You're Dead to Me - Harriet Tubman (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: November 28, 2020

Greg Jenner is joined by comedian Desiree Burch and historian Dr Michell Chresfield to explore the life of the American hero and abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. From a torturous childhood to surgery without anaesthetic, get ready to understand true bravery as we uncover the events which made Harriet Tubman a phenomenal force for change.Produced by Dan Morelle Scripted by Greg Jenner Researched by Emma Nagouse Radio edit by Cornelius Mendez A Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4.

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. All day long.

Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hiya, Greg here. Hope you're doing all right. We are making Series 3 right now. In the meantime, we've been making these Radio 4 versions of the previous episodes. We are putting them in the feed here permanently. They will be alongside the long versions. So make sure you scroll down and choose which version you want.

So you can have the shorter, punchier, swear-free versions or the long, rambling, sweary versions. So make sure you scroll down and choose which version you want. So you can have the shorter, punchier, swear-free versions or the long, rambling, sweary versions. Up to you. Thanks very much for listening. Take care. Bye. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history, and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You might have heard my Radio 4 series, Homeschool History, although that was for the

kids. So how does this podcast work? Well, each week I'm joined by an expert historian who knows their stuff inside out, and a top-notch comedian who knows funny inside out. And hopefully the result is gorgeous audio alchemy, or at least something to drown out the existential despair of modern life. Today we're off to America in search of one of the most extraordinary women of the 19th century, Harriet Tubman. And to help me do that, I'm joined by two extraordinary American women from the 21st century. In History Corner, she swapped New York and Alabama for Birmingham in the West Midlands, where she teaches the intellectual and cultural history of racial ideas. It's Dr Michelle Cressfield. Hello, Michelle, and welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming in. And in Comedy Corner, she's a playwright, actor, storyteller, and one of the hottest stand-ups in the land. It is Desiree Birch. Hello. How are you doing? I'm all right. How are you? I'm doing okay.

Desiree, you grew up in America, where I imagine Harriet Tubman's on the syllabus. But how are you with history as a subject? Did you hate it at school? Is this giving you flashbacks? There is sort of a love-hate relationship with history in that you only grow up to find out that you were miseducated in your history because every country tells the history of we're so great and we did some stuff wrong but it wasn't really that bad and then we totally fixed it

and we're awesome again. And so the parts of history that you get are not the parts of history that you then go encounter when you meet other people in other parts of the world who are like, you didn't know that you guys did this horrible thing? And then you're like, oh sorry. Okay, so you're on an apology tour.

Yeah, pretty much. That is what it means to be an American abroad, is the apology tour. Okay, well, hopefully you don't have to apologise today because we're talking about a woman who did not make too many enemies. So, what do you know? Harriet Tubman is known as Grandma Moses.

She escaped slavery, joined the Underground Railroad, went back to liberate hundreds of others, Harriet Tubman is known as Grandma Moses. She escaped slavery, joined the Underground Railroad, went back to liberate hundreds of others, then became a badass spy in the Civil War. She's an icon of resistance. She's an early heroine in the civil rights movement. And in Hollywood, she helps Abraham Lincoln hunt vampires, which definitely didn't happen.

One thing you should know about Harriet Tubman, she's meant to be on the $20 bill. But Donald Trump, he's basically holding that up. So, Dr. Michelle, this is a comedy show, but Harriet Tubman's life does not start as a comedy. In fact, at no point is it a comedy. Right. So can we have a little bit of her early life, please? Most likely, she was born around 1822 in Dorchester, Maryland. The fifth of nine children born to Harriet Ritt Green and Ben Ross.

Unfortunately, her parents were owned by two separate families. And so when Harriet was a very young child, her mother was sold away to a related family, but a separate family. And so that had profound implications for the way that Harriet grew up, her mother trying to keep the children together, but with the forces of slavery separating them. And so that's really her early childhood. It's one of itinerantism and movement and separation and not having a love of family, but not being that kind of nuclear unit, of course. And she's got siblings? Yes. So she's one of nine. So she has several sisters, brothers.

