Highlights from this issue...

A shaman writes biography
Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat by Paula Gunn Allen. New York: HarperCollins, 2003, 368 pp., $26.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Joanne M. Braxton

 

Pocahontas engraving by Simon Van de Passe. The only portrait done in her lifetime, 1616. From Pocahontas.

POCAHONTAS WAS THE INDIAN PRINCESS who saved the roguish Captain John Smith from certain death, only to be abandoned by him. Or so goes American myth. Now Paula Gunn Allen sets another myth, created from a Native or First American worldview, alongside the story that John Smith popularized in 1624--17 years after he met Pocahontas and eight years after she had died and was no longer around to contest his version of events.

I teach at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where locally, Pocahontas is known as Matoaka. A large body of water and a nature preserve on the campus named in her honor date back to the college's founding. Pocahontas, which means "mischief," or something similar to it, was Matoaka's childhood nickname. After she was kidnapped, baptized, and married to John Rolfe, she became known as Lady Rebecca Rolfe. According to Allen, she had yet another name, Amonute, which denotes her standing as "an initiate and a powerful practitioner of the Dream-Vision People, a shaman-priestess in modern terms."

Rather than establishing new and unknown facts about Pocahontas, Allen focuses on "the importance of story." When new information does emerge, not all of it can be verified outside of the oral tradition, which is to say in written, white and/or masculinist sources. Allen supplements obviously biased 17th-century English sources with material from travelers who kept notes on Native languages, customs, beliefs, and material culture and the inferences she draws from these. Thus, her book is really about "his/story" vs. "her/story," with Allen speaking for Pocahontas. This takes a certain amount of arrogance, but according to the logic of the Native spiritual universe as described by Allen, she, like Pocahontas herself, must follow the dictates of her spirit guides.

The first problem for most readers of Pocahontas will be getting a handle on the story itself. A careful reading of the introduction is the key to understanding Allen's narrative. In it, Allen lays out the overall pattern of her work, her methodology, and her intentions. In her words, she uses a (deliberately) "random, almost chaotic system of narrative" that employs Native American rhetorical devices such as repetition, deadpan humor, and shifting points of view, which may confuse and/or alienate some readers. Allen continually redirects determined readers to her initial premises for greater understanding--or perhaps as a form of literary revenge. After all, Native Americans have always been expected to do things in the way of the dominant culture. In this text, the dominant is on the periphery, and the Native-identified author makes the rules. Some readers may put the book down in frustration, but others will be intrigued by the challenge.

Generically, Pocahontas should probably be classified as biomythography, the term Audre Lorde invented to describe her memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Both works blend biography and myth. Allen says that because she herself is a "mixed-blood, hybrid woman…. Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat is a mixed-breed or hybrid study, as American Indian life in the United States is a mixed-breed or hybrid life." "Pocahontas," Allen says, "like her people, can never be known in terms of 'facts' bereft of the spiritual tradition that defined her and her people, or understood outside the spirit-centered world they inhabited." She explains that she is writing against the traditional Western biography, "a process that singles out an individual, cuts her out of the total biota, or life system, within which she lives and from which she derives her identity, and gives her value and prestige above the rest." Allen contrasts this Western approach to biography with what she calls the "Native traditional life story," which is "situated within the entire life system: the community of living things, geography, climate, spirit people, and supernaturals." She seeks to contextualize the story of Pocahontas within "the sacred narratives, ceremonial occasions, daily concepts and assumptions, and interactions with the other world" that a Native storyteller would include within the frame of the story of Pocahontas/Matoaka, "as a matter of course." Underscoring the hybridity of her project, Allen employs Algonquin concepts and words and attempts to base her interpretations of Pocahontas on "a Powhatan worldview." As a storyteller, Allen asks her readers to enter the universe of Pocahontas, a woman who walked both with power and with "powa," the ability to dream in a prophetic way.

