Читать книгу Quest Biographies Bundle — Books 31–35 - Rosemary Sadlier - Страница 6

During fall evenings, field slaves would work in a group to clean up the wheat and husk the corn. One fall evening in 1835, Harriet saw a slave named Jim, from the neighbouring Barret plantation, make a run for his freedom. Curious, Harriet as well as his overseer, McCracken, chased him. Jim went into the Bucktown general store and was cornered by McCracken, who demanded that Harriet tie Jim up. While Harriet refused, Jim bounded out the door and Harriet blocked the doorway. McCracken responded to this act of defiance by picking up a two pound weight and throwing it, perhaps intending to get Jim, but it got Harriet, hitting her in the forehead and nearly killing her.

For months, Rit did everything she could to help Harriet as she fell in and out of consciousness. Brodess wanted to sell her, but no one wanted the slave who had recurring bouts of sleeping attacks, sometimes as many as four per day. After she “recovered,” Harriet went back to work in the fields for her temporary master John Stewart, and continued to be hired out to Dr. Thompson. Harriet commanded fifty to sixty dollars a week, while a male slave could expect one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars a week for the same type of work.

Harriet Tubman U.S. postage stamp, thirteen cents. First issued in 1978. Photo courtesy Milton S. Sernett, Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press), 2007.

Because Edward Brodess was not yet old enough or experienced enough to assume the responsibilities of plantation administration, John Stewart, a builder, had been brought in to take over for a time. Dr. Thompson’s father owned Benjamin Ross, Harriet’s father, and was Edward’s guardian. Harriet drove oxen, carted, and plowed when working at home, and she sometimes worked with her father, who also worked for Stewart. Stewart liked to brag about Harriet’s strength because he claimed that she could lift a barrel filled with produce, or pull a plow just like an ox could.

Benjamin Ross, though still a slave, was now a timber inspector and supervised the cutting and hauling of timber for the Baltimore shipyards. If she was working with her father, Harriet would cut wood, split rails, and haul logs, producing half a cord of wood a day. Brodess permitted Harriet to keep a small portion of her earnings, and she used the money left over after giving Brodess his share to buy a pair of oxen, worth forty dollars, to help her in her work. It was unusual for an enslaved woman to be doing a man’s strenuous job and even more unusual for a slave to buy and own anything. The Bucktown community would have been aware of this unique slave.

Harriet’s narcolepsy, or sleeping seizures, as a result of her near fatal head injury, prevented her sale to southern plantation owners who might not have been tolerant of her sleep attacks. It also kept her from being paired off to breed while an adolescent, as did her plain appearance on her five foot tall frame. Harriet is reported to have looked like she could not understand anything at all at times, and this was very helpful to her since she could assume this “dull” stance around her master or overseers, while taking in everything that was going on around her. Sometimes she even pretended to be having a sleep attack to learn more about her master’s plans. In fact, many slaves came to know the plans of their owners, as they would listen and watch them intently while seeming not to be aware at all. “One mind for the white man to see, another mind I know is me.”

Harriet was a very spiritual person. Both Ben and Rit possessed a strong faith in God which Harriet shared. They, along with other plantation slaves, worshipped at open-air services at what is now the site of the Bazel Methodist Episcopal Church in Bucktown. By the time of her head injury, Harriet began having visions which guided her or which gave her encouragement. She prayed about everything and took the meaning of her visions to be the response of God to her prayers. She combined an African spirituality with her interpretation of Christianity.

Recuperating also provided her with time to think through the impact of slavery on her life and how she could change her status. Harriet replaced her work name of Araminta with her birth name of Harriet while she was a teenager — though some researchers feel that Harriet was known as Araminta until she was married. Her surname changed when she married John Tubman. John’s surname was from his great grandparents’ bondage experience with the wealthy Tubman family of Dorchester County. John’s parents had been manumitted, freed upon the last will and testament of Justice Richard Tubman. Harriet again was unconventional in marrying a free person.

Certainly Harriet did not wait until her 1844 marriage to consider how to become free. Harriet had been interested in her own freedom for a long time. She questioned John about his freedom and how his parents were manumitted. John’s mother had been manumitted so he was free through the freedom of his mother. Only children born of slaves were seen as slaves according to the law. John’s mother was granted ownership of herself, manumitted, as a reward for a lifetime of loyalty and hard work.

Slaves could also pay for their freedom by buying their own value as labourers, but this was more difficult to do since wages paid to hired workers were incredibly low. Harriet earned only forty dollars a year after giving Brodess his 98 percent share, and it would take her twenty-five years to buy her freedom if her value did not increase, or if her master did not raise her price. White people who owned slaves did so to benefit from the labour that they could provide. Black people who owned slaves were usually successful in raising the funds necessary to buy their still enslaved family members from their owners and consequently become black slave owners in the process.

Harriet decided to have a lawyer look into the will of Athon Pattison (sometimes written as Patterson), since the Pattisons owned Rit and her ancestors before the Pattisons married into the Brodess family and brought their “property” with them. One of Harriet’s ancestors on her mother’s side was her grandmother, Modesty. Modesty came to the United States on a slave ship from Guinea and was sold to the Pattisons. Athon’s will gave Modesty’s girl, Rittia, to his granddaughter, Mary Pattison, the wife of Joseph Brodess. For the five dollars she paid her lawyer, Harriet found out that her mother had wrongfully been kept in slavery and that she was also entitled to be free. “I give and bequeath unto my granddaughter, Mary Pattison one Negro girl called ‘Rittia’ and her increase until she and they arrive to 45 years of age.” Instead of being manumitted, Rit was passed down to Mary and Joseph’s son Edward. Instead of being free, “Rittia and her increase” were still enslaved. This made Harriet resolve to be free and to see her family live in freedom.

A “free” state was a state north of the Mason-Dixon line — the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, the boundary between the northern Union States and the southern Confederate States. In the free states, slave holding was not allowed by law. The free states came into being in 1777 and included Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Pennsylvania. As a compromise for allowing California entry as a free state, greater strength was given to the enforcement of slave laws to appease the slave states. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 meant that these free states were no longer safe for black people, and they could be captured, tried, and found to be runaway slaves, therefore sent back to slavery. As a result, Ontario and, to a lesser extent, Quebec and the Maritimes became magnets for freedom seekers.