You know, one of the worst things that kind of happened for an enslaved family is to be sold away. And so very early on, two of Harriet's sisters are sold down south, which is so she's in Maryland and the northern system looks very different. So to be sold to the south is particularly devastating for the family. And that is that fear that is perpetuating a lot of Harriet's actions that happen for the rest of her life. And her childhood is unfortunately one of work. She's not just enslaved. She's put to work at what, five? Yes. So at five, she's sent out to be a nursemaid.

So nursemaids were responsible for tending to young infants or children, usually sometimes. So it's literal childcare. Literal childcare by a child, right? So you are a nurse, you are a playmate, you are a companion to a young child. And this particular child was often ill. And so Harriet would face these really terrible beatings if the child cried or if the child just was uncontent. And just being sent away because up until five, she had been with her mother's care, but that was quite traumatic for her. And she recounts that narrative oftentimes in her later biographies of just the kind of visceralness of being taken away from her mother at that young age and not really knowing what to do. Like she was just really, you know, as you might imagine, really

down about it. Presumably she's being beaten. I'm assuming she's getting whipped. Yes. So a lot of physical violence is really centered to this time. So the nursemaid is just the first gig. She eventually also works as a muskrat trap keeper. So she has to go out into these marshes or these rivers to uncheck these muskrat traps. And she counters measles. So in addition to the beatings, she's also physiologically vulnerable for all the type of work that she's doing. And so her childhood, on top of the physical violence, she's very poorly for most of her childhood. She's also hanging around with sick kids all the time,

like you think. Right. Which in effect really drives down her worth as a slave, as someone who can be sold. Because all of these illnesses, these kind of physical maladies, the beatings are taking their toll. And also too, she's frail. And also, too, she's frail.

So in her adulthood, she's five feet. I mean, her childhood sounds horrible. And of course, when she's about 12 years old. Desiree, you know this. Doesn't she? Like, she has, I can't remember what, she has some, like, massive scar or some sort of deformation that happens because of a really savage beating that she's given. And I can't quite remember.

Like, there are a lot of stories about different slaves that have different beatings that get conflated in my head. And I'm like, oh, is there like a spike in her fate? Like, I'm trying to remember exactly what it was. But also when you hear the stories, it just also perpetuates this myth of like, oh, well, black people can just survive anything, apparently, because she got a railroad spike to the face or something like that. Michelle? Right. So there at one point is a slave who's attempting to abscond, has kind of transgressed in some way. And there's an overseer who throws an iron weight at this slave and Harriet steps into the path.

Oh, wow. And the weight crushes her skull. And she's not given any type of medical care worthwhile. She's basically convalesces. They're like, okay, we'll take the rest of the afternoon off. We'll see you in the morning. Right. Which she's a disabled person for the rest of her life. In addition to just the kind of physical scarring of that and the devastation, she experiences hallucinations, long bouts of sleep, which we might think of as kind of anacolepsy in our kind of current time.

It starts what she comes to know as prophetic visions, which are oftentimes hallucinations that have to be managed. And so she's dealing in just chronic pain, right? Like through her sort of constant migraines, right? Through her life. And so this becomes this kind of ongoing thing. And so we think about that in addition of this event and then all the other things that she's able to do while managing. Right. It's amazing.

You mentioned her father. He was freed from slavery, but Harriet wasn't. So what happens is manumission becomes more common as the manumission. It means meaning the freeing. And usually it takes effect through wills. Meaning the freeing. And usually it takes effect through wills. So someone would kind of, you know, go their life and say, you know, I will if you're only if you're in it usually was predicated on obedience. So if you don't run away, if you're good.

Then when I die, then I'll just be like, oh, I'm done with you. So you can go and live the rest of your life. Right. And so Ben was a manumitted at the age of 45, which 45 is a very common age. And so he's free. His wife isn't. He's saving money. And eventually he purchased her freedom.

