Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life

by Beverly Lowry

From the award-winning novelist and biographer Beverly Lowry comes an astonishing re-imagining of the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman, the “Moses of Her People.”Tubman was an escaped slave, lumberjack, laundress, raid leader, nurse, fund-raiser, cook, intelligence gatherer, Underground Railroad organizer, and abolitionist. In Harriet Tubman, Lowry creates a portrait enriched with lively imagined vignettes that transform the legendary icon into flesh and blood. We travel with Tubman on slave-freeing raids in the heart of the Confederacy, along the treacherous route of the Underground Railroad, and onto the battlefields of the Civil War. Integrating extensive research and interviews with scholars and historians into a rich and mesmerizing chronicle, Lowry brings an American hero to life as never before.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Womens, Classics, Race, American

434 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 12, 2007

Reviews

[The Book Maven · Rating 1 out of 5]

The title should have given it away: this was the imaginary life of Harriet Tubman. Which is sad, because her life was real, and fascinating, and here it is reduced to conjectures. The irksome thing is that though its disclaimer is "imagining", it is still marketed as non-fiction/biography.

I will admit that it takes me longer to read nonfiction, but holy cow this is ridiculous. The only reason that this book is not completely boring is because it indulges in flights of fancy; it projects thoughts and emotions onto various people with NO CLEAR EVIDENCE to support the statements. It was very frustrating, and it read as though it were a children's book marketed for adults.

I think Harriet Tubman's life was fascinating, that she was a brave and charismatic woman, and I am sorry this is history's way of doing her justice.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed learning as much as I did from this book. While the writer tried to sort of exhaustively proceed through the subject's life year by year, month by month, recreating as much as possible, this sometimes made reading a bit repetitious and dry. Also, the author had a tendency to skip ahead in time and tell the reader of events that may not happen for decades. Finally, the family tree and all the kinships and names were very hard to keep track of. In spite of all this, I thoroughly recommend this historical non-fiction account of Araminta "Minty" Ross's life (Harriet's birth name). Fascinating.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harriet Tubman was a truly inspirational and amazing woman, as this book highlights. The book uses evidences and traces of her life to reconstruct her story. It’s not easy to do for a person born as a slave, regarded as property, who never learned to read or write. Yet the author highlights Tubman’s intelligence, will, faith, dedication, and selflessness in a way that rang true. At the beginning of the book, you read a great deal about the white owners and their issues, which helps to set the scene to appreciate Harriet’s accomplishments. There’s still much to be discovered about her that we may never be able access, but it’s interesting to read how one sympathetic observer reflected upon her accomplishments and character.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometime in grade school, maybe 4th or 5th grade, I read a children's book about Harriet Tubman, so I knew the basics of her being an escaped slave who put her own life on the line to bring several other people North to freedom from slavery. I'm on a big biography kick lately, so decided to learn a little more. Boy did I ever! This lady was BRAVE and STRONG. Tough as Nails!

Things I learned:
- Harriet grew up in Maryland. I guess I had always assumed she was born further in the Deep South.
- Her first husband, John Tubman, was a free man who likely worked in the same logging gang that Harriet's father oversaw.
- Harriet was the first of her family to escape, and was able to bring much of her own family North to freedom, with the exception of her sisters who were sold away from the family, and lost to them forever.
- Not long after Harriet escaped, laws were enacted that allowed for the capture / return of escaped slaves to their owners even if they were living in "free states." For this reason, many of the people Harriet rescued continued North and resided across the border in Canada.
- Harriet was friends with very influential people, including Frederick Douglass and William Seward, whom Abraham Lincoln beat for the Republican presidential candidacy in the 1860 election. Seward had earlier sold Harriet a homestead in Auburn, NY.
- During the Civil War, Harriet volunteered and worked as a spy, scout, nurse, and otherwise jack-of-all-trades for the Union Army stationed down in Hilton Head, SC. She was given the nickname "General Tubman" for her leadership in the Union Army forray up the Combahee River in which anywhere between 600-800 slaves were freed by Union troops from the rice fields of their plantations.
- Harriet's second husband was a turberculitic (?) who was approximately 20 years her junior. He had fought as a private in the Eigth Regiment US Colored Troops.
- After the war, Harriet and her friends struggled for almost three decades to get her compensation from the US government for her role working for the Union army as well as for her status as a widow of a veteran.
- Harriet struggled after the war to take care of her family, and was even the victim of a money scam. She eventually was able to raise enough money to found a home in 1908 for the elderly and infirm near her home in Auburn, NY.
- Harriet died in 1913 at the age of 91.

