Jailbreak out of History: the re-biography of Harriet Tubman

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by Lee, Butch


  When she did decide to close in on a child, in 1856, she did so by just up and kidnapping her favorite niece, Margaret Stewart. On a secret visit back to Maryland, Harriet took the small child back with her without bothering to tell her brother or sister-in-law. Of course, being too busy waging war to actually raise the eight year-old girl herself, Harriet simply dropped Margaret off with Mrs. Seward, the wife of the Governor of New York (and u.s. senator). Sounds hard to believe, but it’s a fact that Margaret grew up as an honored guest with that household. Much beloved by Harriet, Margaret nevertheless never lived with her, although they remained close all of Harriet’s life (her family said that Margaret and Harriet even looked much alike). Margaret remembered that whenever Aunt Harriet came back North, she would be sent in the Governor’s horse and carriage to visit Harriet. So much for the nuclear family.

  Harriet did marry again twenty years later, in 1869, when she was about 49 years old. A young veteran in his 20s, who had met Harriet down South during the War, came to her house in Auburn, N.Y. seeking help. And Harriet took him in. That this was no romance was widely known to friends and family, and her biographer, Earl Conrad, wrote: “It has been said that her husband, Nelson Davis, spite of being a large man was not a healthy man, that he suffered with tuberculosis, and she married him to take care of him.” In other words, under the family values of the times it would not have been respectable for them to live together otherwise. (Davis’ small pension as a Civil War veteran was the only steady income that Harriet’s communal house, with its guest population of homeless children and elderly, had.)

  While women are supposed to be dependent, Harriet lived independent. Just like the wives of Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Delany, who lived working class lives and raised their children (Anna Douglass worked as a laundrywoman and Mrs. Delany as a seamstress to feed and clothe their children), while Frederick and Martin were often living elsewhere for years, traveling frequently, in their roles as New Afrikan leaders. But because Harriet wasn’t a wife or mother, there were less obstacles to her going into combat.

  Harriet is still too Subversive

  If men are still uneasy about Harriet, over a century later women are even more afraid to recognize her on the street. There’s a continuous police action in the culture to domesticate Harriet, to rub her out as an Amazon. This continuous patriarchal theme is to erase Harriet politically. A key part of this is to whiten Harriet, to misrepresent her as being without Black feminist politics or as a “moderate.” Many people have bought into this because they wanted to, even those who should know better.

  Harriet’s political decisions — and they were serious decisions — can only be understood in her situation, in its limitations and choices. i think it’s exactly the radicals who don’t understand their past who haven’t learned to understand their own conditions, and also how to move ahead.

  Women need to de-mythologize politics. There’s a corrupt habit today among radicals of all kinds of demanding that the past only be a costumed fantasy to affirm our latest fashions and opinions. Of only projecting what’s current back onto it. This is disingenuous, and totally harmful. One way it’s corrupt is that it insinuates that politics is a verbal patriarchal power trip. Where Harriet can be politely dismissed for not talking bad enough, while men whose bold statements were only illusions that they could never make work are pointed to as positive models.

  We can forget too easily how unprepared the Black Nation was; how little Black women had. They didn’t have a government (although they were ruled). They didn’t have schools or libraries, hospitals or churches. They had few books of their own. And a people who had not been permitted childhood naturally had nothing for children. As a people they didn’t even have permanent addresses. Entire settlements were springing to life or being abandoned, in the chaotic transition out of Slavery. The Black community as we think of it today didn’t yet exist. It had to be built. All of this had to be created for the first time, in large part by women.

  Harriet stayed her course. Unlike many Anti-Slavery leaders, who took the Union victory as time to cash in their chips, Harriet lived the communal & working class life of her people. Like many other New Afrikan women, she put her life into building the first Black institutions, the foundations of their new communities.

  Development also meant self transformation, because Black women knew how unprepared they were. Almost all were illiterate. While the learned Dr. Martin Delany could write one of the first books opposing Charles Darwin and his new theory of evolution, Harriet, the veteran of a hundred guerrilla raids and campaigns, could not read a wanted poster (she once fell asleep unknowingly under her own wanted poster) or a battle map. Sojourner Truth, the feminist orator, was illiterate, as were her daughters. Anna Douglass, whose husband, Frederick, was the most famous Black man in amerikkka, was also illiterate. Harriet never learned to read or write, but she did throw herself into the Black literacy movement that swept the South. There was a spontaneous mass hunger for knowing, for the power of knowledge and communication that had been denied them under Slavery. Black women could be seen outside during a work break, primary school textbook in hand trying to sound out words. Schools were set up in cabins and shacks, teaching children by day and adults at night. Harriet sent all the funds she could raise (and much of her personal earnings) to help support two of the new Black schools.

