HARRIET TUBMAN: WOMAN WARRIOR
By MUMIA ABU-JAMAL*
[Col. Writ. 7/18/02]
"I started with this idea in my head, 'There's two
things I've got a right to, death or liberty.'"
-- Harriet Tubman
Born into a family held in bondage in Tidewater,
Maryland in (or around) the year 1821, a tiny, brown
baby girl named "Araminta" didn't seem like one to
shake up the world.
The enslaved people on the farm called her 'Minta,' or
'Minty,' when she was a baby, but in the "peculiar
institution" called slavery, childhood didn't last
long.
It was at the tender age of 5, when 'Minta' was rented
out to a white woman nearby for "domestic work." On
her first day, before breakfast, the child was lashed
with a leather strap four times across her face. By
the time she was 7 years old she ran away, tired of
her treatment. She was so tired, and so afraid of
being caught that she fell into a pig-pen, and
competed with pigs for scraps of food. When she
returned to the house where she worked, some 4 days
later, she was beaten, whipped by a man.
Later, returned to her home farm, she was called
Harriet, no longer house slave, but field slave.
As a young woman, she made her way out of the house of
bondage, and, not content with her own freedom, she
resolved to return to the plantations to lead others
out of bondage. She was so successful that she became
a living legend to the enslaved, and a thorn in the
side of the enslavers. The planters put out a bounty
totalling $40,000 (in 1850 dollars) for her capture,
dead or alive.
In the hovels of the enslaved, a whisper of her name
("Moses") or the humming of a spiritual told of her
presence and her mission -- freedom. She brought over
300 souls north, and built a deep network of
informants throughout slave territory.
She so incensed the slavers that they pushed through
the federal Fugitive Slave Act which deputized all
whites in the pursuit or capture of a former (or
escaped) slave, anywhere in the United States.
For Harriet, that meant slavery reached up to the
Canadian border. So she started taking people up there
for a taste of freedom.
She took her job dead seriously. When a captive,
tired, scared, or hungry, wanted to turn back to the
life he knew, he would find himself staring at a
pistol in Harriet's hand, and an offer he couldn't
refuse: "Go on with us, or die." There was no turning
back.
When Civil War broke out, she left her home in West
Canada, and came back down to do whatever she could
against the slaveocracy. With her deep contacts in
slave country, she gave important intelligence data to
the Union Army, and she personally led several raids
against Confederate targets.
One of the most famous was the Combahee River raid, in
June 1863. Her contacts on the plantations on the
South Carolina coast reported the placement of
floating mines in the Combahee to block the Union
Navy.
Under her guidance, the mines were removed, railroads
and bridges were destroyed, and the Slaveocracy's most
precious resource -- captives -- were liberated from
the very heart of the Confederacy. In fact, over 800
of the enslaved were given passage aboard Union ships.
It delighted "Moses" to no end, as she would later
recall:
I never saw such a scene. We laughed and laughed and
laughed. Here you'd see a woman with a pail on her
head, rice-a-smoking in it just as she'd taken it from
the fire, young one hanging on behind... One woman
brought two pigs, a white one and a black one; we took
them all on board; named the white pig Beauregard [aSouthern general], and the black one Jeff Davis
[president of the Confederacy]. Sometimes the women
would come with twins hanging around their necks; it
appears I never saw so many twins in my life; ...
It seemed she loved few things more than the sight of
her people, free. She was a soldier for freedom.
Her words, fueled by a courageous heart, have echoed
down the centuries; "I had seen their tears and sighs,
and I heard their groans, and I would give every drop
of blood in my veins to free them."
Copyright 2002 Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.mumia.org
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