Pat Young Reviews the New Film “Harriet” About the Life of Harriet Tubman

I went to see the new Harriet Tubman movie “Harriet” today and I suggest you see it too.

I don’t say that you should see it because each incident depicted is entirely historically accurate. Not all are. Some are made up, as are some of the characters. I will discuss these later. I think that the film is well worth seeing because it is a moving work of cinema that explores the psyche of a slave and her enslavers and the will to freedom and self-determination that the historical Tubman demonstrated with great courage.

I don’t go to any movie hoping to see a history book brought to life. I read fifty or more scholarly history books every year and I expect them to be accurate and fully footnoted. And I check the footnotes, believe it or not. A movie is always a work of fiction, even if it is based on a memoir like 12 Years a Slave or the work of a historian like Lincoln. Someone told me he did not go to see Lincoln because it got the Connecticut vote count wrong! “Really”, I thought, “you went to see Lincoln to find out how Connecticut voted on the 13^th Amendment?” I have heard a similar complaint about the color of the trousers worn by the black Civil War soldiers Tubman leads in Harriet. Yes, they should have been red and not blue, but so what? The fact that a movie is fictional and will take liberties should be obvious when watching Harriet, or Gettysburg, or Lincoln the first time someone is speaking and an orchestra’s music swells up. In reality, I hate to tell you, movie orchestra’s rarely play behind people in real life. Movies involve artifice. Get over it.

Harriet, the film, brings to life the struggle against slavery waged by the enslaved people of America. Harriet Tubman, and women and men like her, were brave enough to risk torture and death to not be ruled by others. Harriet depicts the fight as one requiring considerable solidarity among the oppressed. Free blacks help Tubman, and later those whom she is conducting on the Underground Railroad, at the risk of losing their own freedom. It also shows the white allies that the bravery of the runaways compel to take a stand and risk their own comfort to help these refugees in the Land of Freedom.

The film, without a heavy hand, exposes the economics at the base of the slave relationship. White slave owners have no legal reason not to break up families if doing so will profit them. White people in the South did not acknowledge that non-whites had the same emotional attachment to spouse, parent, or child, as a white person might have. Family separation of non-whites was not seen as a devastating intrusion into the personal realm of the slave, since the non-white was not thought of as capable of love. Yet we see Harriet take incalculable risks to rescue her family members. She shows an unsentimental love for her parents and sibling, while the enslavers see their slaves, and even one another, as little more than profit points. The ideology of white supremacy and non-white inferiority did not come from God or Nature as slavers claimed, it evolved to justify wringing every possible dollar from the labor, and reproductive capacity from black people.

Harriet also is good at depicting the hardness of Tubman in carrying out her liberating mission. Once she took up the conducting of a refugee, she could not allow him to change his mind and go back. When he was recaptured, he would be tortured and he would give up not only Tubman, but the kind souls, black and white, who were part of the network of abductors, conductors, and shelterers who aided the runaways on the road to Freedom. We do not doubt that she would kill a man who tried to turn back en route.

The film falters in its depictions of Tubman’s relations with three male characters. Two of them, her “owner’s” son and a black slave catcher named Bigger Long, did not exist. There were a tiny number of black men who made a living out of catching slaves. Tubman was involved in a slave rescue in Troy, New York in which a black man figured as a pursuer of the fugitive, but Bigger is pure action movie invention. The other man, a very real one, who is problematic, is John Tubman, Harriet’s first husband. He was, frankly, not as good a mate to Harriet as he is made out in the movie.

In spite of these issues, the film was good enough that the audience that I saw it with broke into applause twice during it, once at the end and once when Tubman spoke to an abolitionist audience in the Auburn, New York home of Senator William Seward explaining why the rescue of slaves from bondage had to continue even as the dangers increased.

Friends who have seen the movie have told me that they were disappointed that it did not depict Tubman’s involvement with John Brown, or her role as a Union spy during the Civil War, or her advocacy for former slaves during Reconstruction and Jim Crow. I don’t think that these are criticisms of the movie itself. They merely reflect the rich life and work of Harriet Tubman. Perhaps a second film is in order?

The movie is remarkable in not allowing Tubman’s story to be overshadowed by the iconic men of her time like Lincoln and John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Tubman is allowed to stand on her own, even as the film acknowledges that her work could only succeed with the cooperation and support of many other white and black abolitionists.

Tubman’s inner life is not overwhelmed by the sort of hyper-realistic violence of films like 12 Years a Slave and Free State of Jones. The violence inherent in slavery is shown, but with discretion. This makes the film accessible to families who want to see this story together. High school and mature middle school students will learn about a courageous American woman and the lengths she was willing to go to in defiance of slavery.  Cynthia Erivo portrays a very human hero whose superpower is bravery coupled with defiance.

 

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