Last week I watched an interview of historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar discussing her book, She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman. While I had heard of Tubman previously, I knew very little about the remarkable life she led. On reflection of Black History Month, I want to focus on the extraordinary actions of the woman who came to be known as the ‘Moses of her people’.
Harriet Tubman is thought to have been born around 1821 as one of nine children to Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross. She was born on the East Coast of Maryland, USA, and was named Araminta Ross, or ‘Minty’. It was only when she married John Tubman in 1844 that she took the name ‘Harriet’, after her mother. From the age of five, Araminta’s owners hired her out to their friends and neighbours. She was sent out alone to work on unfamiliar farms and complete domestic duties such as cooking, cleaning, laundry and lighting fires.
Sometime around 1834/1835, Araminta was running an errand for her master at the general store when she crossed paths with an escapee slave. The slave’s overseer was chasing him around the store and asked Araminta to assist him in restraining the man. Despite being in her early teens at the time, she disobeyed the overseer’s order and the enslaved man got away. The overseer was in such a state of rage that he threw a two-pound metal weight in the direction of the runaway slave, but it missed him and hit Araminta in the head. She was knocked unconscious and then suffered with headaches and seizures for the rest of her life. However, instead of feeling self-pity, Tubman said that this allowed her a deeper connection with God and guided her on her journeys.
In 1849 Harriet made the decision to escape, feeling that she was soon to be up for the auction block. She actually ran away twice: the first time with her two brothers (but they returned two weeks later), and the second time alone. Having made her escape, Tubman felt that ‘there was no one to welcome [her] to the land of freedom’. She was officially free, but with her family and friends still enslaved, Harriet couldn’t find joy in her liberation.
Over the next eleven years, she returned to the Eastern shore of Maryland at least thirteen times and successfully rescued nearly seventy people. She worked as a domestic, saving her money until she had enough to make a round trip, at which time she would use her connections with the Underground Railroad* to inform her family that she was coming for them soon. Tubman relocated all of her family to St. Catherine’s, Canada, apart from one of her sisters who had sadly passed away before she could free her. She even managed to save her elderly, immobile parents by using a rickshaw!
Due to her extensive knowledge and success, Harriet Tubman was asked if she would support the Union Army in 1863. She became a soldier and spy during the Civil War and was the first woman to lead an armed military operation in the United States. In later life, she helped to create one of the first homes for elderly black people in the country, where she herself was cared for in her final years.
While appreciating her abolitionist contributions, Erica Dunbar works to convey a more nuanced, in-depth depiction of Harriet Tubman. She writes of Harriet as a wife, mother and an active suffragist. What I particularly liked when watching Dunbar’s interview was the genuine interest and admiration that she showed for Tubman, alongside her aim to deconstruct some of the common falsehoods about Tubman’s character.
I feel it is impossible to do Harriet Tubman justice in a short article, but if you are keen to learn more I encourage you to watch Dunbar’s interview and grab a copy of her novel (which is the first thing I did!). There is also a film called ‘Harriet’ that was released in 2019, directed by Kasi Lemmons and starring Cynthia Erivo.
*The Underground Railroad was a network of people, routes and shelters that was established in the late eighteenth century to allow enslaved people to escape into free states. Harriet Tubman is widely known for being a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
This article is part of a themed content week celebrating Black History Month