Harriet Tubman: From Maternal Mother to Jezebel

I. The Power of Change

On August 19, 2013, Judith G. Bryant, the great-great-grandniece of Harriet Tubman, shared with me her concerns about Russell Simmons’s decision to release the “Harriet Tubman Sex Tape” parody on his Internet station, about the outcry from the feminist community in response to the release and content of the tape, and about Simmons’s subsequent “apology.” We shared our mutual feelings of disgust, anger, sadness, and concern that this false information has now become a part of our public consciousness and is forever linked to the life and times of Harriet Tubman. We exchanged materials: I sent her a link to my blog post about Harriet Tubman, and she forwarded me a copy of her letter to share with others. With her permission, I posted the “Open Letter” on my website, and it went viral. Her comments touched a chord among those who love Tubman, particularly when she wrote that she was “sick, and very tired of the ongoing denigration of our people in the name of art, or some other hifalutin’ acts of hubris and juvenile chutzpah” and that Simmons’s “disgusting portrayal of one of America’s most beloved heroines” was a “travesty” and was “simply inexplicable.” I cheered when I read it and felt that Harriet Tubman would be proud knowing that the world she fought for—the one where black people can be president and their voices do not go unheard—exists, and her name and her legacy continues to encourage us, center us, and challenge us to do and be more.²

Her letter, along with the outcry from Tubman lovers across the Internet, reminded me that silence is never an option and that we have to be responsible for speaking up for those who can no longer speak up for themselves.³

II. Harriet Tubman: My Childhood Myths and Legends

I have always wanted to be like Harriet Tubman. She was my American shero, both fearless and brave. I remember the first time I pretended to be her. I was eight years old, and I was on my way to the water to think. I used to spend every summer on my paternal grandmother’s farm in Lexington, South Carolina. Marie “Red” Anderson, my dear sweet grandmother, was a big brown woman with a face full of freckles and moles and a head full of blazing dusty red hair. She used to go fishing every day in her lake that sat at the end of the woods on her property. She probably had somewhere between eight to ten acres of land, most of it wooded. She had a path through the woods where she used to make us walk down to the water and sit whenever we got in trouble.

It always felt like we were walking our last mile. She would stand at the entrance to the woods and watch as we walked down to the lake. I remember this because I used to get in trouble quite a bit as a young girl. She would tell me to go and sit by the water and think about everything I had done so that I could figure out a way to “be better.” She would say, “I’m gonna watch you all the way to the water and just because you can’t see me doesn’t mean that I won’t see you.”

I used to walk through the woods pretending to be Harriet Tubman, leading my people to freedom. I would pick up a stick and put it in my waistband and pull it out like a gun when the runaway slaves would talk about going back to Egypt. I would duck down in the trees and tell everybody to quiet down so that I could hear the dogs and come up with a plan to hide from them. I used to look up and pretend to see the North Star or touch the sides of the trees, feeling around for moss.

When I got down to the lake, I would pretend that we were...