Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography) [Hardcover]

Jean M. Humez (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2004 | Series: Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography

    Harriet Tubman’s name is known world-wide and her exploits as a self-liberated Underground Railroad heroine are celebrated in children’s literature, film, and history books, yet no major biography of Tubman has appeared since 1943. Jean M. Humez’s comprehensive Harriet Tubman is both an important biographical overview based on extensive new research and a complete collection of the stories Tubman told about her life—a virtual autobiography culled by Humez from rare early publications and manuscript sources. This book will become a landmark resource for scholars, historians, and general readers interested in slavery, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, and African American women.
    Born in slavery in Maryland in or around 1820, Tubman drew upon deep spiritual resources and covert antislavery networks when she escaped to the north in 1849. Vowing to liberate her entire family, she made repeated trips south during the 1850s and successfully guided dozens of fugitives to freedom. During the Civil War she was recruited to act as spy and scout with the Union Army. After the war she settled in Auburn, New York, where she worked to support an extended family and in her later years founded a home for the indigent aged. Celebrated by her primarily white antislavery associates in a variety of private and public documents from the 1850s through the 1870s, she was rediscovered as a race heroine by woman suffragists and the African American women’s club movement in the early twentieth century. Her story was used as a key symbolic resource in education, institutional fundraising, and debates about the meaning of "race" throughout the twentieth century.
    Humez includes an extended discussion of Tubman’s work as a public performer of her own life history during the nearly sixty years she lived in the north. Drawing upon historiographical and literary discussion of the complex hybrid authorship of slave narrative literature, Humez analyzes the interactive dynamic between Tubman and her interviewers. Humez illustrates how Tubman, though unable to write, made major unrecognized contributions to the shaping of her own heroic myth by early biographers like Sarah Bradford. Selections of key documents illustrate how Tubman appeared to her contemporaries, and a comprehensive list of primary sources represents an important resource for scholars.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, Harriet Tubman famously boasted that she could say what most conductors couldn't: "I never run my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." The quote fits with the popular image of Tubman as the courageous, inspired "Moses of Her People," yet Humez, a professor of women's studies and scholar of African-American spiritual autobiography, argues that the edifice of Tubman iconography has concealed the woman herself. Humez has assembled a trove of primary source documents-letters, diaries, memorials, speeches, articles, meeting minutes and testimonies-that create a more intimate portrait of Tubman. But instead of interpreting the rich materials she has collected, Humez offers a biography of Tubman and then includes a scholarly article asserting that since Tubman was illiterate, and her stories and correspondence have been recorded by others, "such texts cannot be read at face value" and must be understood to have undergone at least minimal changes from the author's original statements. Although Humez's prose lacks narrative flair, she aptly places Tubman in a broad historical context, documenting her relations to John Brown, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, Frederic Douglass, Northern abolitionists and the nascent women's movement. The book is at its best in the last two primary-source sections. Through Tubman's documented words and the observations of others, "Aunt Harriet" emerges as an even more charismatic figure than American history has allowed: profoundly spiritual, irreverent, witty, wise, impoverished and ultimately neglected by the Union she defended.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher

Series: Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography William L. Andrews, General Editor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299191206
• ISBN-13: 978-0299191207
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,590,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a great way to learn U.S. history!, February 11, 2004

By 

Rita Arditti (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography) (Hardcover)

Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories, by Jean M. Humez

This book is a treasure. Eminently readable, impossible to put down, totally absorbing, this book will satisfy meticulous scholars and the general public. What a great way to learn U.S. history! Great quotes, critical appraisal of the work of earlier historians, new documentation, wonderfully illuminating photographs. A feast for the curious mind and eye.
I have always wanted to know more about Harriet Tubman and as soon as I heard this book was out I dived into it. Harriet Tubman's life has been the subject of several biographers in the past, but in this work Humez convincingly argues that Harriet Tubman, who could not read or write, was able to produce a "self-authored life story" by carefully choosing the writers she collaborated with and exercising control about what stories to tell and how to tell them. This results in a fascinating and kaleidoscopic interpretation of Harriet Tubman's life, as seen through different authors and through Harriet Tubman herself.
In the first section, "The Life," I learned about the salient facts of Harriet Tubman's life: her years as a slave in Maryland, seeing two of her sisters sold and carried away in a chain-gang, her successful escape from slavery in 1849, when she was probably 29 years old, her contacts with the anti-slavery movement in the North, the mutual admiration of Harriet Tubman and John Brown who referred to her using the masculine pronoum ("Harriet Tubman hooked on his whole team at once. He is the most of a man, naturally, that I ever met with"). It is also about the clandestine trips she made to Maryland to rescue her extended family and others, her military and nursing work during the civil war and her settling in Auburn, New York, in poverty, taking care of old and sick people of color and children-- the John Brown Hall project, as she called it.
Interesting quotes from her dictated letters reveal details that throw light on her views on other issues, such as women's rights. For instance, in telling about the successful Combahee River raid in South Carolina, in which she worked with Col. James Montgomery and a band of 300 black soldiers, she states after her dress was shred that "...I made up my mind then I would never wear a long dress on another expedition of the kind, but would have a bloomer as soon as I could get it..."
It is in the second part, "The Life Stories," that Humez makes the case that Harriet Tubman's gifts as a story-teller, singer, and performer and her reputation as an African-American celebrity ensured that her experiences as a slave and her deep spirituality would be preserved. Here, through a discussion on the politics of research, the dynamics between a researcher and her/his subject, and the cultural and social context that influences much of those dynamics, I felt Harriet Tubman's presence and resourcefulness vividly, towering above those who tried to capture her complex story and interpret her life according to their values and the racial views of their culture.
The third part, "Stories and Sayings," offers a hypothetical version of Tubman's "autobiography" culled from every individual life history story Humez was able to locate from the earlier works. While all the stories and sayings are revealing and offer significant insights my favorite part was the "Stories of Clever Exploits and Tricks," probably because I always wondered how she actually carried out her rescue missions. In this section the intelligence, courage, and humor of Harriet Tubman shines through, like in the story "Avoiding Capture by Pretending to Read." It says: " At another time when she heard men talking about her, she pretended to read a book which she carried. One man remarked. `This can't be the woman. The one we want can't read or write.' Harriet devoutly hoped this book was right side up" (Tatlock, 1939a).
The final section, "Documents" is a gift of primary source materials for future researchers and anybody interested in pursuing an in-depth study of Harriet Tubman's life.
Read this book. See for yourself how illuminating the past and looking at history with a fresh eye can instill hope. This book is yes, about Harriet Tubman, but more fundamentally, it is a book about courage, dignity, persistence, and solidarity in incredibly harsh circumstances. What a gift for us all in these troubled times.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As close to an "autobiography" as we can get!, February 12, 2004

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AfroAmericanHeritage (Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography) (Hardcover)

Several years back I was watching a documentary on Harriet Tubman in which one of her relatives was interviewed. I suddenly realized I had never thought of Tubman as a real person, with actual living relatives! Her legend looms so much larger than life that she hovers somewhere in the realm of Paul Bunyan.

This book begins with a traditional biography, presenting the bare bones of Tubman's life. The section called "Stories and Sayings" puts meat on those bones, breathing life into someone who has nearly been lost to us in legend. It's a fascinating concept, and I think it works.

Equally amazing is the Documents section, reflecting 10 years of research and which will be required reading for any future Tubman scholars because, as Humez herself says, "...my retelling of her life story cannot be definitive." Highly recommended.

Curator, AfroAmericanHeritage dot com

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Harriet Tubman's memory and legacy are cherished, February 9, 2004

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography) (Hardcover)

Harriet Tubman: The Life And The Life Stories by Jean M. Humez is an exhaustive biography of this celebrated and heroic woman. Grounded in exhaustive research as well as the complete texts of stories Harriet Tubman told about her life. Harriet Tubman: The Life And The Life Stories follows Tubman, who was born a slave in the American South, as she escaped to freedom in the North, and vowed to liberate her entire family. Her work to guide dozens of slaves to freedom, as well as her service as a spy and a scout for the Union Army, are also described in historical detail. After the Civil War Tubman settled in New York and founded a home for the indigent aged. an absolutely essential addition to academic library Black History and African-American Biography reading lists, Harriet Tubman's memory and legacy are cherished in this profound and all-encompassing chronicle.