Rating: WORTHY!
Adopting the same title as an earlier book: " Harriet Tubman, Conductor on the Underground Railroad" by Earl Conrad, this is a middle-grade book about America's first super hero. Forget Captain America. He's fiction. Tubman was the real thing. In many ways, as this book reveals, it's insulting to use the name she's most commonly known by. Harriet Tubman was born in slavery as Araminta Ross, and as a child was known as Minty. She became Harriet Tubman when she married John Tubman, who was a free man, and who had no interest in moving north with Harriet so she could be free as well. When she started talking seriously about running, he threatened to turn her in!
She decided to go anyway, but feeling bad for those she'd left behind, she became 'Moses' as she was known back then - a conductor on an underground railroad - which some had thought was a real railroad, really underground! Today she'd be known as a mule, but that often has negative connotations. There was nothing negative about Harriet, who was both physically and mentally strong, independent, determined, and who became expert in avoiding authorities, hiding out, reading the lie of the land, and successfully ferrying people to freedom.
The pro-slavery crowd thought Moses was a guy, but it was Harriet leading people to the promise land of the free north. She began freeing her family, but when she came for John, he was already shacked-up with another woman and had no interest in Harriet. Despite set-backs like this, she continued to free her family and many others, and over a dozen trips or so, delivered three-score and ten people safely to the north. She worked in winter, when nights were longest, and she would bring them out late on Saturdays, so the newspapers would not be able to print notices of their escape until the following Monday, giving them plenty of time to move.
When the civil war began, she was of course on the Union side, initially working as a cook and a nurse, and later as a scout. She personally guided the raid at Combahee Ferry that freed ten times as many slaves as she herself had conducted north. After the war she was thanked for this in no way at all, and had to eke-out an existence by selling fruit and vegetables she farmed, and from the proceeds of two books which were written about her by a friend who wanted to help her. The union would not pay her a pension, and the only income she had was the pension her new husband - a man by the name of Davis - earned because of his role in the war. This helped to sustain her after he died prematurely of tuberculosis.
Tubman herself died in 1913 having lived to a ripe old age - probably her early nineties. I fully commend this book as a worthy read and a great introduction to a real hero.
