Jailbreak out of History: the re-biography of Harriet Tubman Read online

  Jailbreak out of History:

  the re-biography of Harriet Tubman

  by Butch Lee

  Jailbreak out of History: the re-biography of Harriet Tubman

  ISBN 978-1-894946-50-6

  Copyright Butch Lee

  FIRST KINDLE EDITION 2013

  Kersplebedeb Publishing

  CP 63560

  CCCP Van Horne

  Montreal, Quebec

  Canada

  H3W 3H8

  [email protected]

  www.kersplebedeb.com

  Table of Contents

  Childhood And The Gathering Storm

  To Understand Harriet, We Must First Understand The War

  Black Women's Unique Situation

  And Children, Too...

  Harriet Steps Forward

  Increasing Violence And Will

  Freedom Is The Recognition Of Necessity

  The Largest Radical Conpsiracy In U.S. History

  "Moses" And "The General"

  A Revolutionary Politic

  To Develop Armed Struggle

  This Wasn't Just About Race

  A New Afrikan Political-Military Leader

  A Nodal Point: Blowing Away The Whiteness

  A Multi-Faceted Reality

  Warrior As Healer

  No Civilians There

  A Four-Sided War

  The Inevitable Resolution

  The Exact Spot Of Enemy's Imbalance

  Harriet Is Still Too Subversive

  About the Author

  More Kindle Books from Kersplebedeb

  Childhood & the Gathering Storm

  Focus on Amazons. About why we deal with real women as myths. Girls who never really existed. Yet and again, are all around us & that we can’t bring ourselves to see. Cause seeing through white men’s eyes is about non-vision of ourselves. So let’s deal with a real Amazon.

  Think about Harriet Tubman. Take six months. In fact, take a year & think. Break it on down. What does it mean to be the most famous New Afrikan woman in u.s. history? What does it mean to be stuck in that lie? What’s the meaning of being famous while being hidden and dis-figured and dissed? Let’s jailbreak Harriet Tubman out of white his-story and place her in Amazon and New Afrikan herstory. Her story, her peoples’ story.

  Harriet Tubman’s life is a live weapon placed in our minds, showing us what it means to be an Amazon. Which is why the capitalist patriarchy has forbidden us to touch it for so long. In this, maybe for the first time, we can see Amazons as a future force in the clash of peoples & nations. Not as myths, but as players in the whole difficult course of world politics. We can also appreciate the bittersweet tang of reality, as the peeling away of layers of propaganda and disfigurement which have hidden Harriet from us exposes how much we assume and how little we’ve known.

  Black women have already pointed out the significant pattern of Harriet’s exclusion. Cultural critic bell hooks said recently: “I mean if we could recover Ida B. Wells and Harriet Tubman to the extent that we have recovered, say, Zora Neale Hurston, I think that’s an important contrast because people want to bury that revolutionary black female history...”

  Historian Deborah Gray White connects Harriet’s treatment to a larger pattern in mainstream history of slavery, in which Black women “were reduced to insignificance and largely ignored.” In examining the influential historian Stanley Elkins, she points out:

  That Elkins seemed to omit women altogether was accentuated by his description of slaves whom he identified as part of an American ‘underground’, those who never succumbed to Samboism. Among those mentioned were Gabriel, who led the revolt of 1820, Denmark Vessey, leading spirit of the 1822 plot at Charleston, and Nat Turner — an omission, conspicuous by its absence, was Harriet Tubman... If Elkins had really been thinking of slaves of both sexes he would hardly have forgotten this woman, who became widely known as the Moses of her people.

  Patriarchal capitalisms, which only want Amazons to be exotic myths from forgotten ages, have hidden Harriet Tubman in her own fame. They both trivialize and exceptionalize her. These are tools of oppressor culture. The stripped-down and censored version of her life is told in elementary schools all over the US empire. So much so that everyone thinks they know her story already, although they don’t. Harriet Tubman was born in slavery in Maryland around 1820. She escaped to the north when she was 29, but kept returning secretly to the South again & again to help other slaves escape. For this she became known as “Moses.” True statements. But by limiting her it becomes clever propaganda against her. And against her people.

  Where patriarchy has been unable to deny that women do significant things, it denies the full meaning of what we do by trivializing them. Mary Daly, feminist philosopher, traces the enormity of what patriarchy has done to us. In ancient Greece the goddess Hecate (also known later as Artemis and Diana) was sometimes known as Trivia (and represented by a three-faced statue). That was also the name used for the intersection of three paths, which in many old cultures were the sites of mystical power. She writes in Gynecology:

  In light of the cosmic significance of the term triviaas the crossing of the three roads and of the goddess who bears this name, contemporary meaning of the term in English should be examined. The English term, which, according to Merriam-Webster, is derived from the Latin trivium(crossroads), is defined as ‘common, ordinary, commonplace... of little worth or importance: insignificant, flimsy, minor, slight.’ Of course, according to patriarchal values, that which is ‘commonplace’ is of little worth, for in a competitive hierarchical society scarcity is intrinsic to ‘worth.’ Thus gold is more important than fresh air, and consequently we are forced to live in a world in which gold is easier to find than pure air.

