harriet Tubman's ancestors came, the definition of immortality centered on being remembered. The "living dead" were kept from fading into anonymity by being called to life in communal story, song, and dance.
Remembering, whether by written or oral means, is an act of distillation. Some memories fall away; others survive, are embellished, and become stronger with the passage of time. Stories written for children make up the decanter in which the base elements of the Harriet Tubman myth are revealed. By examining children's literature, sometimes called juvenile literature, we discover not only what Americans have thought worth remembering about Tubman, but also how the Tubman myth has been shaped and reshaped in the crucible of American history. The curricular wars that erupted among educators and politicians in the late twentieth century prove to be an especially revealing window on America's struggle to come to terms with the meaning and importance of Harriet Tubman. By examining this controversy and the emergence of Tubman as a staple in juvenile literature, we can understand the essential elements of the Tubman myth.
Harriet Tubman was herself an inveterate and powerful storyteller. Though she had no children of her own, she enjoyed telling young people of her adventures. This was especially the case during her matriarchal years when she would show up at the homes of her Auburn benefactors. Their children sat before the elderly Tubman and heard of her marvelous exploits on the Underground Railroad and in the South during the Civil War. Samuel Hopkins Adams, a renowned storyteller in his own right whose great-aunt Sarah Hopkins Bradford acted as Tubman's biographer, recalled that it was a "gala day" in the late 1870s when "Old Harriet" arrived at his grandfather's Grant Avenue mansion on the outskirts of Auburn, New York. The children gathered around her, transfixed by her dramatic storytelling ability. They did not fully understand her historical significance, for, as Adams says, "The postwar ebb of patriotic fervor left her stranded." However, they found her to be a fascinating "tribal teller of tales, a never-failing source of adventure and romance." Some of the stories Tubman told passed from parent to child to grandchildren. In 1939, Alice L. Brickler informed Earl Conrad that, when she closed her eyes, she could "feel again the thrills of adventure & terror as my mother use[d] to tell me the stories of Aunt Harriet." Alice Brickler, the former Alice Lucas, daughter of Margaret Stewart, the young woman whom Tubman allegedly kidnapped in 1862, was approximately fifteen when Tubman died in 1913. Harkless Bowley, another of Conrad's informants, recalled how Tubman, who had aided his parents in escaping to Canada West, as Ontario was known from 1841 to 1867, told of the dangers of working on the Underground Railroad. When a young boy, he lived with the one hailed as "Black Moses" in her Auburn home. Eighty-two years of age in 1939 when corresponding with Conrad, Bowley could still bring to mind his aunt's thrilling stories. Another vivid recollection of Tubman's power as a storyteller comes to us from Vivian Carter Mason, the civil rights activist and educator who became the third president of the National Council of Negro Women in 1950. Born in 1900, Mason was the daughter of the Reverend George Carter and his wife Florence, onetime residents of Auburn. When the National Council was putting together The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro in 1958, Mason contributed a recipe for "Cornbread Harriet Tubman," said to be Aunt Harriet's favorite dish, along with a delightful account of having heard the "brave and dauntless woman [who] revitalized the meaning of freedom" tell of her exploits.
As a child I could not realize what a wonderful privilege it was to have known the famed freedom fighter, Harriet Tubman. Many the time "Aunt Harriet," as we called her, would tramp through the ice, snow and bitter cold of the northern winters from her home on the outskirts to our snug house in Auburn, New York, to sit before the huge kitchen range and warm her thin body before the glowing coals. My mother, Florence, and my father, The Reverend George Carter, loved and revered Harriet Tubman and taught their children to do the same. She would draw us to her side and while we made ourselves comfortable with old pillows on the floor, tell hair-raising stories of her escape from slavery and subsequent returns to the plantation to bring over four hundred men and women to freedom as the chief "conductor" of the underground railroad. As she talked, her head thrown back and eyes closed, we were in the woods with her tramping at night through stony creeks where the water was cold, hiding in the bush during the day and glad for a piece of cornbread washed down by the water of a hidden spring. We shivered as we heard the sound of horses' hoofs, fearing the men searching the woods and highways for black Harriet and her runaways. That they never caught up with her was always the triumphant ending of a fearful and frightening recital of days full of danger and suffering. Then mother would call us to dinner, and as the lamps cast a bright light on the huge kitchen table, with the steaming bowls of rice soup and the crisp cornbread piled high, it was not hard to imagine that in the darkness outside someone was still searching for Harriet and would take us too.
