Imagining the life of Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life: A Biography
By Beverly Lowry
Doubleday, 418 pp., $26
"This book does not pretend to be a work of intense scholarship. It is the story of a life as I have studied and re-imagined it, based on documentation and previous publications and told, as best I could, scene by scene," Beverly Lowry writes in the introduction to her new book about Harriet Tubman.
It's a frank admission in a work that fancies itself a biography about the famed runaway slave who came to be known as "Moses" for leading countless fellow slaves from bondage to freedom.
Despite her seminal place in American history -- in 1978, she became the first African-American woman ever honored with a postage stamp -- Tubman has never received a biography equal to her stature. Having never learned to read or write, she couldn't pen her memoirs like Frederick Douglass did. What little we know of Tubman's life has been so shaded by misinformation and rumor, it has been impossible to parse the woman from the myth.
As well-intentioned as it is well-written, Lowry's biography isn't the thorough treatment Tubman has long deserved. It's a swiftly-paced, fascinating read, though with the subtitle, "Imagining a Life," Lowry might have been better served calling her book a historical novel. That's what Russell Banks did with his sprawling 1998 book "Cloudsplitter" about the tumultuous life of anti-slavery crusader John Brown.
Lowry's book on Tubman -- whom Brown called "General" -- is just as meticulously researched, but there's also a great deal of conjecture. One could argue that every biography or autobiography is an act of invention and imagination, and biographers are allowed some speculative leeway in order to convey essential truths about a compelling life. Yet Lowry stretches those boundaries in a way that might make uneasy those with more exacting standards for something promoted as a biography.
Still, Lowry has a ripe subject in Tubman, a small, unassuming woman anointed with an overwhelming spirit and resolve. She was a spy and a nurse during the Civil War, but she is best remembered as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad, a widespread network of people, both black and white, who ferried slaves to the North and into Canada. Tubman once boasted, "I never ran my train off t he track, and I never lost a passenger."
These are the details even a fifth-grader can recite, and Lowry, who teaches at George Mason University , works mightily to fill the considerable gaps in our knowledge of Tubman. She divides her book into five distinct sections, each bearing a name or moniker associated with Tubman. It begins with "Araminta," as in Araminta Ross, Tubman's real name when she was born into slavery in 1822.
Many of the quotes attributed to Tubman come from Sarah Hopkins Bradford's "Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman," written in 1869. It was the first book-length biography about the former slave, and Bradford sat face-to-face with Tubman for hours, writing down her recollections. Lowry calls the Bradford book "instructive, if problematic," and some could say the same for Lowry's work here. The book is peppered with so many "maybes," one can't help wishing for something more definitive. Instead of getting a deeper sense of Tubman, we're asked to make do with what Lowry believes Tubman may have thought or done. Or as Lowry puts it, a "version of what life may have been like for the American hero Harriet Tubman."
At least until a biography in the true sense comes along, this book may be as close as we get to Tubman. Yet for all Lowry's efforts, it never feels close enough.
Renée Graham is a freelance writer. 