But what's interesting is that Harriet solicited an aide. I don't know if it was a lawyer or someone to look into her mother's background. And what they found was that actually one of her owners had manumitted Harriet, the mother, already. So it was in the will, but it had never been executed. And not only Harriet, the mother, was supposed to be manumitted, each

child at the age of 45 was also supposed to gain their freedom. So the system had failed. She was meant to be free, her mom was meant to be free, and yet still there she is. And they were like, no, no, we'll keep this actually. I mean, they can't read. So they'll never know. Exactly. Let's move on to a slightly cheerier subject, at least vaguely cheerier. Her escape. How does she get out of slavery? She actually escapes twice. The first time around September 17th, 1849, she and her brothers go away.

And one of the big kind of impetuses for this escape is that their owner passes away and they are transferred to the property of his widow. But the owner has a large amount of debt. And so they're really concerned that they're all about to be sold. So she and the brothers, they leave in the night. They're gone for about two weeks when the brothers start to have second thoughts. And they also have left behind wives and children. And so not only do they turn around, they make Harriet come back. Oh, wow. They're like, you've got to come home.

Well, I guess if they think, oh, the punishment's going to be meted out on our wives and our children and everything, we all have to go back if we don't. Right. And then Harriet stays for a very short time. But a couple of days later, around October 3rd, she leaves again by herself this time. She doesn't take anyone with her. And she is one of the her earlier jobs had been as a lumberjack. Was this when she was like seven? Like what?

Like a child. Child minder at five, you know, doing entertaining. Her teens, like early adulthood, she worked as a lumberjack with her father. So she was able to be farmed out. So she works as a lumberjack. She's five foot tall and she's wielding an axe. They're basically training a revolutionary and they don't realize it the whole time. I mean, once you hit her in the face and she's in constant pain and disabled, she has literally nothing left to lose.

It's like you are in the making of like an X-Man, basically. Yeah. So that position allows her to really learn the land. And she understands the topography of her area. One of the guiding things that she's able to use is the North Star, which she follows at night. And so she does a lot of her walking at night and moving, hiding towards the day. But also it's an infrastructure of AIDS, a large Quaker population in the area who help her give her solace, send her to different points. So this is the kind of Underground Railroad, right? She's benefiting

from that. And it's not just white Quakers or anti-abolitionists, right? This is also a network of other free Blacks. So this is a biracial system. Anywhere between one week to three weeks, it takes her. She's doing a lot of that journey on foot, 90 miles to Philadelphia. She's the original Forrest Gump. Just keep on walking, just keep running. Yeah. So she makes it to Philadelphia. She sets up a life for herself as a cook. And that's where she builds out networks from other abolitionists and starts to kind of plan so she can return. I mean, that's the extraordinary thing. So she gets out. That in itself is commendable.

But now she's going to go back in. The reason she went back was for her family, especially being in Philadelphia, realizing that if her whole family isn't free, then she can't really be free or it felt somehow wrong to be enjoying the fruits of that freedom. So did she go back every time, pick up a face like, ah, you're not my sister. Oh, forget it. Come on, let's just go. Quickly.

Well, she also, so she went back for sisters, for brothers, but also too, she would take kind of, you know, like your play cousins, who you call your brothers. So how many does she save? Because the internet gets very excited. It's like it's either two or 11 billion people. How many has she saved during that decade of? 11 to 13 trips, saving 70 people, maybe somewhere closer to 100. It's hard to know. It's pretty good. Yeah, it's really good. I mean, why do you have to embellish that? Exactly. Before she would make a trip, she'd cultivate funds.

She'd have to get her money in order. You gotta like feed people and get them passage in certain ways on certain forms of transport. Right. And she was, according to all accounts, very careful that anyone she took she could feed and care for. One of the greater things and knock-on effects of those trips was she was sharing information with people. So we also believe that several dozen people escaped through knowledge that they gained. Just followed the list of, like, turn left at the Burger King.

This is what you know. This is what you do. So she was married the first time to John Tubman, where she gets the surname, but he stays behind. So second husband? So much later, she meets a former Union soldier who's actually a border in her house named Nelson Davis. And they marry and adopt a little girl named Gertie. So she does lead this not completely domesticated life, but she does have a love and a family in her later life, which is quite beautiful. She's a working mom. Complete hero.

