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Zusatztext “A swiftly paced! fascinating read. . . . Lowry has a ripe subject in Tubman.” — Boston Globe “ Harriet Tubman is a biography that goes to the core of character! using the record to create a fully imagined life.” — The New York Sun “Lowry's dramatic retelling seems thoroughly researched. . . . [Her] method produces vivid scenes of Tubman's life.” — The New York Times Informationen zum Autor Beverly Lowry is the author of six novels and the nonfiction works Crossed Over and Her Dream of Dreams . The recipient of the 2007 Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award, Lowry teaches at George Mason University. She lives in Austin, Texas. Klappentext From the award-winning novelist and biographer Beverly Lowry comes an astonishing re-imagining of the remarkable life of Harriet Tubman, the "Moses of Her People.” Tubman was an escaped slave, lumberjack, laundress, raid leader, nurse, fund-raiser, cook, intelligence gatherer, Underground Railroad organizer, and abolitionist. In Harriet Tubman, Lowry creates a portrait enriched with lively imagined vignettes that transform the legendary icon into flesh and blood. We travel with Tubman on slave-freeing raids in the heart of the Confederacy, along the treacherous route of the Underground Railroad, and onto the battlefields of the Civil War. Integrating extensive research and interviews with scholars and historians into a rich and mesmerizing chronicle, Lowry brings an American hero to life as never before.Scene 1. Owasco Lake There is a quiet dignity about Harriet that makes her superior or indifferent to all surrounding circumstances . . . she was never elated, or humiliated; she took everything as it came, making no comments or complaints. —SARAH BRADFORD, HARRIET, THE MOSES OF HER PEOPLE, 1901 She is old now, near eighty, and feeble—illness and injury, brutality, oppression, and the constant cut of fear having taken their toll—her condition convincing many people that Harriet Tubman has lived out her time and will soon pass into history and legend. They underestimate her stubbornness, the thick shell of the nut of self-preservation tucked into the curl of her heart. In Auburn, New York, where she lives with her brother William Henry Stewart, her presence is almost boringly well known, she having so memorably and so often performed the events of her life—dramatized, danced, sung in shouts, creating the shadows and cries and frosty streams between slavery and freedom—that she has become, even in 1900, only thirty-five years beyond Appomattox, outmoded, overexposed, a relic of another time and a victim of our country’s old and continuing malady, a propensity for willed historical amnesia. She has lived in central New York State, in the town of Auburn, for some forty years—more than half her life—even so, many people born since the war’s end don’t know who she is anymore but have to be told, and even then they shrug and wonder, Which war? What slavery? Where? Maryland? And if they do know of her, some of them have wearied of hearing about the terrible days back then and down there. Oh, they think, her again. The country is sick of hearing about slavery and the South, the war, the disenfranchisement of black men, the masked white terrorists who ride the night. People want to move on. But not all have forgotten. Some are steady friends, and believe. Aunt Harriet, as she is often called by those who would idealize her into safe, if nonexistent, kinship, lives a mile south of downtown Auburn, beyond the city tollgate on South Street, where she raises some crops and chickens and, despite her fragility, cares and provides for a number of indigent and infirm people, one of them blind. “Her beloved darkies,” one woman calls them, though not all of them are black. Children, stragglers, panhandlers, the ill, the haples...
