Harriet Tubman's life: Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

Harriet Tubman

By Beverly Lowry

Random House / 432 pages / $32

In 1822, Harriet Tubman, nee Araminta Ross, was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation. She came into the world not simply as her parents' issue but as someone else's property. Along with her siblings, she and her parents were chattel, nothing more.

Regularly, the Ross family was splintered by the harsh commerce of slavery. The child known as Minty was routinely beaten by despotic owners - punishment for transgressions that were often minor and more often imaginary. Compassionate masters and mistresses may have existed somewhere, she said in later years, but "I didn't happen to come across them."

At age 13, Minty's world changed when her skull was split open in a freak incident. A 2-pound weight, probably intended for someone else, hit her dead between the eyes. The hideous wound, and the triangular crease that would remain on her forehead for life, made her unsalable. "They said they wouldn't give sixpence for me," she recalled. The injury changed her in other ways: Minty began having visions, private insights that turned an always independent child into a rebel.

In Harriet Tubman, Beverly Lowry, author of two other works of nonfiction as well as six novels, has taken on a remarkable subject. Tiny, powerful and illiterate, Tubman (who kept the surname of her first husband and took her mother's given name) escaped from slavery at age 27 and soon set about guiding scores of slaves to freedom, some of them clear to Canada. She became known as "Moses," often fording deep waters as she steered frightened men and women to new lives free of white ownership. Some called her the black Joan of Arc, others General Tubman. At her funeral in Auburn, N.Y., in 1913, she wore a medal from Queen Victoria. In recognition of her service to the United States during the Civil War, ministering to wounded soldiers and aiding the government as a scout, spy and de facto nurse, an American flag was draped across her casket. In 1978, Tubman became the first African-American woman to be featured on a U.S. postage stamp.

Given such dramatic-accomplishments, Tubman would seem to be a biographer's dream. But Lowry, although her newest book is listed as a biography, tips her hand with the subtitle: "Imagining a Life." In an author's note, she gives her readers fair warning. "This book does not pretend to be a work of intense scholarship," she writes; rather, Tubman's life has been "reimagined ... based on documentation and previous publications."