I have to admit I was stunned at how much I didn't know about this strong, compassionate woman, who truly was a hero. The book itself was written as almost a blend of fiction surrounding the well-documented biographical facts of Harriet's life, as Harriet herself was illiterate, and much of the information about the details her life come second-hand. Nonetheless, this is a definite must read. More ought to be taught about this WONDER WOMAN in schools, and she deserves far much more recognition in our American society.

[Rachel Jackson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Without a doubt the worst biography I have ever read. Maybe even the worst history book I've ever read. Nothing in this book tells any real, important detail of Harriet Tubman's life that I didn't already know. Author Beverly Lowry writes like the novelist she apparently is, concocting a story out of nowhere with pseudo-beautified language, but telling the reader nothing of note about this towering woman in American history.

As other reviewers have said, the title alone should have been an indication of the type of book this is: Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life. So yes, I understand that not every single detail of Tubman's life was accounted for, so Lowry would have to speculate some. And there are cases where such speculation can be done accurately and tactfully, but neither of those adverbs fits for this book. Lowry spent the entire book talking about inconsequential details of Tubman's life, her clothing, her favorite foods, the weather; but she didn't discuss anything about her amazing feats beyond vague details. She hardly touches on Tubman's escape. She glosses over her returns to slave territories to bring back her family and other slaves to the free states up north. She rushes through her involvement in the John Brown affair. She still then talks about other Civil War participants in the section called "The General" about Tubman's time during the Civil War. Then, she takes the easy way out in the end of the book and essentially says, "Welp, that's all we know about the end of Harriet Tubman's life. Now she's dead. Bye!"

Lowry's writing is incredibly irritating, especially her use of fragmented sentences and questionable punctuation which seemed to me a poor attempt to create suspense in some of Tubman's most intense life events. It's clear Lowry is a novelist first and not a biographer, given both the terrible writing and the shoddy research. I was hoping to read an interesting biography on Harriet Tubman and educate myself on who she really was, but the book told me nothing and in fact angered me more than enlightened me to anything.

[Straw · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had no idea this life was so varied....I only knew of her as the conductor of the underground railroad. But, she also worked down in South Carolina during the Civil War as nurse, spy, cook, and liaison to the newly freed slave community. Did the government pay her a pension? No, not until she bothered them for years and years. Shameful....at anyrate, the writing is quite good and the story is excellent.

[Elise · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked this true-to-life account of Harriet Tubman's life as one of the heroes of the Underground Railroad. While I appreciate the dramatization of some biographies, this one avoids speculation by presenting the facts and then personifying an occasional scene here and there. The result is not as gripping as I'd sometimes like, but it was a very good read. I came away with an increased sense of gratitude for freedom and the courage of so many to do what they could to help others.

[Barbarawiley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unbiased look at an amazing woman. What she accomplished as an illiterate former slave staggers and humbles me. It reinforced the sadness of lost family and ancestors that will never be discovered.

[Tori · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started this book off feeling a little put off by the author's musings. But - after getting into the story I understood the reason better. There is so much that is unknown about Harriet's life, but Lowry's research and "imagining" made the story come alive! I loved reading the Water Dancer, and this book was a wonderful complement to that book. So much to learn!
She was born Araminta Ross, but was better known as Harriet Tubman, or Moses, or General Tubman. She had "the charm" - she believed that God spoke directly to her, and others were benefited by her spiritual sense. "'The whites can't catch Moses, cause she's born with the charm. The Lord has given Moses the power.'" "She went only where the Lord told her to, and since He never sent her into danger, she never worried about getting caught." "Like a shape-shifter, Harriet becomes who she must be in order to perform her duties and do what she considers the Lord's work."

