Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories

Harriet Tubman’s Practices as a Life-Storyteller

H arriet Tubman’s autobiographical medium was the well-told individual story performed for an audience—not the more private, analytical, and self-reflective commentary characteristic of autobiographers in the habit of reading and writing.1 She was schooled in her Maryland childhood in the distinctive storytelling practices of an African American subculture within a larger Anglo-American rural culture—both traditions intimately shaped by the power dynamics of the institution of slavery. When she came north she found she was able to put her storytelling skills to good use in her life as a celebrated antislavery heroine. Her experience with living in two cultures in Maryland undoubtedly made it easier for her to operate in the initially alien world of the antislavery networks in Northern cities and towns—the world in which most of her life storytelling took place. Tubman’s motives for public performance of her life stories were a mixture of the practical, the political, and the religious. Her public testimony certainly had economic value, and from the moment she arrived in the North she began to struggle with the problem she would face for the rest of her life—how to feed, clothe, and shelter those who depended on her. Recognition that her telling her life story could help her raise funds did not imply a cynical perspective on the project—as perhaps it might for the celebrity today. She moved in highly idealistic political circles, where former slave testimonial was seen as a powerful tool in the war against the sinful ownership of other human beings. To make sure that at least some of the facts of her experience as a former slave would become part of the public record was a political act, even if it also helped her support herself and her family. Most importantly, her work as a storyteller should 133 harriet tubman’s practices as a Life Storyteller be understood within the context of her lifelong personal religiosity. Like other spiritual autobiographers who have been confident of divine guidance in their lives, Tubman believed that telling her life story could be a way of making God’s active participation in antislavery work more widely known. Unlike her acquaintances Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, Tubman never acted as a paid lecturer for an antislavery society. Her stories of slavery were not developed into a written “slave narrative” prior to the war, as so often happened with the paid lecturers.2 Yet like these more “professional” antislavery life story narrators, she provided her politically allied audiences with thrilling and entertaining stories and songs and further stimulus for their political work.3 As important as the plot and style of the well-told story was the body language—the “wealth of eloquent gesture” Tubman used to enhance the performance (in Telford’s phrase). Those who heard her frequently claimed that a mere transcription of her words would be inadequate: “I wish it were possible to give some of her racy stories; but no report would do them justice” (Cheney, 1865, 36). Similarly : “The mere words could do no justice to the speaker; and therefore we do not undertake to give them; but we advise all our readers to take the earliest opportunity to see and hear her” (Yerrington, 1859). Those who heard her speak in the 1850s were both amazed by the facts of her unusually courageous actions and moved by the impact of her personal presence. Thomas W. Higginson recalled in his memoirs the impact this kind of storytelling had on his generation of antislavery white Northerners: I know that my own teachers were the slave women who came shyly before the audience, women perhaps as white as my own sisters,—Ellen Craft was quite as white—women who had been stripped and whipped and handled with insolent hands and sold to the highest bidder as unhesitatingly as the little girl whom I had seen in the St. Louis slave-market; or women who having once escaped, had, like Harriet Tubman, gone back again and again into the land of bondage to bring away their kindred and friends. My teachers were the men whom I first saw walking clumsily across the platform, just arrived from the South, as if they still bore a hundred pounds of plantation soil on each ankle, and whom I saw develop in the course of years into the dignity of freedom. What were the tricks of oratory in the face of men and women like...