Harriet Tubman

Scene 1. Owasco Lake There is a quiet dignity about Harriet that makes her superior or indifferent to all surrounding circumstances . . . she was never elated, or humiliated; she took everything as it came, making no comments or complaints. SARAH BRADFORD, HARRIET, THE MOSES OF HER PEOPLE, 1901 She is old now, near eighty, and feebleillness and injury, brutality, oppression, and the constant cut of fear having taken their tollher condition convincing many people that Harriet Tubman has lived out her time and will soon pass into history and legend. They underestimate her stubbornness, the thick shell of the nut of self-preservation tucked into the curl of her heart. In Auburn, New York, where she lives with her brother William Henry Stewart, her presence is almost boringly well known, she having so memorably and so often performed the events of her lifedramatized, danced, sung in shouts, creating the shadows and cries and frosty streams between slavery and freedomthat she has become, even in 1900, only thirty-five years beyond Appomattox, outmoded, overexposed, a relic of another time and a victim of our country's old and continuing malady, a propensity for willed historical amnesia. She has lived in central New York State, in the town of Auburn, for some forty yearsmore than half her lifeeven so, many people born since the war's end don't know who she is anymore but have to be told, and even then they shrug and wonder, Which war? What slavery? Where? Maryland? And if they do know of her, some of them have wearied of hearing about the terrible days back then and down there. Oh, they think, her again. The country is sick of hearing about slavery and the South, the war, the disenfranchisement of black men, the masked white terrorists who ride the night. People want to move on. But not all have forgotten. Some are steady friends, and believe. Aunt Harriet, as she is often called by those who would idealize her into safe, if nonexistent, kinship, lives a mile south of downtown Auburn, beyond the city tollgate on South Street, where she raises some crops and chickens and, despite her fragility, cares and provides for a number of indigent and infirm people, one of them blind. "Her beloved darkies," one woman calls them, though not all of them are black. Children, stragglers, panhandlers, the ill, the hapless and disabled, those with no homes or family, people unable to take care of themselvesthey wander into her yard, gather beneath her fig tree, and settle in. No one is turned away. She has spent a good part, if not most, of her life on the road, alone. Today she is on the move again, on her way out of town, going downstate to visit two old friends. An old woman, small, compact, keen-footed. Layered in clothes: dress buttoned to the neck, boots, dark straw hat, flat-brimmed against the sun. Moving at a quick clip. Her mother and father and other members of her family once lived with her in Auburn. Most are dead now, but her younger brother, William Henry, born into slavery as Henry Ross, still lives there. William contributes, but he is now seventy years old himself. Everybody in the household is old, infirm, or a child; nobody leaves. And so, ever the caretaker, despite her own age and infirmities, Harriet continues to take to the road to solicit funds from her supporters and to sell eggs and chickens in town in order to keep the operation afloat. In one photo, her chin is tucked and she looks up heavy-browed, as if wary. Others in the picturelined up in a row, posinglook straight at the camera, taking it on. Harriet stands at the end, holding a washbasin tightly in her grip, their protector. The month is June, maybe early Julyearly summer, at any rate, and halfwayLowry, Beverly is the author of 'Harriet Tubman' with ISBN 9780385721776 and ISBN 0385721773.