And she's an American hero in the military capacity as well. She's doing it all. And this is around the time that she takes up her feminist work as well. But unfortunately, Nelson's very poorly. He suffers from tuberculosis. But unfortunately, Nelson's very poorly. He suffers from tuberculosis. Even though he's a bricklayer and they, for a small time, run a business together, she also has to take up a lot of that responsibility as well. So that's a kind of another... Lumberjack, bricklayer, nurse cook. Doing it all. Independent. Narcoleptic spy. I mean, it's one hell of a career, isn't it?

Narcoleptic. That does sound like a Roan Atkinson film, though, right? It does. So she's going in, she's rescuing people. Between 70 and 100 people are coming out, which is an extraordinary thing. And there's also this idea, the internet gets excited, the idea of a ransom. So if you go online, the internet will tell you there's a big ransom on her head, $40,000, which now is millions of dollars. But that doesn't seem true, does it?

Because they don't really know who they're hunting. Right. And that's really the great thing. And especially the name change is very fortuitous in terms of thinking about when she has so many monikers by this time. They don't know that the ransom, that amount, is actually a fabrication that was started to help Harriet. That's kind of speculation.

So an abolitionist, Sarah Holly, starts this rumor in the 1860s as a way to garner support for Harriet. And so her argument was, look how much slave catchers are willing to pay for her. Surely you can give to help her, you know, her program and what she's doing, because she continues working to make the funds to fund her rescues. But also she is battling hardships throughout her life. And so this rumor. There's a whole marketing machine behind her now.

She's becoming more successful. And they're like, oh, we make you seem like a badass. Then all of a sudden people are going to want to give their money toward you. So the only evidence we have for a ransom. Do you want to guess how much it is, Desiree? I mean, OK, so 40,000 exorbitant, let's say $10,000. A little bit lower. Really?

$8,000? $100,000. What? Because that's what her master, her owner initially paid for. I was willing to pay to get it back. He's like, I just want my money back. I just want my slave back. Because, you know, he didn't know.

And then, of course, 1861, we have the American Civil War. So the country splits in half. Lincoln is the president of the North, the Union. But the South decide they're going to have their own president. Yes, Jefferson Davis. Jefferson Davis. But Harriet Tubman steps into the war. Yes.

But not initially as sort of like heroic Harriet Tubman. She's a nurse? What is she doing? She's a nurse. She's a washerwoman. She's a cook. So what happened? A lumberjack. A lumberjack. What else do you need?

Yeah, right. So one of the first places where she makes her kind of entrance is Fort Monroe in Virginia. And so what happens when war breaks out, you have several slaves who are leaving plantations. They're trying to take refuge with Union soldiers. But the position from Lincoln and his generals and advisors is that the Union can't take these people because that's going to agitate the Southerners and we're going to kind of, you know, complicate the reunification. But General Benjamin Franklin Butler says because of war amendments that allow you to take property of the rebel side, we can take place. And so they create basically a colony at Fort Monroe of like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of enslaved people.

And the idea is that, well, they need skills, they need education, they need food and clothing. And so they call on abolitionists, right, and other bodies to kind of come south and help. And so Harriet is one of the first northern free blacks to come south. And she teaches the women how to wash and launder so that they can have wage labor skills once the war is over. So it's amazing. And in 1863, President Lincoln passes the Emancipation Proclamation. What does that mean for Harriet? So it applied a decision that would free the slaves, but only in those territories that had succeeded. So if you were in a border state that didn't succeed, right, slavery was still technically legal. Right. So the states that hadn't left. The states that hadn't left could still have slavery. And so that's a kind of knock on thing that you start to get sorted in the later years of the war.

But for this immediate point, so like places like Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, those slaves are free. And it has a really great effect of bringing people to the Union cause. And this really opens up the opportunity of exploiting that knowledge that they have on the local areas. And so the Union cause like really gets a big push off the back of the Emancipation Proclamation because it gives all of these troops to the cause. And you see Harriet Tubman enter as this military leader. So she's the first woman in American history to lead troops in battle. But the Combahee River raid is like this great success. So thinking about the Combahee River, it is like water passageway.

