Lives and Times by Browne Blaine T.;Cottrell Robert C.; & ROBERT C. COTTRELL

Author:Browne, Blaine T.;Cottrell, Robert C.; & ROBERT C. COTTRELL
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 616345
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated

HARRIET TUBMAN

Araminta Ross, later renamed Harriet Tubman, was born to two slaves, Benjamin Ross, a skilled woodsman, and Harriet “Rit” Greene, a cook, on the plantation of Mary Pattison Brodess, located near Dorchester County, Maryland, around 1820. By the time she was five or six, having already helped to care for two younger siblings, “Minty” was toiling as a nursemaid or another kind of house servant, often being loaned out to other plantations. She grew up, she later acknowledged, “like a neglected weed—ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.” She was neither happy nor content, worrying about being taken away each time she spotted a white man. Subjected to frequent beatings for the smallest supposed infractions, including when a baby she was watching awakened and cried, “Minty” became quite ill when she contracted the measles after being ordered to check muskrat traps in marshes. At the age of twelve or thirteen, still illiterate, she was working in the fields, driving oxen, plowing, and pulling logs. She continued to suffer corporal punishment. On one occasion, she refused to help restrain a runaway slave while obtaining supplies in a dry-goods store, and the irate overseer threw a heavy weight at the escaping slave and it hit her. Taken back to the plantation, she was placed on a loom and left unattended to for two days, after which she was forced into the fields, “with blood and sweat rolling down my face until I couldn’t see.” The injury was permanently disabling, with resulting narcoleptic seizures, headaches, and visions.

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