Harriet Tubman: The Lives of a Historical Fugitive

Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2004 by Gill, Tiffany M

Harriet Tubman: The Lives of a Historical Fugitive

Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom By Catherine Clinton (Little, Brown, $27.95)

Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero By Kate Clifford Larson (Ballantine Books, $26.95)

Fugitives leave few tracks. just as Harriet Tubman managed to elude slave catchers for more than a decade, securing freedom for herself and others, her life has evaded the historical scrutiny of a full-length biography for the last 60 years. Despite the current explosion of historical work on the lives of African American women, remembrances of Tubman have been limited to biographies for young adults and the requisite profile hanging on elementary school bulletin boards during Black History Month. In other words, most of what we know about Tubman we learned as children.

Two recent biographies, Catherine Clinton's Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom and Kate Clifford Larson's Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero, move Tubman beyond the confines of childhood heroine to instead illuminate the life of a complex freedom fighter: an illiterate woman with the mind of a military strategist; a deeply religious woman who was once drawn into a questionable getrich-quick scheme; a woman who "kidnapped" a free Black girl named Margaret thought to be her neice, but likely her estranged daughter; a woman who had man troubles, as well as money troubles.

The early chapters of both biographies reveal that unearthing the intricacies of Tubman's life is no small task. Born Black, enslaved and female in the 19th century rendered her historically invisible. Like her male contemporary Frederick Douglass, Tubman was never certain of her date of birth.

While Clinton and Larson, both academic scholars, agree on most of the basic facts surrounding Tubman's life, they disagree on a few aspects. Clinton puts Tubman's birth somewhere between 1815 and 1825. Larson, who employs a much more historically rigorous approach, asserts that Tubman was most likely born in 1822.

Another significant area where the two authors differ concerns Tubman's adoption of the name Harriet. Born Araminta Ross, she eventually came to be known as Harriet, which was actually the birth name of her mother. Larson argues that Araminta became Harriet once she married in 1844 and that the name may have also reflected a spiritual conversion in her life. According to Clinton's account, Araminta was reborn as Harriet once she arrived in Philadelphia as a fugitive slave.

Larson's more-detailed account based on a meticulous investigation of court and Census records, genealogical data, abolitionist papers and archival records of those who knew Tubman firsthand, uncovers facets of Tubman's life that go unexplored by Clinton. But what Clinton lacks in historical detail she more than makes up for in pointed and illuminating prose, moving the reader through the most significant aspects of Tubman's life with the skill of a novelist.

Both authors dutifully retell the story of how Tubman came of age on Maryland's Eastern Shore, an area from which slaves frequently escaped, aided by the region's proximity to abolitionist Philadelphia and the presence of a sizeable free Black population that often assisted fugitive slaves. Both attempt to unearth the personal motivation behind Tubman's successful escape in 1849. They both contend that much of her outrage grew out of the horrors and cruelties of slavery she experienced as a child.

When she was about 10 years old, she suffered a blow to the head that not only changed her physically, but empowered her spiritually. An overseer threw an iron weight intended to hit another slave, but struck Tubman with sueh force that she would suffer from headaches, seizures and sleeping spells for the remainder of her life. The physical effects of this injury, which both historians identify as temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), coincided with an awakening of the extraordinary spiritual gifts and supernatural perceptions that would prove to be major sources of Tubman's success in rescuing fugitive slaves. According to Larson, "epiphany-like" spiritual manifestations are a common side effect of TLE. These manifestations, along with her deep Christian faith, enabled Tubman to be directed by what Clinton calls her "protective intuition" in her rescue missions.

More motivating than the physical violence was the toll the "peculiar institution" took on African American families -Tubman's in particular. By the time she reached her early twenties, Tubman's father had been separated from her family and her sisters and nieces had been sold away. It was the sale of additional family members, and rumors that her sale was imminent, that caused Tubman to run away with two of her brothers in 1849. What is perhaps most interesting about this attempt is that Harriet ran away against the wishes of her then-husband of five years, John Tubman, a free Black man.

While Clinton does not provide any historical evidence as to how John Tubman became free, Larson suggests that he was a "dark-skinned mulatto" born to free parents. Little is known about their courtship or marriage, but Larson suggests that John Tubman must have cared deeply enough for Harriet to be willing to deal with all of the legal and extralegal challenges they faced as a result of her enslavement. Despite this connection, Harriet decided to flee with her brothers. On their way to freedom, her siblings got fearful and pleaded with her to return to the plantation with them alter only two-and-a-half weeks. Tubman reluctantly obliged, but set off on her own solo journey to freedom shortly thereafter.