  So to trivialize Harriet Tubman the capitalist patriarchy pictures her as an idealized woman by their definition, who makes a life of helping others. Thus her deeds are squeezed into women’s assigned maternal role as nurturer, helper and rescuer of men (who then go on to do the important things). But Harriet wasn’t repping Mother Teresa. She wasn’t even any kind of civilian at all. She was a combatant, a guerrilla, a warrior carrying pistol and rifle, fighting in her people’s long war for freedom. A war that rocked the foundations of Amerikkkan society and that has never gone away.

  Think about what it means to be called “Moses” (which was the code name other slaves gave her, and which became Harriet’s famous warrior name in the Anti-Slavery underground). When we check out the bible, we can see that Moses was a ruthless visionary, someone who forced the boldest changes and risks upon his people so that they could survive. Who led them out of slavery. To put it simply, Moses was a leader in a time of war. So, too, was Harriet Tubman.

  What trivializing her as a “rescuer” also does is that it takes her out of her own politics. Harriet Tubman was a radical political figure, someone totally involved as a player in the great political ideas and military storms of her day. She was a guerrilla. Someone who lived and taught others to live by the communal and working class New Afrikan culture that her people had planted in this difficult ground, and a Black Feminist to the end.

  In her own lifetime, white people were referring to her as “superhuman,” as “a woman who did what no man could do” (as if this were some exceptional standard). Thus, even then her white supporters needed to exceptionalize her, as something unique and singular. This made her less dangerous to them. Easi
er to handle. Less awesome. After all, picture a nation of Harriet Tubmans.

  First of all, there was nothing mythical or superhuman about her. Harriet Tubman was one Afrikan slave woman among many. And her most striking qualities were qualities she had in common with many other Afrikan women and children, who like her came out of a culture of communal resistance and strength. So to insist on her supposed unique individuality as a compliment, is actually denying her real identity.

  To understand Harriet, We must first understand the war

  If they think of it at all, people look back on the Underground Railroad in civilian terms, as a “movement” like Civil Rights. In fact, such comparisons are often made. But the Underground Railroad cannot be understood in civilian terms, because New Afrikans then were not civilians.

  Here again, it’s easy to let ourselves be fooled by the dis-information of patriarchal capitalist history. It’s easy to not really understand the distinction between civilian and military.

  The meaning of these distinctions is important to us, and yet we never think about it. Harriet wasn’t an Amazon because she was oppressed, or even because she dissented or rebelled. You’re only military if that’s what you are. Just because you’re oppressed doesn’t mean you’re at war. Just because you rebel or protest that doesn’t make you a soldier. New Afrikans today still are oppressed, but they certainly aren’t at war. That may have been true in the 1960s, the mass ghetto uprisings and the role of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, but it’s not true of the Black Nation today.

  When Harriet and the other jail break leaders were referred to back then as “conductors,” when the chiefs of local Underground Railroad committees were always spoken of as “station masters” and “brakemen,” that was cover. Civilian-sounding words for illegal military activity. Harriet and the rest of the Underground Railroad had military goals, had military strategy and tactics. It wasn’t any accident that Harriet and many of the other guides (those front-line guerrillas who moved through Slaveowner territory) were armed. They were soldiers on a military mission, even though they may have been wearing work clothes and not have a patriarchal military hierarchy anywhere on them.

  Remember, most white men back then in the South or on the frontier weren’t civilians exactly, either, even though they, too, may not have worn what we recognize as uniforms. Most white men there were armed, as a normal matter. Had to be, when you come to think of it. (Most nations of the capitalist metropolis have histories of strict personal gun control, like England and Japan. There the ruling class was afraid of class warfare. While in settler-colonialist societies — such as South Afrika, the u.s.a., and Israel — white men have always had armed and militarized mass cultures.)

  In its origins as a white men’s invasion culture, Team USA itself may have looked civilian to us, but it was really military. The masses of armed settler men were their own military. Banding together in militias or Slave Patrols or Committees of Correspondence to commit genocide against Indians and prison guard their Afrikan and women property.

  The ways of life, the culture created by the young Black Nation in this furnace, were centered on dangerous and illegal resistance of all kinds. Even their music and their personal lives were part of this resistance. Because without such guerrilla activity they would have had no space or human life at all. Those were the stakes. And the New Afrikan political struggle against this armed oppressor had definite characteristics; it was not only conspiratorial and communal, embracing all forms of resistance from illegal education and sly sabotage to violence, but its only goal — understood by all — was the total destruction of the enemy slave-owning society. That is, it was inescapably military in its full dimensions, just as its situation was military.