With the passing away of individuals who had heard "Aunt Harriet" tell her own story, and with the weakening of the oral tradition over time, text-based accounts of Tubman's life began to appear. Part of the difficulty in probing memories about Tubman is that by the time written testimonials to her greatness began to appear in profusion, the legend and the lady-that is, the iconic symbol and the historical person-were intertwined. This is especially true of the information passed down about Harriet's experiences prior to her escape from Maryland in 1849. Nevertheless, authors who write accounts of Tubman's life for young readers highlight the first decades of her life, hoping, perhaps, that children will find cause to be inspired by their young heroine's triumph over adversity in spite of her hardships.
Our historical knowledge about children's experiences within America's so-called peculiar institution is limited. Frederick Bailey (Frederick Douglass), whose first two decades were spent under "the whip and the lash" on Maryland's Eastern Shore in Talbot County, not far from where Harriet grew up in Dorchester County, told of his childhood experiences and struggles in several autobiographical works. Harriet A. Jacobs revealed the injustices visited on a young female slave in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. While numerous ex-slave narratives touch on childhood experiences, few of them were written with the intent of chronicling childhood as such. Secondary literature focuses, for the most part, on adults, and until recent decades primarily on African and African American men who bore slavery's yoke. Since the interpretive lens of gender has been employed, historians have given greater attention to the theme of "Black Women and Slavery." Scholarly attention to the lives of children in the slave quarters of the antebellum South did not flourish until the 1990s. Written accounts of Harriet's childhood and experiences as a young woman began to appear, however, long before there was any special interest in the interior or exterior lives of slaves who were both young and female.
Until Tubman sat down with Sarah Bradford after the Civil War to tell something of her story as background for Bradford's biographical sketch of her, published in 1869, interest in the childhood of the woman who became "Black Moses" lagged behind stories about her Underground Railroad heroics and Civil War experiences. Benjamin Drew's brief mention of Harriet Tubman in his book A North-Side View of Slavery, based on Drew's encounter with her while visiting St. Catharines in 1855, has Tubman telling the white journalist and abolitionist: "I grew up like a neglected weed,-ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented: every time I saw a white man I was afraid of being carried away. I had two sisters carried away in a chain-gang,-one of them left two children." Apart from this one reference to Tubman's life story prior to her escape, nothing else about Tubman's early years appeared in print for public consumption until 1863, when the Boston-based newspaper Commonwealth, edited by Franklin B. Sanborn, carried a three-column-long story under the title "Harriet Tubman."
Sanborn told his readers that his black heroine had been given the birth name Araminta when born "as near as she can remember, in 1820 or in 1821" in Dorchester County, Maryland. He reported that she was the daughter of Benjamin Ross and Harriet Greene (Green) and that both of her parents were enslaved. Sanborn claimed that Araminta was the granddaughter of a "native African" without "a drop of white blood in her veins."
Recent scholarship suggests that Harriet actually had eight siblings (four brothers and four sisters). Kate Clifford Larson discovered that Anthony Thompson paid a midwife two dollars in mid-March 1822 to aid Harriet "Rit" Green in childbirth. Larson believes that "this could be a fortuitous record of Tubman's birth," suggesting that she was born in late February or early March 1822. We may never know Araminta's exact birth date, but it is not far-fetched to imagine, along with the painter Jacob Lawrence, that a bright star shown on the night of the birth of Black Moses. Lawrence's powerfully evocative "Harriet, Harriet, Born a Slave" (see Plate 1) brings to mind cradle scenes of the baby Jesus and his parents.
