help with analysis due in 36 hours

Jean M. Humez. Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2004. 484 pp. ISBN 0-299-19120-6, $45.00.

Harriet Tubman, the legendary escaped slave who guided scores of slaves to freedom, has been the subject of well over a hundred children’s books, yet no major biography of her life has been produced since 1943. One might argue that this contradiction demonstrates the ways in which Tubman, the mythic figure said to have been guided by the North Star, mystical visions, and her famous motto—“I can’t die but once”—has come to represent many things and serve many needs in the cultural imagination. In light of all the painful and shameful stories of slavery that would not and perhaps could not be told, the story of Tubman’s heroic feats in the face of the monstrous insti- tution replaced slavery’s legacy of disgrace, indignity, and guilt with the epic narrative of a brave and victorious warrior. Perhaps to flesh out the life of the woman behind the icon would complicate that narrative displacement, yet, such an investigation is exactly what Jean M. Humez’s biography of Tub- man attempts. Humez’s study encounters dense intersections between Tub- man the iconic figure, and Tubman the private self. Indeed, Humez argues that the public image of Tubman has virtually swallowed the private woman. In this biography, Humez attempts to illuminate the creation of Tubman’s celebrity while also resurrecting the private Tubman, who was shrouded by that celebrity.

To that end, Humez offers a four-part volume that begins with a biog- raphical overview of Tubman’s life. Situating Tubman’s biography within the growing national crisis over slavery, in Part One Humez compiles accounts of Tubman’s history, not with the intent of offering a definitive biography, but rather an interpretative outline that carefully brings multiple accounts of Tubman’s life into conversation with each other. The result is an illuminating account that delineates the historical contours that shaped Tub- man’s life, while also closely examining the biographical data on Tubman. Taking into account the cross-fertilization of iconography and biography, Humez attempts to locate the boundaries between the two, and thus map a probable account of Tubman’s life. For example, in her description of Tub- man’s escape, Humez compares early accounts that claim that Tubman was assisted in her escape by a white woman with later accounts that describe Tubman as having escaped slavery alone, guided only by the North Star. Humez concludes that while the former is probably the less “heroic” of the two versions, it seems “highly likely” that Tubman would have received such assistance, and that such an early alliance might explain Tubman’s later ami- able relationships with politically like-minded white women activists. Humez’s account is replete with words such as “probably,” “maybe,” and

868 Biography 27.4 (Fall 2004)

07-Reviews_845-881 1/6/05 9:23 AM Page 868

“likely.” However, her speculative explorations often rely heavily on histori- cal evidence that compels such interpretative reflection and warmly invites scholarly inquiry.

Part Two of the biography is an innovative attempt to prove that Tub- man, an illiterate slave, “did ‘write’ her autobiography.” According to Humez, Tubman used all of the resources available to her as a storyteller and celebri- ty to create her public story. Humez contends that Tubman actively shaped her public legacy, and even exerted considerable control over the most exten- sive biography of her written in her life time. Interestingly, Humez mines Tubman’s public performances, arguing that these performances, which included songs, storytelling, and performing dramatic reenactments, arguing that these performances not only projected the iconic Tubman, but also helped to create the audience for the biography, which Tubman collaborated on with Sarah Hopkins Bradford. Humez explores the possibility of finding Tubman’s voice within the biographical texts, proposing Tubman’s author- ship might be best exemplified in the “mini-narratives” or “core stories” in which Tubman is not only a character but also controls the narrative per- spective. Humez argues that these narratives are Tubman’s creation and exhibit artfully crafted narrative structures that may have evaded revision and censorship by the biographers. Despite this optimistic portrait of the possi- bilities of locating Tubman within the mire of biographical accounts and cultural iconography, Humez also calls attention to the silences, especially ones related to Tubman’s family history, in the interview-based biographies. In addition, Humez probes what she reads as the biographers’ perspective of “racial ‘otherness’” that shapes their accounts of Tubman.

Parts Three and Four are fascinating collections of biographical extracts and primary source materials. The former includes extracts from three biog- raphies of Tubman, all of which Tubman participated in. Humez describes the section as an assembly of “every individual life history story I was able to locate.” Entitled “Stories and Sayings,” the section is a rich resource for future study of Tubman. The various accounts trace Tubman’s early history, her activism, and her growing celebrity. While Humez argues that these materi- als also contribute to our understanding of the private Tubman, they some- times illustrate the inextricability of that private self from the iconography. Each of these accounts, though extracted from its contexts, speaks to the com- plexities of a historical moment, and personal and collective agendas. Many of them also suggest the tension between the teller’s agenda and that of Tubman. Such conflicts should not be surprising, considering that Tubman, who Humez convincingly argues was the author of her life, was also in many ways competing with others for that authorship.

Reviews 869

07-Reviews_845-881 1/6/05 9:23 AM Page 869

Though she maps the ways in which Tubman shaped her own legacy, Humez also contends for that authorship, forming an image of Tubman as not only a powerful storyteller, but a bit of a nineteenth-century spin doctor who carefully erected her image and her legacy. Humez’s argument forces readers to rethink the relationship between authorship, authority, literacy, and slavery, shifting from Tubman as a character within a particular meta- narrative, to Tubman as the inventor of a public self and narrative. For this reason and others, Humez’s biography is a dynamic contribution to the fields of history, women’s studies, and literary studies.

Cassandra Jackson

Frank H. Goodyear III. Red Cloud: Photographs of a Lakota Chief. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. 211 pp. 97 photographs. ISBN 0-8032-2192-4, $35.00.

Frank H. Goodyear III’s book Red Cloud: Photographs of a Lakota Chief brings an interesting and fresh perspective to photographic artifacts usually seen as simply another weapon in the colonial arsenal. That photos of Native Americans were, and still are, used in ways that participate in the ongoing and mythologizing construction of American Indians as silent, noble Other to Western civilization cannot be disputed—a point made by authors such as Lucy Lippard, Gerald Vizenor, and James Clifford, among others. Good- year discusses how the typical uses of these photographs center on white con- sumption: the amusement of the white masses through newspapers or dime novels, markers of social standing for the wealthier classes who commis- sioned and owned collections of such photos, and ethnographic analysis by social scientists and anthropologists. At the same time, though, Goodyear asks us to (re)consider our long-held views of one such photographic subject in particular, the Lakota leader Red Cloud (1821–1909), as instead a willing participant in what Goodyear wants us to recognize as a “transcultural con- versation” (4).

The first few pages of the book can be taken to symbolize Goodyear’s approach to the impressive assortment of eighty-one photographs he has gathered and carefully analyzed. Bright red pages invoke at once the foreign- ness and amorphousness of Red Cloud’s name as a signifier. A white page with the words “Red Cloud” in small font toward the top right follows, as if to suggest that this name, this historical figure, this man was both a blank page onto which meanings were projected and a canvas for Red Cloud’s own “self-fashioning” (6). The next page positions a negative image of the photo- graph that appears on the facing title page in this white blankness. This series

870 Biography 27.4 (Fall 2004)

07-Reviews_845-881 1/6/05 9:23 AM Page 870