She lived a long, eventful life, from 1822-1913. At the age of 6 she was hired out, and barely stopped working since that age. She became the leader, the caregiver, the provider for her whole family. Even after being hit in the head with an iron weight, which seemed to be the start of her narcolepsy, she continued on. There was no other choice. She was never one to do "woman's work" indoors, but preferred outdoor work, and thus got to know the area really well, which helped her in the future leading slaves to freedom.

Throughout her life, she trusted God. The slaves sang gospel hymns, Bible songs. The white minister or slave owner wouldn't understand "that the Promised Land the black people long for is not spiritual heaven but New Jersey, or even Canada."

She was always a loner - and didn't want to trust anyone else. Although she was interested in John Brown and his goals, she didn't join him. (another interesting person I knew very little about). During the Civil War she planned and led armed expeditions, and worked in hospitals. And was never remunerated by the government for this work. Individuals definitely valued her work, but getting the government to acknowledge her contribution was difficult. And towards the end of her life she was approached by strangers who wanted her to give them money for a lot of confederate gold. She felt she could trust them - and lost a lot of her money in this way.

This story was fascinating, and sad, and inspirational!

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

So readable. The author takes us through the life of Harriet Tubman, providing background and context for her work.

Read in preparation for Living Legacy Pilgrimage to Low Country

parts that particularly spoke to me:

287-290, with maps of the South Carolina Harbor: That part of the state, from Edisto Island to the Savannah River and down to Jacksonville, make up what is called the Lowcountry. In South Carolina, this comprises the Sea Islands--Hilton Head, Saint Helena, Port Royal, Lady's, Tybee, and others--and only one town of any size, Beaufort. The Lowcountry is soggy, flat, and salty, almost equal parts water and land, much of the ground too marshy to walk through. Islands dot the raggedy coastline like scraps of paper thrown to the wind. Subject to the rhythm of ocean tides, the soil of the islands contains a good bit of yellow sand, flecked with bits of disintegrated coral. The air is staggeringly humid, the summers all but unbearably hot, the land rich with oceanic alluvium.

291 Harriet's friend, John S. Rock, the first Black lawyer admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court, speaks at an 1861 anti-colonization and anti-emigration [to Haiti] meeting of African Americans in Boston: "This being or country, we have made up our minds to remain in it and to try to make it worth living in."

Words that can give us courage today to remain in the United States and keep on working to make it worth living in. This whole book is an inspiration to keep on moving forward.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just want to be clear that two stars means the book was "OK." I didn't dislike the book, actually, I really learned a lot about Harriet Tubman's life and found the the facts about her life extremely interesting. I just really had a hard time with the author's writing style. The style was very dry and she asked a lot of rhetorical questions when the historical facts about Tubman's life were fuzzy, which got a little annoying after a while. I usually love reading biographies, but I just really struggled to get through this. Like I said before, I have come out of reading this book with so much more knowledge about the life, work, and bravery of Harriet Tubman, but I just wish a different author would have written it.

[Melanie Giovenzana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like a collaboration between the author and the reader; like brainstorming how Tubman’s life was. The author has gathered the facts, some contradictory with supporting evidence like Tubman’s different accounts to different people, Frederick Douglass’ account, and two biographers who may or may not have written what they heard. The author offers her opinion by comparing facts, and then lets you decide-or as the title rightly states-imagine the story. It’s not a flowing story as the author states in the beginning.

If you like historical facts, have an imagination, and you’re interested in this iconic heroine’s story, this is a great book.

[Jaylin · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is a really good book if you like slavery. This book is about a girl name Harriet Tubman and, she puts her life on risk to rescue families and people that are being slave. She goes back and forth using a underground railroad track going to slave territory. Harriet tubman was not educated she didn't even know how to read or write. Whenever she wanted to write something she had someone write it for her. She was a brave girl she could of just free herself but no she made a underground railroad track and went back and saved people.

