help with analysis due in 36 hours

i^lashback To know nothing of what happened before you were born

is to remain ever a child-—Cicero

Harriet Tubman, Pre-Mummification By Biii Kauffman

Araminta Ross, later known as Harriet Tubman, is perhaps the

historical personage most familiar to the latest generation of American school- children. An American Moses, this pre- ternaturally wise conductor never lost a passenger on the Underground Raiiroad. The bare facts of her life—escape from slavery, daring raids to liberate other bondsmeti from servitude, untimeiy fits of narcolepsy, service as a Union spy in South Carolina—are extraordinary.

Yet most textbooks faii to convey any sense of what Harriet Tubman was really like. If only a good novelist had known her, the reader murmurs. Well it just so happens....

Later in life, Tubman made her home in Auburn, New York, on property that had belonged to Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward (an ardent admir- er of Tubman's). And it was in Auburn, a generation removed from the Givii War, that Harriet met a boy named Samuel Hopkins Adams.

The fortunate son of a notably cul- tured upstate New York family, Adams inherited an ample sense of self-worth from his grandsires (who became the subjects of his best book. Grandfather Stories). Walter Edmonds, author of Drums Along the Mohawk., once told me that when Adams visited his home for the first time, "he went all around the house...saying what furniture was worth having and what was bogus. He was a very forceful old boy."

When he was a forceful young boy.

Sam was often visited by "Aunt Harriet" Tubman. His great aunt, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, had written a pair of books about Tubman, and it was because of Aunt Harriet that young Sam and his friends played slaves and overseers rath- er than cowboys and Indians.

Tubman would walk the two miles to the house of Sam's Grandfather Hop- kins, who would ask, "Harriet Tubtnan, will you sing for my grandchildren?" After a modest demurral, Harriet "would clap her stringy hands upon her bony knees, rock her powerful frame, snap her eyes," and sing "Go Down, Moses" in the same great baritone in which she once sang her song of deliver- ance to escaping slaves following the North Star. The children, being chil- dren, would make impertinent requests ("Show us your mark. Aunt Harriet") and she would reveal the scars left by the whip.

The dramatics of Harriet Beecher Stowe left Harriet Tubman unim- pressed: "When our grandmother once took her to a matinee of Uncle Tom's Cabin" Adams recalled,"she expressed approval of the theme but was critical of Eliza's escape across the ice, declaring the affair ill-managed and intimating that she could have handled it better." Adams transcribed Tubman's remarks in her rich dialect: "'Bloodhoun's!' she said disdainfully, eyeing the two dis- consolate mastiffs who appeared in the dramatic production. 'I nevah made no min' of bloodhoun's.'"

Although her date of birth remains a mystery, Harriet Tubman lived close to.

if not beyond, 90 years. She was a fixture about town, and was often seen sweep- ing clean the front yard of the Harriet Tubman Home, which her respectful neighbors in Auburn endowed as a resi- dence for indigent African Americans.

As one of the great heroines of our history, Tubman deserves better than today's mummification in dry text- books. We are lucky that Samuel Hopkins Adams, the young novelist- to-be, captured her sly wit and super- abundant humanity. When Sam and his cousins asked her "Did you kill lots of people?" Aunt Harriet disappointed them by answering no.

"Why not?" they wondered. "Whuffoh I want to kill folks?"

replied Harriet Tubman. "Nobody nevah kill me."

46 THt AMERICAN ENTERPRISE