Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories

Reading the Core Stories for Harriet Tubman’s Own Perspective

Stories of Childhood M any of the childhood stories collected and published by Cheney, Sanborn, and Bradford emphasize, in the manner of the classic abolitionist slave narrative, the heartless cruelty of the various white employers to whom Harriet Tubman was hired out and do not reveal much about her own family life or her private emotional world. However, a few stories captured later in her life by her white Auburn neighbor Emma Paddock Telford offer a less politicized, more intimate glimpse of her life as a playful, even mischievous, child.1 Tubman’s earliest memory was of lying in a cradle, suddenly caught up “in the air” by “the young ladies in the big house where my mother worked.” She pictured herself to Telford as enjoying caring for a baby brother a few years later, while her mother was working: “I used to be in a hurry for her to go, so as I could play the baby was a pig in a bag, and hold him up by the bottom of his dress. I had a nice frolic with that baby, swinging him all round, his feet in the dress and his little head and arms touching the floor, because I was too small to hold him higher. It was late nights before my mother got home, and when he’d get worrying I’d cut a fat chunk of pork and toast it on the coals and put it in his mouth. One night he went to sleep with that hanging out, and when my mother come home she thought I’d done kill[ed] him (Telford, n.d.). The story is a kind of joke, emphasizing her pride in herself for creating a pacifier and her success in getting the baby to sleep. The mother’s shock when she got home and found the sleeping baby apparently “dead” is recorded, though not the consequences for the babysitter. Did Ritta Ross whip her for this, 173 reading the core stories for harriet tubman’s own perspective or was she so relieved that she overlooked the offense? The storyteller goes on, “I nursed that there baby till he was so big I couldn’t tote him any more, and I got so mischievous about the house that they put me out to learn to be a weaver.” Even from the perspective of her old age, however, Tubman remembered the experience of being sent away from home to learn the trade of weaving as being traumatic. She conveyed vividly to Telford the embarrassment (“shame”) she felt at being in domestic proximity to strange whites for the first time: “The man came after me riding horseback. I hadn’t any clothes, but I was anxious to go, and the mistress made me a petticoat and the man took me up in front of him on the horse and off we went. When we got there, they was at the table eating supper. I’d never eat in the house where the white people was, and I was shamed to stand up and eat before them. The mistress asked me if I done want some milk to drink? But I was that shamed to drink before her, that I said, No, I never liked sweet milk no how. When the truth was I was as fond of milk as any young shoat. But all the time I was there I stuck to it, that I didn’t drink sweet milk” (Telford, n.d.). The story leaves us with more questions than it answers about Tubman’s adult perspective on her childhood self, however. Did she see this “shame” as foolish in retrospect? Or might she have taken pride in looking back at her instinctive effort to resist psychological identification with the white family? Certainly the stubbornness with which her child self stuck to the lie reminds us of later instances of self-denial, in which she triumphed over her bodily appetites by sheer willpower. Her homesickness in the story is also revealing: “I used to sleep on the floor in front of the fireplace and there I’d lie and cry and cry. I used to think all the time, ‘If I could only get home and get in my mother’s bed!’ And the funny part of that was, she never had a bed in her life. Nothing but a board box nailed up against the wall and straw laid on it. I stayed there two...