Harriet Tubman is both a famous historical figure and a woman whose legend has grown to the level of myth. A new film about her life is being released this week and the team behind it hopes it presents the real Tubman. Today’s New York Times looks at how the film does. From the article:
Among the oft-repeated myths about Tubman: that there was a $40,000 bounty on her head, a preposterously high figure at a time when the reward for the capture of John Wilkes Booth was $50,000. “If it were that high, she would have been caught,” Larson said. In the film, we see posters citing a more reasonable $200 or $300.
And then there’s the number of enslaved people she rescued through the Underground Railroad, which was reported as 300 in her 1869 biography, but was more likely around 70. “Her story was a hard sell at the time, so they embellished things to try to sell it,” Lemmons said. The film’s epilogue goes with the more accurate estimate, while adding that as part of a relatively large military operation, she also freed more than 750 slaves during her time with the Union Army during the Civil War.
In the film, we see Tubman leading hundreds of black troops, leveling a rifle at her Confederate enemies as plantations burn in the background. “I don’t think we necessarily think of historical female figures as Joan of Arcs, particularly in children’s books, but that’s exactly what she was,” the producer Daniela Lundberg said.
Lemmons added, “You don’t have an image of what she was like when she was actually doing this work in her late 20s, when she was this young superheroine, this completely badass woman.”
As for those guns, Tubman carried a pistol during her time with the Underground Railroad (to protect herself and her charges against slave hunters and, on at least on one occasion, as seen in the film, to encourage those under her to stay the course). During the Civil War, she wielded a sharpshooter’s rifle.
The filmmakers included several lesser-known episodes from Tubman’s life, including one that opens the film, in which a young Tubman hires a white lawyer to examine the will of her mother’s former master, only to discover that her mother, and hence herself, were legally free. They also endeavored to get Tubman’s words right, particularly given how often she’s been misquoted. In 2018, Kanye West attributed a made-up quote to her in a since-deleted tweet — “I freed a thousand slaves, I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves” — not long after describing slavery as “a choice” on a “TMZ Live” appearance. “That shocks me,” Larson said. “Anyone who was enslaved knew they were enslaved, and if they could have run away, they would have. It’s an insult.”
Even so, there were things the filmmakers had to fudge in the interests of a cohesive narrative. Timelines were conflated (the Fugitive Slave Act, for instance, was passed within months after Tubman’s escape, not after she had already become a conductor on the Underground Railroad, as in the film) and characters were created. Gideon, the young slave owner and childhood companion of Tubman, for example, was a fiction, a stand-in for hundreds of men and women who grew up alongside the people enslaved by their parents.
“For me, of course, as a historian, I wish it was completely, totally accurate,” Larson said. “But it’s Hollywood. And they got Tubman. Kasi Lemmons really got her, and made her this militant radical, while also conveying her love for her family. And that’s who Tubman was.”
Lemmons said that by now, “I know a whole lot about the story, so when I conflated, embellished, created or used poetic license, I certainly knew exactly what I was doing.” Still, she said: “I did want to present as much of it as accurately as possible. The story is so incredible that it sounds as if it’s not accurate, but it is.”
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