Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories

Part 3: Stories and Sayings

p a r t 3 tories and ayings A Note on the Selection and Editing of Story Texts W hen selecting from several recorded versions of a core story text, I have preferred those of writers who knew Harriet Tubman well or at least had documented interviews with her. In most cases I have chosen earlier recorded versions of stories over later ones—not only because they probably reflect a fresher memory of the events retold, but also because there is less probable “contamination” by other printed versions of the story.1 I have occasionally violated this rule when a latertold or later-written story seemed to add something distinctly new and valuable (as in the case of the material on Tubman’s childhood memories gathered by Emma Paddock Telford, discussed in the previous section). In editing excerpts from manuscripts and nineteenth-century publications I have generally preserved spellings and punctuations of the original texts, occasionally adding paragraph breaks for the relief of the modern reader, along with ellipses (. . .) to indicate editorial omissions within quotations. Exceptions to this practice, made for the convenience of the reader, are noted on individual excerpts. I have had to wrestle long and hard with the question of whether to preserve the “dialect” spellings used by many writers to render the sounds of Tubman’s Southern English. Dialect writing from dictation or memory by scribes arguably reveals more about the ideas and ear of the scribe than it does about the actual sound of the historical spoken word. It is immediately evident when we compare the many inconsistent versions of Tubman’s dialect used in these texts, as well as inconsistencies of dialect 197 writing within the same texts, that there is no way of determining which, if any, of the written texts accurately captured the sounds of her speech— even assuming that her “dialect” did not vary according to location, occasion , and time. At any rate, given that my goal is to minimize the “mediation ” of the biographers, in texts aimed not at language historians but at the general public, I have not attempted to preserve all these inconsistent, distracting, and (because of the racist history of dialect writing) potentially disturbing examples of dialect writing. I was guided in part by the advice of Sterling A. Brown, who made suggestions to the state WPA oral history narrative editors in 1936. Brown wrote that “simplicity in recording the dialect is to be desired in order to hold the interest and attention of the readers. . . . Truth to idiom is more important . . . than truth to pronunciation . . . . In a single publication, not devoted to a study of local speech, the reader may conceivably be puzzled by different spellings of the same word. . . . Most important are the turns of phrase that have flavor and vividness” (S. A. Brown, 1985, 37–39). When a text rendered Tubman’s speech in dialect, I removed nonstandard spellings meant to indicate Southern pronunciation, but I retained distinctive grammatical usage that seemed to preserve “turns of phrase that have flavor and vividness.” Storytelling Performances Described S1. Lucy Osgood (1859) Yesterday afternoon I missed through my weather caution of an unique entertainment, to which I had been kindly invited by Mrs. Bartoll, who at the request of Mrs. Cheney opened her doors for a gathering of friends, to ascertain who might be disposed to aid a real heroine. Where Mrs. Cheney found her, I do not know, but her name is Harriet. She is coal black, and was a slave only three years ago, but within that time she has taken leg bail herself, & assisted no fewer than fifty others to do the same. Two or three times she has returned to the very plantation where she had served, & brought away with her companies of her relations & friends. Her old father & mother she has helped out of bondage, & the object of this gathering was to assist her to buy a little place for them in Auburn. Her course had not always been smooth. The object of her first return journey was to liberate her husband. All her travelling by the way has been performed in the cars by night, but when she went for her husband, she had carefully provided herself with clothing to make him, she said, fit to 198 Stories and Sayings be seen among folks—Lo! however the miscreant had taken to himself another helpmeet [wife], & strongly advised her...