Allen's book differs from biographies such as Frances Mossiker's Pocahontas: The Life and Legend (1996) not only in this emphasis on matters of the spirit but also in Allen's placement of Pocahontas rather than Captain John Smith at the center of the story. Her woman-identified biomythography posits a woman (i.e., Pocahontas) as a real person, which she sees as another challenge to the traditional Western biography:

It has also long been the modern way to frame the female as an adjunct to the male. In this mode, a man is a person. A woman is attached to a male, thus enjoying a sort of vicarious personhood. One locates a woman's identity by showing her relationship to the real human being--husband, father, brother, or king--and thereby judges her significance. This convention, like the separation of the person from the matrix of her life, is not a convention of the Oral Tradition in Indian country. (pp. 2-3)

ONCE ALLEN'S PREMISES ARE UNDERSTOOD, one can begin to read, or rather to negotiate the narrative.

Allen introduces us to a very different Pocahontas from the one we have known, a barely pubescent girl who was "by birth, vision, training, and circumstance the agent of change."

As the spring equinox approached, Pocahontas knew it was time for her apowa, or Dream-Vision.... At midmorning she quietly stepped out of the longhouse where she lived---a half-cylindrical structure made of bark and animal skins lashed to wooden frames. She left the central area of the village, walking out through fields where the deer shared path with her, across shallow streams, until she came into a clearing.

…Pocohantas had been directed to the proper hobbomak, a natural sacred structure, by her manito--her sacred medicine power, her connection to the Great Spirits that directed her spiritual path. She would have gone at the direction of the Council of Women, responsible for teaching and guiding her along with the direction of her manito. (p. 28)

There be at this tyme certayne Prophesies afoote amongst the people enhabiting about us…which his [Powhatan's] priests continually put him in feare of…How from the Chesapeak Bay a Nation should arise, which should dissolve and give end to his Empier.

…that twice they should give overthrowe and dishearten the Attempters, and such Straungers as should envade their Territorye, or laboure to settell a plantation amongst them, but the third tyme they themselves should fall into their Subjection and under their Conquest. (pp. 34-35)

Since a white feather, or numerous white feathers, always signifies a Beloved Woman and is carried or worn by such women most of the time, it is likely that she did indeed have that "calling," or vocation, from birth. Her clan name, Matoaka, signified her station in life--her destiny, if you will. It foreshadowed the part she would play in the transformation of the Powhatan peoples and of the land they knew as the tsencommacah. (p. 31)

Allen cites several familiar images of Pocahontas where she is either carrying white feathers or wearing white feathers or soft down laced into her hair. As an initiated Beloved Woman (one among many), or a Beloved Woman in training, Allen suggests, Pocahontas would have been given the responsibility, even the obligation, to make life-and-death decisions under certain circumstances.

Thus, it was in her role as a Beloved Woman that Pocahontas spied on the fort at Jamestown, diverting the Europeans with her "mischief" and reporting to her Powhatan people what she saw and heard. As a nascent entrepreneur, she and her family helped her husband John Rolfe establish a new, hybrid blend of native and Spanish tobacco as the most profitable cash crop in Virginia. She eventually served as a de facto diplomat between the English and the Powhatans and between the Virginia Company and the English.

WHEN 26-YEAR-OLD JOHN SMITH set sail for Virginia in December 1607, he too became an agent of the great change foretold in the tsenacommacah, although he lacked the foreknowledge of his role that Pocahontas, as a Powhatan initiate, possessed. Smith was "a new breed of Englishman--thrill seeker, entrepreneur, man on the make," says Allen. "While Christian in faith, he was more interested in adventure than spirituality of any sort." As the loser at a game of craps, Smith drew a dangerous mission "to locate the headwaters of the Chicakahominy River and to contact Powhatan, the 'king' of the Powhatan Alliance." Smith was captured by the Pamunkey, Pocahontas' tribe, which had duly noted that that "the coming of the Virginia Company…marked the third incursion of strangers." The tribe had to decide what to do with him.

