Jean Humez. Harriet Tubman: the Life and the Life Story

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Pero G. Dagbovie

Jean Humez. Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Story. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 471 pp. $45.00.

Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) is arguably the most famous historical African American heroine. A "larger-than-life figure," she is among the handful of African American icons to earn a celebrity-like status in past and modern black culture. For many, she has become the single most recognizable symbol of resistance to slavery. One popular image poses her leaning comfortably against a rifle. Similarly, scholarly discourses about resistance to slavery, the Underground Railroad, and the anti-slavery movement acknowledge Tubman's important role.

Though exact numbers are unknown, she legendarily liberated some 59 to 70 fugitive slaves, including her parents and other family members, during the turbulent 1850s. As is the case with many African American leaders, familiar and obscure, the details of Tubman's remarkable life are not widely known. Journalist Earl Conrad's General Harriet Tubman, the last significant biography of Tubman, appeared 60 years ago in 1943. Now, Jean M. Humez's timely Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Story, offers "a fresh and more multifaceted understanding of the private woman whose life has virtually disappeared behind the heroic public icon."

Humez attempts to reconstruct Tubman's life, work, and thoughts from various biographies by both black and white writers, from Tubman's own accounts as extracted from legitimate interviews and discussions with her biographers, and from a wealth of illuminating primary documents. Though Tubman never learned to read or write, Humez maintains, she played a very proactive role in constructing the "public Harriet Tubman story." At one level, Tubman succeeded in writing her autobiography by using her collaborators as cultural translators and literary guides. She wielded strong influence on her biographers and their articulations of her life story.

Harriet Tubman is sub-divided into four major parts. In part 1, Humez critically chronicles Tubman's life from her birth in Maryland, circa 1820, to her death in upstate New York in 1913. Expanding previous Tubman biographies, Humez places Tubman's life and activism within the broader landscape of American history from the antebellum era through the "nadir" at the end of the nineteenth century. In dealing with her early years as a slave in the border state of Maryland, Humez delves into the debate concerning her famous head injury, her first marriage to free man John Tubman, her psychological suffering as a young slave, and her escape from slavery in 1849. Humez addresses the 10 or 11 successful trips--the first in 1850--that Tubman made to the South to liberate her enslaved counterparts; her relationships with prominent white and black abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Franklin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, Thomas Garrett, Henry Fowler, Lucretia Mott, John Brown, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, and members of both the Underground Railroad community in western New York State and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society; and her role in the bourgeoning anti-slavery speaking circuit. During the 1850s, a very mobile Tubman spent time in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Canada West (the settlement of St. Catherine's), New York, Massachusetts, especially Boston, and Maryland (on rescue missions).

Though Tubman's exact whereabouts at the outbreak of the Civil War are not known, Humez discusses Tubman's war roles as advocate for newly freed blacks in refugee camps, spy in the 1863 Combahee River Raid, recruiter--with Martin Delany--for black soldiers, and nurse and cook. Tubman spent most of the war in the Sea Islands and other neighboring coastal regions. In the fall of 1865 she was harassed and assaulted by a conductor while traveling by train. According to Humez, this incident in part signaled Tubman's post-war activism. Once again, she successfully mobilized prominent white and black abolitionists behind her cause. During Reconstruction, however, she settled in Auburn, New York, and worked more to re-establish and strengthen family ties than to shape traditional party politics.

During the "nadir," Tubman devoted her energies to a variety of black self-help projects, racial politics, and Progressive era reform, including charity work for poor black children, activities with the National Association of Colored Women, activism within the AME Zion Church, and the creation of "a permanent social service institution" for impoverished black elders, which she named in honor of John Brown. To raise funds for her asylum, she re-entered the public speaking circuit and addressed a variety of audiences. Nearly three decades after the Civil War, Tubman was finally recognized for her vital wartime services. She began receiving a small monthly pension in 1890. This stipend, which started out at $8 and rose to $20, was never enough to sustain her comfortably. Ironically, this woman who sacrificed so much for others died poor on March 10, 1913, though remembered with fondness by white and black communities for decades following her death.