[Pam Karnatz · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an amazing story of Harriet's courage and determination! She helped so many others to freedom and continued to care for them and her extended family for decades, with support and hands-on help.
I was especially impressed with her service during the Civil War near Hilton Head, putting herself in danger and discomfort.

[Mark O'brien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Granted, Harriet Tubman is a difficult subject since she could neither read nor write and left little in the way of a first-hand account of her life. But this book meanders so much that I gave up on page 134.

[Douglas Graney · Rating 1 out of 5]

Having lived in Auburn, NY in the past and just recently moved to Auburn I was jazzed to read this book; Auburn being Tubman’s hometown. The organization of this book makes no sense the author goes on tangents, very difficult to read. I’ll find another Tubman book.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harriet's life story is amazing. The writing style did not transport me. The text read like a school text book.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Filled with speculations and unsupported suppositions and written in a precious style, this is not the biography Harriet Tubman deserves.

[Gail Siqueiros · Rating 2 out of 5]

Slow read. I had to struggle to finish the book.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the way the author told the story of Harriet Tubman’s life. The author acknowledged the methods of research, but still told her life as a story effectively.

[Carl Rollyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reared in slavery, beaten by her masters, struck in the head as a young woman with a heavy weight that caused narcoleptic spells — the story of Harriet Tubman is well-known. This petite, illiterate woman ran away to the free North, and then repeatedly returned to her home ground of Maryland, spiriting away not only her own family, but dozens — perhaps even hundreds — of slaves, never once getting caught or losing anyone in her charge.

When the Civil War broke out, Tubman became a nurse and intelligence agent. Her exploits are well documented, including the dramatic liberation of nearly 800 slaves in South Carolina in a Union army expedition Tubman planned and led — the only time a woman, let alone an ex-slave, managed such a feat.

No wonder, then, that Tubman is a staple of children's stories, not to mention three recent biographies. Scrupulous scholars have detailed what Tubman did, but they have all been stymied when having to account for how she did it. Although Tubman obliged countless journalists and biographers with stories about her adventures, she rarely divulged her methods. A woman who could have run the Central Intelligence Agency, she never gave up the secrets of her trade.

Enter Beverly Lowry, a novelist, who has "imagined" her subject's life in her new biography, "Harriet Tubman" (Doubleday, 432 pages, $26). Reviewers have already expressed a certain uneasiness about Ms. Lowry's methods. She sometimes resorts to the nugatory "must have been," but usually she is bolder and more effective than biographers who try to bootleg factoids into their narratives — those statements that sound certain, but are actually bootless speculation.

Ms. Lowry reminds me of Faulkner's Ike McCaslin in "Go Down, Moses," who scrutinizes his family's commissary books and ledgers to recreate the past and make it live again. Like Faulkner, Ms. Lowry even uses italics to denote words taken from documents she has studied while envisioning life as Tubman lived it day-to-day. The author often shifts tenses, moving from past to present, back to past again, simulating the kind of dynamic that occurs when attempting to make a continuum of history.

If Ms. Lowry's method succeeds, it is because she is a historiographer who examines what other biographers have done with the Tubman material and explains how she regards their redactions of Tubman's words. Through Ms. Lowry's text we see how the historical record develops and what it omits.

By all accounts, Tubman was a devout woman who believed her successes were the result of divine will. She spoke in parables. She believed God talked to her, and whites and blacks called her Moses. But Tubman's words require parsing, since like many ex-slaves, she was schooled to use coded language that occluded her life, preventing her masters from understanding her deepest feelings.

Ms. Lowry focuses, for example, on Tubman's earliest recorded memory. Harriet is in a tree cradle when "the young ladies in the big house where my mother worked came down, caught me up in the air before I could walk." Ms. Lowry dwells on these words, wondering about the circumstances of the tree cradle story. Unable to supply any more details, and she concludes:

See her: a special child with a large spirit, irresistible to the young white women. Her small, compact body in flight, airborne, like a ball pitched to the sky, the baby who would one day find her own way to fly. Arms out, she catches at the air, aloft.

