Linda Davidson/The Washington Post - Board member
William Jarmon walks past portraits of Harriet Tubman in the Harriet Tubman
Museum and Education Center in Cambridge, Md. on March 5. There are plans for a
national historic trail and a state park honoring Tubman and the Underground
Railroad. The groundbreaking takes place this weekend on the 100th anniversary
of her death.
Go to Cambridge, which remains a sleepy town, and
you’ll find the Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center, where a local art
teacher has painted a colorful mural of Tubman, and photographs of her adorn
the wall. Docents and volunteers tell stories of the black community’s
connection to their heroine.
(Anonymous/Associated Press) - This photograph
released by the Library of Congress and provided by Abrams Books shows Harriet
Tubman in a photograph dating from 1860-75.
Tubman was born into slavery, but escaped to
Philadelphia in 1849, and provided valuable intelligence to Union forces during
the Civil War.Her name was invoked here in the 1940s to raise money for an
ambulance for use in the black part of town. Later, the black community began
celebrating Harriet Tubman Day around Juneteenth on the grounds of Bazzel
Church, an old wooden edifice where blacks worshipped during slavery.
With the beginning of construction on the visitors
center at the new state park in Dorchester, excitement about Tubman is
palpable.
“It all comes together in a way to celebrate the
courage of a person who is an inspiration,” said Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin
(D-Md.), who has also been a forceful backer of naming a national park after
Tubman.
One place that transports visitors back a century and
a half is the Bucktown
Village Store, which
is owned by Dorchester natives Susan and Jay Meredith, who operate the tourism
business Blackwater Paddle and Pedal — renting out bicycles, canoes and the
like. The Merediths are the fourth generation of their family to operate the
general store, which they call the site of “the first known act of defiance in
the life of Harriet Tubman.”
Step onto the wooden porch and through the heavy door
and see shelves lined with artifacts: chamber pots, wooden duck decoys, old
coffee cans. Beneath the glass are metal slave tags purchased on eBay and heavy
shackles.
There is also a rusted metal weight, which Susan
Meredith holds in her hand as she tells a story about the woman she calls
“Minty.” “She was being leased out to farmers so she was working in the flax
field. She said her hair looked like a bushel of flax. Master comes and says,
‘Minty go to the store.’ Like any woman, she said, ‘Ain’t no way I’m going with
my hair looking like this.’ She put her Misses shawl on her head and headed to
the store.”
It’s hard to believe an enslaved woman would drape her
head with a shawl that belonged to her owner, but Meredith energetically
continues her story.
Minty is in the store, and an overseer comes in
chasing a enslaved boy who has walked off the field. Tubman refuses to help the
overseer detain the boy. (On this point historians agree.) The overseer hurls
the lead weight, “accidentally” hitting Tubman in the head, Meredith says with
conviction, though there is some dispute about whether the incident was an
accident.
“If this park revolves around inspiration and family
and tradition, you’ll get everyone to come. But if you tell the things we
already know about slavery, you’re not going to have many people,” Meredith
says. “People
aren’t going to come to be sad.”
But there is sadness in Bradford’s telling; she wrote
that Tubman’s “master . . . in an ungovernable fit of rage threw a heavy weight
at the unoffending child, breaking in her skull, and causing a pressure upon
her brain.”
Moving beyond happy children’s stories to look slavery
in the face and conjure up the fearlessness Tubman must have possessed is — in
fact — the draw, says Morgan Dixon, the co-founder of GirlTrek, a
District-based organization that promotes fitness among black women.
The image of Tubman walking away from slavery
undergirds GirlTrek’s “We are Harriet” walk on the anniversary of her death.
More than 13,000 women, many walking alone, will participate.
The idea was born five years ago when Dixon got in her
car and drove to the Eastern Shore looking for signs of Tubman.
Dixon ended up at the Bucktown store. She sat inside,
thinking about Tubman getting knocked in the head and later walking through
forests. It was there that Dixon began to think of Tubman as a physical being,
not a storybook character — a woman who felt fear, pain and unyielding resolve.
“Harriet Tubman was a woman just like us,” Dixon says.
“One woman who was radically connected to herself and to God takes it upon
herself — with this core value of self reliance — to really walk in the
direction of her best life.”
It is this Harriet that Dixon will have in mind as she
walks Sunday. It is that Harriet Tubman, redrawn to reflect reality, that
historians hope will resonate with people seeking to understand her legacy and
the era in which she lived.
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