But during the war, it was booby-trapped with all kinds of bombs, explosives, basically. And so very dangerous for the Union soldiers who wanted to make it down to the river because that's where the Confederacy was holding things. Like, there are lots of slaves, but also there are goods and, you know. So she starts this kind of spy network of working with other enslaved people in the area

of trying to understand, like, where the booby traps are. And so under the cover of darkness, these three steamboats go down the river and they're navigating. And she's at the lead. She's at the helm with a general and they're leading around all of the booby traps. And so they get to the dock safely.

Their soldiers go out. They root out the Confederate opposition. They kind of take them out and then they tell all the people, come to the boats, we're going to save you. It's great. But they also, right, it's a tactical success because they burn down everything they can't take. And they take all the goods and things. But 750 people liberated. Wow.

And she plays a role not just in the kind of tactical aspect of it, but there's a point where the people get a little agitated and concerned because they want to go. And there are these rowboats that are so, you know... She pulls out that pistol and she's like, like I said. She sings the song.

Don't make me shoot you. Yeah, she actually sings to them and it calms them. Because they're so scared that the boats are going to leave them. And so she sings a song that they all know and they sing back to her. And so things get calm and then the boats are able to kind of go back and forth and do what they need to do. Lincoln is assassinated. Spoiler alert, sorry. And the war is won by the Union. What happens to Harriet after the war? Is she a national hero?

So she has like supporters who are publicizing the Combahee raid in the immediate aftermath. And that is successful in terms of getting some monies for her cause. Also, too, she never kind of comes out of that poverty, though. She continues to have to work. And one, like, Maryland up to New York. And she is violently ejected from the train by a conductor who is agitated that she's traveling on a pass for the military. So not recognizing her service. So her arm is broken. She's fractured several ribs. Well, I mean, he throws her from a moving train. Right. Or he throws her from one car to the next. Right. With all these supporters. But there is like this threat that he will eject her from like physically from the train itself. It's a sort of Rosa Parks moment, but a slight step on, isn't it? Because it's not recognizing what she's done for the nation.

Right. Right. And it's true for a lot of black soldiers in America's history who have like fought and some have died. And they're like, why can't I be treated like a human? I've served this country multiple times over. Right. And so this really bitter moment. But also thinking about someone whose parents, she has elderly parents that she's taking care of. Her brothers, we know from the letters, were really dependent upon her. The primary breadwinner is now incapacitated. And so she's laid up for weeks. She does have benefactors who step in from time to time, but it's a really precarious position. She and then the minute you get success, there are so many people in your family who are depending on you to help out in certain places.

Right. It's not like there's anything to build on. It's always like there's somebody else that needs to be taken care of. The minute you're incapacitated, like everything crumbles again. Zoraide, can you guess how many years it takes for her to get her war pension? I'm imagining it's something horrific. Like I'd be surprised if she got it and it wasn't like some descendants so many years later. I'm amazed that they actually paid out while she was

still alive. Let's say maybe it covered her funeral costs. Like, I don't know, 20 years. It's 30 years. Yeah. Yeah. Like right at the end of the 19th century, she finally gets it. And what's interesting. So she was receiving a ration initially, but she gave it up because she was worried about the impression that she was receiving preferential treatment. So during the war itself. It plagues us still. It's like, what, you mean your pay? Right. For doing what nobody else could do?

And like for going down a river that was booby trapped that no one else would go down and just being like, I'll sort it out. No worries. Right. So during the war, she gets about $200. So towards the end, she's actually starts to petition the government for her back pay. And she wants about $700, which is still less than what a spy would have earned. That's denied. She's not able to get. On what grounds? Just like, no, you're still a bit slavey. Sorry. Bye. Probably as well. But also, too, the type of work that she did was clandestine. And so they can just sort of go like, oh, it never happened.

