The New York Times
Ron Stodghill
Feb. 24, 2017
Ron Stodghill
Feb. 24, 2017
At some point in the swelling
rhapsody around Harriet Tubman’s remarkable life, it is easy to wonder,
with perhaps a bit of guilt, where Tubman’s heroism ends and tall tales
begin.
Somewhere between mythic and make-believe slave narratives, you want
to hit pause and go searching for the truth of how, for instance, a
fugitive slave slipped into Poplar Neck, Md., on Christmas Day in 1854
and stole off with her three brothers and several loved ones.
I traveled Maryland’s Eastern Shore, hoping to gain a deeper, more accurate understanding of Harriet Tubman, a complex American hero.
My trip coincided with the state’s renewed fervor around Tubman: On
March 11, the Maryland State Park Service and the National Park Service
will open the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center,
a $21 million project in Church Creek that commemorates Tubman’s
journey, from slave to Underground Railroad “conductor” and, later in
life, Civil War scout, spy and nurse. Sitting on 17 acres, the center
will be part of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, a 125-mile self-guided driving tour that wends through 36 significant sites along the Eastern Shore.
From the early 1600s until the mid-1800s, thousands of
African-Americans would encounter the marshy wooded landscape of the
Chesapeake Bay region, first as a gateway through which slave traders
forcibly brought them from Africa into the colonies and later as
essential paths and waterways that formed the Underground Railroad.
In 1850, Maryland had 279 runaway slaves, leading the nation’s slave
states in successfully executed escapes, the author Kate Clifford Larson
says in the Harriet Tubman biography “Bound for the Promised Land.”
“But few returned to the land of their enslavers, risking capture and
re-enslavement, even lynching, to help others seek their own
emancipation,” Ms. Larson writes.
Among those few was Tubman.
In the Mire
Bucktown, Md.
The exact date of Harriet Tubman’s
birth is unknown, but historians generally agree that she was born
Araminta Ross in 1822 to Benjamin and Harriet (Rit) Greene Ross, taking
on her mother’s first name when she married in 1844. She was born in
nearby Peters Neck, on a farm owned by Anthony Thompson, a medical
doctor and timber magnate, and was later moved to Bucktown.
The morning after my arrival in Cambridge, I took the 20-minute drive
to the Bucktown farm of Edward Brodess, Dr. Thompson’s stepson and
Tubman’s owner. It is a serene drive, as the landscape shifts quickly
from urban to wide-open rural spaces, with acres of barren, tan-colored
land stretching miles into the distance, punctuated by the occasional
farmhouse.
Along the way I encountered some fascinating sites:
Joseph Stewart’s Canal
From 1810 to 1832, enslaved and free blacks dug a seven-mile canal
through the marsh for commercial transportation. The canal was owned by
the wealthy slaveholding Stewart family; and Tubman’s father, who
worked at a nearby timbering operation, transported materials on the
canal.
I also stopped briefly at the Stanley Institute, a one-room
19th-century schoolhouse that doubled as a church, and I sat at one of
its wooden desks. It is one of the state’s oldest schools operated by
the black community.
Tubman herself never learned to read or write. Starting at around 5
years old, she was lent out to nearby families to work; she checked
muskrat traps in streams and rivers, and worked as a nursemaid to a
planter’s child and later as a field hand on timber farms.
Bucktown Village Store
From Tubman’s era, the Bucktown Village Store, though
renovated, still stands. It was there that Tubman, as a teenager, showed
early signs of rebellion — and she paid dearly for it.
First Flight
One day, Tubman had arrived at
Bucktown Village Store with a slave owner’s cook, crossing paths with an
overseer arguing with his slave. The slave apparently had left the farm
without permission. When the overseer ordered Tubman to help him
restrain the man, she refused and the slave broke away. The overseer
then grabbed a two-pound weight off the counter, threw it at the fleeing
slave and instead struck Tubman. The blow fractured Tubman’s skull and
caused her to suffer severe headaches and seizures throughout her life.
Nearly a decade later, she married John Tubman, a free black man,
even as she continued in servitude to the Brodess family. When her
master died in 1849, Tubman and two of her brothers, Harry and Ben,
fearing they would be sold, ran away — later returning for fear of
punishment.
“God’s time is always near. He set the North Star in the heavens. He
gave me the strength in my limbs. He meant I should be free.”
I stopped at a small log cabin built in the 1850s by James Webb, a
free black farmer who lived there with his enslaved wife and four
children.
These days, Paulette Greene and Donna Dear, an African-American
couple, own some 130 acres of that property. Beneath a giant poplar
called the “Witness Tree,” where folks travel from miles away to pray
and hold spiritual retreats, we talked about the sacred history of this
land. Then they invited me inside their home and treated me to a
delicious soup of kidney and navy beans grown on their farm.
Shortly after returning to the farm, Tubman set
out on her own, guided through the night by the North Star and well-worn
paths of the Underground Railroad up into Pennsylvania, where slavery
was illegal.
Tubman’s freedom proved to be bittersweet, as she would recount in
her biography. In Philadelphia, she was free, working odd jobs, but
lonely. Tubman began plotting her return home to bring her kin back with
her: “I was free and dey should be free also. I would make a home for
dem in de North, and de Lord helping me, I would bring dem all dere.”
In 1850, Tubman made her first trip back to Maryland, where, on the
steps of the Dorchester County Courthouse (which was rebuilt in 1854
after a fire), Tubman’s niece, Kessiah, was scheduled to be auctioned
off. But Tubman had plotted with Kessiah’s husband, who had been
manumitted, to free his family. He secured the highest bid for Kessiah
and their two children, smuggled them to a local safe house, then sailed
up the Chesapeake to Baltimore, where Tubman greeted them and guided
them to Philadelphia.
The rescue must have inspired Tubman. Over the next decade, she would
return to Maryland’s Eastern Shore a dozen times, rescuing some 70
family members and friends.
Tubman was no-nonsense on these journeys, unwilling to suffer
weakness among those joining her perilous flight. “For the faint of
heart she carried a pistol, telling her charges to go on or die, for a
dead fugitive slave could tell no tales,” Ms. Larson writes in her
Tubman biography. “She used disguises; she walked, rode horses and
wagons; sailed on boats; and rode on real trains...She bribed people.
She followed rivers that snaked northward. She used the stars and other
natural phenomenon to lead her north.”
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