Harriet Tubman: The Civil Rights pioneer survived an abusive childhood

Harriet Tubman legacy

Harriet Tubman is world-famous as an abolitionist because of her role in helping 70 slaves travel north to freedom. It has been suggested that she made about 13 trips using the underground railroad which was a series of locations and check-points to keep slaves hidden from those who were tracking them.

Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland as Araminta Ross and her nickname was Minty. The exact date of her birth is in question as no records of the birthdates of slaves were kept. On an application for her pension, Tubman stated she was 67 and that she had been born in 1825 but there is no way to prove it. Her death certificate lists her being born in 1815 but her gravestone in Auburn’s Hill Cemetery, says 1820.

What matters is what is known about her life which is that Harriet along with sympathetic Jews and White Americans led many slaves to freedom through the underground railroad. This is her story that is told each February during Black History Month when school children write papers about Tubman and read them to their classmates. She is hailed as a hero but her troubled childhood and the obstacles she overcame are rarely mentioned.

Early injustices

Harriets parents were Harriet "Rit" Green and Ben Ross and they nicknamed her Minty. Rit belonged to Joseph Pattison and his sister Mary Pattison Brodess who inherited their father's plantation after his death. Ross was the property of Anthony Thompsons and at some point after Mary's father-in-law died the two plantations were temporarily merged.

One of the first injustices young Minty endured was being separated from her father when she and her 8 siblings along with their mother were taken by Joseph Pattison to a different plantation and their father was left behind. At only 5 years of age, Harriet was expected to be a caretaker for an infant and she had to stay up all night to rock the cradle.

She was still expected to do her regular work the next day and whenever the mistress heard the baby cry Harriet was beaten around her neck. This forced labor of a child also took Harriet away from her mother each time she was hired out. At age seven she was hired out to collect muskrats from traps which required the child to wade into dirty water and end up being wet from the waist down on a regular basis. Minty came down with measles but still went to work and was so weak she collapsed.

When she was eight Harriet was hired out to another household, where she ate a lump of sugar one day while her masters were arguing. She had never had a sugar cube before and wanted to know what it tasted like. Afraid of the punishment her mistress would give her Harriet ran away and found shelter for 3 days inside a pigpen. She survived by eating the same food as the pigs and later said this period in her life was a time when she felt "severely neglected".

By the age of 12, Harriet was considered to be strong enough to work in the fields with the adults. She was hired by a man named Barrett and found she preferred the harsh physical labor rather than domestic work which subjected her to white women who mistreated her. It was during this time that Minty’s Christian faith began to grow.

Harriet Tubman traumatic brain injury

One day when she was in a grocery store Harriet saw a runaway slave. As he attempted to flee from the establishment Minty stood in the doorway blocking the overseer and giving the slave enough time to escape. The overseer picked up a heavy metal weight from the counter and aimed it at the fleeing slave but instead hit the 12-year-old in the head with it.

The weight cracked her skull open, tore her shawl in two, and drove the shawl into Harriet's head. She was bleeding heavily and fainted and was carried to the house. She had no bed and was laid on the seat of the weaving loom, where she remained for two days. It took months for Minty to recover from the traumatic head wound and she later found that as a side effect from her injury she would fall asleep any place and it was practically impossible to wake her up.

These sleeping spells (today called narcolepsy) would come upon Harriet without warning and her master tried to sell her. She also began having vivid dreams related to her religious beliefs. She never fully recovered from the traumatic head injury and in her later life had surgery to alleviate the symptoms.