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

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.

In Part 2 of her study, Humez critically analyzes Tubman's skill as an accomplished storyteller as well as Tubman historiography from the late 1860s through the early 1940s. Couching Tubman within the tradition of African American storytelling, folklore, slave narratives, and oral tradition, Humez highlights the precision and consistency that she demonstrated as a dazzling entertainer and educator who performed parables, religious songs, re-enactments, and "dramatic gestures." At the same time, Humez carefully evaluates the "mediated texts" that have largely shaped our interpretations of Tubman. She acknowledges the value of Tubman's collaborators' biographies, but stresses that we must scrutinize them. For example, she suggests that the backgrounds, motivations, and ideologies of Tubman's biographers represent "a tension between two alternative perspectives." Perhaps the most accurate and "authoritative" primary sources of Tubman scholarship are the letters and messages she dictated.

Part 3 of Harriet Tubman includes important "core story texts" that Tubman told to and through her various collaborators as well as accounts by those who knew her. The more than 100 "core stories" represent essential post-Civil War perspectives on slavery that are as valuable as the WPA former slave narratives collected during the New Deal period. They shed light on other dimensions of Tubman's life, such as her rescues and wartime and post-war experiences. Part 4 includes 64 instructive primary documents pertaining to Tubman's life and work, especially letters and newspapers articles. The comprehensive sampling of primary sources in Harriet Tubman will certainly become an important documentary trove for scholars. In the two appendices, Humez briefly discusses debates surrounding Tubman's family and the number of fugitives she liberated.

Within the last several decades, historiographical scholarship on African American women has flowered. Today, black women's history is a very popular, mainstream field of scholarly inquiry that continues to develop and mature. Biographies of well-known and lesser-known figures constitute an important part of this major reconstruction process in American history. While the story of Harriet Tubman's life and work has been repeatedly recounted in a range of biographical sketches, brief and detailed, since the late 1860s, most of the material in Harriet Tubman is refreshing, original, and provocative. Humez's analysis of Tubman as a politicized symbol of "iconographic value," a conduit of interracial harmony, a storyteller, and a window into myriad dimensions of African American life is especially intriguing and valuable. Equally important, the book is a vital, accessible collection of primary sources. Humez succeeds in blending existing scholarship on Tubman with her own insightful historical speculation and original research. Perhaps a more detailed section on Tubman's image as appropriated in modern African American popular culture could have yielded an interesting discussion. But this is no major oversight. This biography is a solid, much-needed book on an important individual in American history.

Pero G. Dagbovie

Michigan State University