Like Mossiker and other recent scholars, Allen emphasizes the complexity and sophistication of Powhatan society and the tendency of the culture-bound English invaders to misinterpret what they saw and experienced. Allen takes us back to Werowocomoco, the ritual center and the royal court of the Powhatan Confederacy, on the fateful night of January 8, 1608, when the Powhatans had John Smith's head on the chopping block--but Allen's is a very different story from Smith's self-aggrandizing adventure narrative, from which he emerges as the irresistible and all-powerful white male.

Because he was a warrior and a leader of his own people, the captured Smith, by Powhatan custom, was entitled to undergo certain tests to determine whether he would live or die, although Smith had no way of knowing this. Kept captive and taken from village to village for weeks, he was feasted and otherwise well treated. Allen argues that the leaders among the confederacy likely "met and concurred: This man and his people were the threat depicted in Pocahontas' Dream-Vision." A ritual during the Feast of Nikomis, a celebration of regeneration, would determine whether Captain John Smith of the Virginia Company could be remade as a Powhatan:

In the transformation from one state to another, the prior state or condition must cease to exist. It must "die." During the Nikomis festival, John Smith would undergo just such a ritual--magical--transformation. The purpose of this "adoption" or remaking ceremony is to magically change an Englishman into a Powhatan. If the magic works, the new man will belong to the tsenacommacah. (p. 42)

Not long after, Smith would endure a near mortal wound and be returned to England, unfit for further duty. His English colleagues told Pocahontas that he had died. Only many years later, in England, as Lady Rolfe, did she learn the truth. Meeting Smith in England, the outraged young mother at first could not bear even to look at him, but when she did, she challenged him, not for abandoning her, but for failing to live out his remade life and to keep the promises he had made as Nantaquod to bear allegiance to his adopted father, Wahunsenacawh, the Powhatan.

Chief Anne Richardson, primary leader of today's Powhatan confederacy calls Pocahontas "cutting edge work." Others, impatient with the form and the emphasis on story rather than his/story, will dismiss it out of hand. But as a scholar of women's life writings, I find Pocahontas tremendously interesting. As a new form of biography, it interrogates and reinvents a familiar story and articulates it from the perspective of those who have long been voiceless.

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Pocahontas' voice
A conversation with Paula Gunn Allen

by Joanne M. Braxton

PAULA GUNN ALLEN, of Lebanese and Laguna-Pueblo descent, has been tremendously productive as a poet, a writer, and a spokesperson for women's and Native American issues. Allen has published almost 20 books, including five books of poetry and Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat.

Joanne Braxton: Why did you decide to write about Pocahontas?

Paula Gunn Allen: Very briefly, because she had spoken to me across the years. I had encountered Charles Larson's chapter, in his book American Indian Fiction (1978), about Pocahontas' influence on American literature, specifically American-Indian fiction. She more or less "said" my poem "Pocahontas, to Her English Husband, John Rolfe," which I wrote in 1978-1979. That was over two decades ago, of course, and as with all "sendings" it was and is subject to my own abilities to "hear" and transcribe accurately--which has everything to do with what I know and my own biases. That is, what I can hear depends on what I recognize and how I map or contextualize what is said or sent.

Also, because a book group--a company that devises book projects and hires someone to do the writing--wrote requesting that I suggest someone to do the job [of writing a new biography of Pocahontas]. I accepted, after several weeks' thought, but the results were very unsatisfactory to me, so I withdrew after agonizing months of trying to do what my editor wanted. In the meantime, HarperSanFrancisco accepted my proposal that I write the book the way I saw fit. So, the book group's desire that the book be written for an average audience, say a newspaper-reader level of literacy, had to be ditched because I couldn't do it and remain faithful to the story of Pocahontas' actual life.