  Being disarmed is not the same thing as being civilian. A distinction that patriarchal capitalism loves to mess over in our minds.

  Black Women’s Unique Situation

  For Black women slaves, as Deborah Gray White explains in Ar’nt I a Woman? Female Slaves In The Plantation South, their bondage had another dimension from men because of the threat of rape and the responsibilities for the children. Even escaping, which every slave naturally dreamt of, was something more difficult for most women, who almost always had children to care for.

  William Still, Philadelphia “station master” of the Underground Railroad, said that because of the difficulties of fleeing with children “females undertook three times the risk of failure that males are liable to.” Deborah Gray White says her own studies of slave runaways in different areas & times consistently show that women were a minority. “In North Carolina from 1850 to 1860, only 19 percent of the runaway ads described women. In 1850, 31.7 percent of the runaways advertised for in New Orleans newspapers were women.”

  Many of those women who did escape had to leave children behind. New Afrikan women also resisted violently, as White points out:

  Some bondswomen were more direct in their resistance. Some murdered their masters, some were arsonists, and still others refused to be whipped. Overseers and masters learned which black women and men they could whip, and which would not be whipped. Sometimes they found out the hard way. Equipped with a whip and two healthy dogs, an Alabama overseer tied a woman named Crecie to a stump with intentions of beating her.

  To his pain and embarrassment she jerked the stump out of the ground, grabbed the whip, and sent the overseer running. Women fought back despite severe consequences. An Arkansas overseer decided to make an example of a slave woman named Lucy ‘to show the slaves that he was impartial.’ Lucy, however, was not to be made an example of. According to her son, ‘she jumped on him and like to tore him up.’ Word got around that Lucy would not be beaten. She was sold, but she was never again whipped.

  Their greatest resistance was not in these individual acts of anger and bravery, but in what lay beneath it. New Afrikan slave women created communal networks to sustain and guide each other.

  “Slave women have often been characterized as self-reliant and self-sufficient,” Deborah Gray White reminds us. “Yet, not every Black woman was a Sojourner Truth or a Harriet Tubman. Strength had to be cultivated. It came no more naturally to them than to anyone, slave or free, male or female, black or white. If they functioned in groups...”

  Women more than men were the long-time core of a plantation’s multi-generational population. The networks or women’s sub-culture they created with their own leaders and values was a communal survival instrument in the face of dehumanization.White adds:

  Few women who knew the pain of childbirth or who understood the agony and depression that flowed from sexual harassment and exploitation survived without friends, without female company. Few lacked female companions to share escapades and courtship or older women to consult about the vicissitudes of life and marriage. Female slaves were sustained by their group activities. Treated by Southern whites as if they were anything but self-respecting women, many bonded females could forge their own independent definition to which they could relate on the basis of their own notions about what women should be and how they should act.

  and Children, too

  This was the culture that Harriet Tubman was born into. At age five her childhood as we think of it ended, and she was rented to a white woman to do full-time domestic labor. The white woman believed in torturing Afrikans every day, and the small Harriet was lashed with a leather whip four times across her face and neck as an introduction before breakfast that first day. Harriet’s first escape attempt (i.e., attempted prison break) came when she was seven years old. Caught by the latest white woman she had been rented out to, while trying to steal a piece of sugar (forbidden to Afrikan children), Harriet outran the white woman and her rawhide whip:

  By and by when I was almost tuckered out, I came to a great big pig-pen. There was an old sow there, and perhaps eight or ten little pigs. I was too little to climb into it, but I tu
mbled over the high part and fell in on the ground; I was so beaten out that I could not stir.

  And I stayed from Friday until the next Tuesday, fighting with those little pigs for the potato peelings and the other scraps that came down in the trough. The old sow would push me away when I tried to get her children’s food, and I was awfully afraid of her. By Tuesday I was so starved I knew I had to go back to my mistress. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, even though I knew what was coming.

  Because attempting to escape was the second-most serious crime, Harriet was whipped senseless by the white man of the house. So, Harriet Tubman had become a full-time productive worker, had become familiar with daily violence and utmost danger, had committed crimes and stolen from white settlers, and had tried to escape (prison break) — all by age seven. And this was not exceptional in any way, but common, a story shared by millions of New Afrikans.

  Harriet’s childhood can’t be understood easily by us. Certainly not without uprooting the capitalist myth of children, which is implanted like a barb in our minds. A smarmy romanticized ideology that children are “precious,” “cute,” naturally “helpless” — who for their own good must be safely isolated and governed within the nuclear family (just like women). Powerlessness and being property is masked by a cloying sentimentality (just as the southern slavemasters always talked on how much they “loved” their supposedly loyal slaves). Instinctively, children know this.