Most biographers would be afraid to write this way: It seems too fanciful. But biography, Ms. Lowry knows, is about more than facts — so long as the biographer never forgets what facts are available. Biography is about imagining a life, wondering why as a young women Tubman hired herself out, became a "freelancer," as Ms. Lowry calls her in an inspired choice of words. Tubman refused to be a house slave, preferring the hard manual labor that put her in the fields with men.

"Harriet Tubman" is a biography that goes to the core of character, using the record to create a fully imagined life. Here is Tubman making her first escape: "From among the laborers, most of whom are men and boys, a young girl — compact, tightly wound, her low center of gravity a certain sign of surefooted speed — sets off at a quick clip." There is no document that justifies this sentence, but look at Tubman's photographs and consider the whole life. Ms. Lowry's prose, you will find, runs right along with her subject.

[James (JD) Dittes · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is remarkable here, is the scholarship that Lowry pulls together to form this biography is remarkable. The early sections, dealing with Harriet's--nee Arminta Ross--childhood on Maryland's eastern shore reminded me of the work of Annette Gordon Reed on Sally Hemings.

The fact is that Harriet Tubman never learned to read or write, so her background must be reconstructed from old runaway slave ads, wills, and other legal transactions. Even later in life, Tubman would dictate stories from her life to two sources. Still Lowry pieces together clear images of Tubman's work on the Underground Railroad and later in the Civil War as a nurse and scout among South Carolina's coastal islands.

I had known so little about Tubman before reading this. Lowry connects her memorably with James Brown, and she even places Tubman in the background of actions familiar to fans of the movie, Glory (1989). Col. James Montgomery--a "bad guy" in the film who commands his black troops to loot and burn the Georgia town of Darian--was one of Harriet's biggest supporters, and for him she scouted several raids to rescue enslaved people on rice plantations upstream from Union outposts.

Readers also learn in this book about Tubman's mystical experiences--visions, dreams and messages from God that followed a head injury when she was a teenager. I don't want to spoil this for readers, but Tubman claimed to have had premonitions of both the failure of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and the success of the Civil War and the end of slavery, along with other remarkable experiences that helped her to avoid capture as she returned time and time again to Maryland to lead slaves out of bondage.

[Stephanie Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I already have a huge interest in the life of Harriet Tubman, so this was an easy read. Someone less interested might find it dull. The author did an incredible amount of research to give good insight about slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore (different from in the Deep South) and the forming of black military regiments during the Civil War. This book answered a lot of questions for me about how my own family might have bought freedom and land before the emancipation.

I was especially pleased with the connections drawn between Harriet Tubman's actions and the important events of the time, like the Fugitive Slave Act, John Brown's raid and Lincoln's assasination.

Missing pieces of Harriet Tubman's life are filled in with educated guesses based on the author's research. Still, the book reads as more biography than fiction. She doesn't try to trick anybody.

[Donna]

I had wanted to read a biography of Harriet Tubman. This one was ok , but not that great. There was too much unnecessary detail in the beginning and the writer seemed to be using other peoples's works and not her own research. It gave me some new information about this amazing woman, but not exactly what I had hoped for. I'm glad I read it but it is not one I will pick up again.

[Charlene Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew very little about Ms. Tubman. This book explained
all that this person was. Real interested in the actual
strength she had in spite of her physical ailments.
She is someone to look up to and see what a person
can do.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book. Given that it's based on pulling together research and various accounts of people who are no longer alive, some sections were awkward and hard to follow at times. Overall, however, it was well researched and well written. Enjoyed reading this perspective.

[Elissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

My daughter is studying a poem about Harriet Tubman and I thought it would be interesting to learn about her life.
After escaping slavery, she went back 19 times to help free others in slavery.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love to read anything about Harriet Tubman. Author did tons of research and the story of her life is very well-told.

[ShadowTalon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly inspiring and wonderfully personified, Harriet Tubman was undoubtedly one of the greatest American heros of all time. And this biography catches that heroic feeling perfectly.

[Rocio]

havent read it yet