Right. What was interesting, one of the things that really helped was the biographers who worked on her behalf, who wrote documents. So when she receives her wage benefit, it wasn't like a random bureaucrat in an office who was like, you know we're gonna do good by harry tubman yeah it was a congressional order so like they sat around congress to discuss this and then somebody had to be like okay it's official right yeah and the gendered narrative of that which is interesting is that she gets widow's benefits before she's able to get her own benefits as right as a spy and soldier and participator in the war. So she doesn't have much money, but at the end of her life, she still gives land to a church and opens a sort of an old people's home.

Yes. Throughout her life, she really took care of like the indigent orphans, the elderly. The National Association of Colored Women raises these funds, as well as African Methodist Episcopal Church to start this home that's named in her honor for aged people. And what's so amazing, during a couple of years before she dies herself, she's a resident in this home. Yeah. So that's where she kind of lives her last days, which I think is just a...

So she's Harriet Tubman in the Harriet Tubman retirement home. Yeah, right. Yeah. Do you think she was sort of pretty badass about it? She was like, it's named after me. By the way, I'll do what I like. This is my house. And she hasn't suffered enough,

but she also has brain surgery with no anesthetic. She does have this brain surgery to try to kind of fix some of these effects. I just remembered what no anesthetic means. So she's awake, face down on a massage table. And probably had some grain alcohol, but that would have been... Yeah, but that's nothing. She's biting down on a bullet table and probably had some grain alcohol but that would have been She's biting down on a bullet isn't she?

Which she's seen soldiers do in the Civil War This is a lady who has been brutalized her whole life and she is still going at 91 She died at 90? 91 I think In her own home, named after her

It's a phenomenal life. The Nuance Window! This is where we allow our experts to go to town on whatever it is they want to say. Do you want to tell us in your Nuance Window about Harriet Tubman and the idea of her as an icon? Yes, thank you. So the scholar Kansania Wise Whitehead, she said what I think is the most beautiful thing about Harriet Tubman.

And she says, quote, she was more than what we talk about, but a little less than what we try to pretend that she was. And I think that that's a beautiful way to think about Harriet Tubman and the work that she was doing, right? She existed in an institution that did its best to deny her humanity, to deny the kind of contributions of black people.

And she worked within that in ways that were ingenious and clever and novel to assert her identity and that of many other people. And I think this kind of effort to mythologize her and to build her up more than she she was enough. Right. kind of effort to mythologize her and to build her up more than she she was enough right just how she was she was enough but with that being said i do think that there's different ways that we should think about her right her absence and feminist scholarship i think is crazy and thinking about her presence and important feminist movements i think that we need to do more work in recovering those narratives the ways in which she helped articulate a kind of version of female consciousness, not just black women consciousness, but female consciousness in the 19th and 20th century is an unprecedented contribution. And

we deserve to remember her for that. Awesome. Thank you so much. Desiree, if you've got a follow-up point on that, is there anything you want to say regarding that? Just word. Absolutely. I mean, so many of the superstars of the sort of abolitionist movement of slavery are women and are people who have the consciousness of like, we need to make sure

that everybody is given their due as far as human beings' personhood is concerned. And also just a lot of times because we mythologize someone like Harriet Tubman, she loses her femaleness. You know, she is she's black. Therefore, she's just black. She may as well be a man or an animal or whatever you want to reduce that to. Because, you know, she is a lot more than that. And also the fact that she has the nuance of humanity, like, you know, she did these incredible things

and she navigated a booby trap forever, but then she was also con by con man as an older lady. Like, you know, that means that she's a human being. I think it's very important for us to remember that that's the humanity we embody. And that's all we have time for today. But let me say a huge thank you to our incredible guests. In History Corner, Dr. Michelle Cressfield from the University of Birmingham,

and in Comedy Corner, the incomparable Desiree Birch. And to you, fair listener, I bid you a fond farewell. Until next time, bye! This is how the pandemic ends. Not with a bang, but with a shot. Or rather, billions of shots. I'm Tim Harford, the presenter of More or Less and 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.

And in a new podcast series from the BBC, we'll be covering the defining story of the crisis. The search for a vaccine. We look at the cutting-edge biotechnology behind these vaccines and the underrated business of fridges and vials and porter cabins that will be essential in a huge public health campaign. And of course, there are the other questions. Who's going to pay for this?

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