Thompson's farm was located south of Madison in the Parsons Creek district of Dorchester County. This means that Tubman was not born in the Bucktown area on property owned by Edward Brodess, as so many children's books have stated. As to the claim that Tubman was the granddaughter of a "native African," usually thought to be of Asante origin, recent biographers entertain the possibility that Modesty, Tubman's grandmother, or perhaps another grandparent may have originated from West Africa, specifically from the region now known as Ghana, but definitive proof has not been found.
At six, according to Sanborn's article, Harriet was taken from her mother and removed ten miles away to learn the weaver's trade in a white household, that of James Cook. She was so ill at ease in this new environment that she refused a favorite drink: "I was as fond of milk as any young shote [young pig]. But all the time I was there I stuck to it, dat I didn't drink sweet milk." Harriet became ill and was temporarily returned to her mother. Though she was brought back to work for the Cook family when her health improved, she refused to learn weaving and hated her mistress. Sanborn did not mention an especially onerous task young Harriet had to perform while hired out-wading in cold water during winter to check on muskrat traps, even when she was sick with the measles.
Sanborn did tell the public in 1863 about the incident when Harriet, "after she entered her teens [and] was hired out as a field hand," received an injury that had long-lasting consequences. Readers of the Commonwealth article learned that an overseer, attempting to whip a slave who had left his work and gone to a crossroads store, threw a two-pound weight at the runaway. It missed and struck Harriet "a stunning blow on the head." She, "among others," had sought to intervene between overseer and slave. This "blow to the head" incident has been a primary strand in the Tubman story as recapitulated and illustrated for children. A popular book written by David A. Adler and illustrated by Samuel Byrd graphically depicts Harriet almost being killed (Figure 1). Harriet, said to be thirteen or perhaps fifteen, refuses to help tie up the runaway Jim (a name not given in the primary sources), is hit on the head, falls to the ground, and, bleeding from a long gash, is carried to the slave quarters. Her mother fears for her life. Tubman's sleeping spells and seizures dramatize the "Minty" books; illustrators frequently depict Tubman having one of her sleeping spells. Approximately eight years before her death in 1913, Tubman revealed details of the trauma she had experienced as a teenager. An interviewer reported her as saying: "I had a shoulder shawl' ob de mistis' ober my haid an' when I got to do sto' I was shamed to go in, an' said [saw] de' oberseer raisin' up to throw an iron weight at one ob de slaves an' dat wuz de las' I knew ... broke my skull and cut a piece ob dat shawl clean off and druv it into my haid. Dey carried me to de house all bleedin an' faintin. I had no baid, no place to lie down on at all, an' dey lay me on de seat ob de loom, an' I stayed dere all dat day an' nex.'"
Sanborn's sketch continued with an account of how Harriet worked "for five or six years" for John T. Stewart, first in the house but later hiring her time out, earning enough in one year to purchase a span of oxen for forty dollars. She drove oxen, carted, and ploughed in the fields. She also worked for her father, Ben Ross, a timber inspector, cutting and hauling logs. Tubman books written for children often include an illustration of Harriet at work in the woods (Figure 2), underscoring the theme that she became unusually strong physically, a characteristic that would become useful when she served as an Underground Railroad conductor. Sanborn's biographical profile did not include several stories about Tubman's younger years that have become basic components in the "Black Moses" legend. From sources published much later, the public learned that Harriet had to break flax, an unpleasant task for a child. She was whipped at age five for failing to keep a baby quiet, and she ran away at seven to escape punishment after taking a lump of sugar. Harriet hid out in a pigpen, where she had to compete with the swine for food, an incident depicted for young readers by the illustrator Rick Cooley in Harriet Finds a Way, written by Dolores Ready (Figure 3).
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Excerpted from HARRIET TUBMAN by Milton C. Sernett Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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