  For years, as Harriet would lead her fellow fugitives through the North, on the way to Canada and safety, she would use the first African Methodist Episcopal churches as shelters. Where the band of escaped slaves could hide among sisters & brothers, rest and be fed. These few churches were the only centers an oppressed people in a hostile land had. Deeply moral, Harriet joined with other Black women in the area to conduct revival meetings, to start new churches wherever they could. Her own house in Auburn, N.Y. she turned into a communal resource. She put up children whose parents could not afford to support them, elderly Anti-Slavery movement veterans and guests. She wanted to set up a self-supporting farm, which would operate the “John Brown Home” (as she called it) as a resource for the community. She lived her life constructing the grassroots of the Nation, upon which the Ida B. Wells’ and countless other women of later generations would stand.

  Victory and defeat change everything. Harriet Tubman was the product of a slave communal nation — that’s why she was so military. Her movements were more natural because she was never subordinate within her people. Harriet could work in the Underground Railroad with men and not be a subordinate, but that was the last time that could be true. The rise of the Black Nation as a patriarchy meant that while Black women still play strong roles, they are no longer military leaders. They help build male-dominated movements and male leaderships. We’re talking about the essential homelessness of women.

  The death of Moses was a signal event. An Amazon that Slavery and armed white men had not been able to stop. But Harriet could no longer be the General, could no longer be Moses. Again, this isn’t just about one Amazon. Here — in modern history, not thousands of years ago before recorded time — we can see in detail how the development of patriarchal classes changed the nature of women and men in war. This is a modern change, that can be remade or reversed in our lifetime. This is the subject here.

  Harriet is still too subversive, still really hard to deal with. One reason even radicals fall into the trap of treating her non-politically. Dis-missing her as a simple minded woman (they don’t say it. but they mean it). What’s so hard to swallow is that her deeds didn’t come from super abilities, like an Einstein, but from qualities that we’re all supposed to have. And that, embarrassingly, most of us have only momentary glimpses of.

  More than anything else, Harriet was deeply rooted. In herself as an Amazon and in her New Afrikan people. And being so centered, there was a deceptive fluidity to everything she did. For her there was no distance between “I should” and “I did.” She simp
ly lived her politics to the fullest.

  If Harriet wasn’t what women are supposed to be, even more threatening was that she was much more. Not only independent of men, but a player in their closely monopolized territory of war and politics. Harriet was out of men’s control, but as a Black woman was also considered by white men to be lowly and unimportant. An attitude Harriet took big time advantage of. In fact, had she tried to join or reform the patriarchy she never would have gotten anything done. Harriet took guerrilla advantage of her informal, unorthodox status to slip beneath the radar of men’s restrictions. After all, as “Private Harriet” or “Corporal Harriet” she never would have been able to confer with Union leaders and generals, or guide their decisions by shaping their Intelligence.

  We need to go back to something we said earlier: Once out of Slavery, Harriet never put herself under the command of men. Make no mistake, Harriet understood hierarchy & patriarchy quite well. Literally under the lash for 29 years, bearing whip scars she would carry all her life, working with fugitive slaves and Union commanders alike, she had a very practical grasp of men’s hierarchy. But she never followed it.

  Harriet worked with male leaders of the Anti-Slavery movement, not under them. Just as she worked with the Union Army, but reserved the right to do whatever she felt best at any time. She wasn’t confined by a career or a rank in the hierarchy. And you know she wouldn’t have been able to fight a war if she had to be home for dinner.

  Harriet rode the waves of her Peoples’ struggle, and became a leader. Their victories and losses, their choices right & wrong, were the preconditions for the Malcolm Xs and Audre Lordes that came later. Harriet didn’t have to always win, or save her People single-handed. What’s crucial is that as an Amazon, Harriet took her turn at bat. She made political choices. She did what she had to do to fight out the great issues of the day.

  Guerrilla, farmhand, lumberjack, laundress and cook, refugee organizer, raid leader and Intelligence commander, nurse and healer, revival speaker, feminist and fundraiser — Harriet flowed, without fuss, from need to need, task to task. Having no power, she could live with unmeasureable power. That’s what makes her such a difficult model. You can’t get a grant to be Harriet. And while the capitalist patriarchy has a million schools, women still do not have even one school to teach what Harriet could do.

  In her old age a newspaper reporter from the N.Y. Herald came to interview her, one of the last surviving heroines of the Anti-Slavery struggle:

  She looked musingly toward a nearby orchard, and she asked suddenly: ‘Do you like apples?’ On being assured I did, she said: ‘Did you ever plant any apple trees?’ With shame I confessed that I had not. ‘No,’ said she, ‘but somebody else planted them. I liked apples when I was young, and I said: “Some day I’ll plant apples myself for other young folks to eat,” and I guess I did.’

  About the Author

  Butch Lee is a revolutionary Amazon theorist, the author of Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain, Jailbreak out of History: the re-biography of Harriet Tubman, and The Military Strategy of Women and Children.

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