I think they had envisioned a book about the popular Pocahontas who gave John Smith fever and Disney Corporation beaucoup bucks. Not that I would mind the latter. And lord knows Pocahontas gave me more fever than ever Peggy Lee sang of--I'm still recovering from a bout lasting four years so far (or 26, depending). I just couldn't down-mind my writing, however much I wanted to. So I wrote the book with the able help of my Harper's editor Eric Brandt and, alas, gave up my dreams of a movie, a big bank account, and a shiny new car!

I think the whole thing was a set-up by the manito (little mysteries) to get Pocahontas' story out at this troubled and tumultuous time and in the way I would present it (with a lot of assistance from my own mysterious movers).

JB: What did Matoaka say when she spoke to you?

PGA: She said, "He [John Smith] give me fever…not! That smelly, hairy, old man! He couldn't give even my mother fever! I had a task, a job, and it was with and for the tsenacommacah [the land of the Powhatan people]. He figured in it mainly because the manito said so. But in another way I guess he did give me fever…and all of us too. Most died from it."

I heard her most directly near her burial place at Gravesend, England, on the banks of the Thames, near the only structure left from the year she was offloaded, dying or already dead and unceremoniously buried in the church there. She didn't use words. She was a sense of beauty, as in iyani, orenda, hozho, wakan, powa--mani. It's not a modern/postmodern American-English language sort of thing. Perhaps that sense of beauty is what gives rise to the arts: poetry, music, painting, sculpture, dance--the state one reaches when hearing some superb violinist or singer; reading a mind-stopping poem; seeing some natural sight--the Pacific shores, moonlight, a jillion stars at 2 am. The English and Scots countryside is loaded with that quality. (I wish I had an English word for it other than "beauty," because "beauty" might signal hair, cosmetics, Hollywood, babe, doll, which are generally about as far from what I mean as you can get. Horace called it "the sublime"; Pythagoras, "the golden mean.")

Translated, she said, "I'm here. Where I want to be. Where I was supposed to be. England. A promissory note, sort of. A promise and a vow, a bridge."

JB: I don't know if you identify as a lesbian writer, but you are often included in "the club" by others. Does your orientation make a difference?

PGA: I do accept "lesbian," though I'm probably more accurately "bi." Except, of course, I'm actually human. I don't fall in love with or get turned on to sexes/genders, after all. I am most likely to be drawn to border people, to those who although female, seem male, and those who although male, seem female. I'm a sucker for white hair. However there's little likelihood that I would ever have a domestic partnership, marriage, or long term relationship with gay males, not of the very femme type, for sure. I think I am neither/nor, both/and. Right now I'm of the celibacy school of human sexuality, the saints be praised. Have been since time out of mind, 15-plus years.

JB: There are many books on Pocahontas--so why another one? How does your book differ from, say, Pocahontas: The Life and Legend by Frances Mossiker (1976)?

PGA: Mossiker wrote her book before the Disney version crashed upon us, lucky woman.

I relied on the Mossiker book a lot, but her story of Pocahontas is largely concerned with the English. Pocahontas has at best a supporting role to the central story. Even the explanations of the Powhatan world were English/American academic historiography and ethnography, which as a general rule have little bearing on Native people's views of their own world. What I wanted to do in my book was to make Matoaka the central figure--the entrée, not a nice side dish, large footnote, or ingénue.

Mossiker, a fine historian and great writer, wrote from outside [of Pocahontas' story] in every way (other than sex). I write as a somewhat outsider and a somewhat insider; that is, I am academically trained, but in interdisciplinary studies. My PhD is in American Studies with a concentration in American-Indian Studies. I am modern, not 17th century, but because of my academic background and personal inclinations I know quite a bit about the period. I am familiar with historiographic and ethnographic methodologies, having studied both and spent a great deal of time reading in these and related fields such as religious studies and comparative religion. I also know American-Indian methodologies, which differ rather widely from those of historiography or ethnography. I've read scores if not hundreds of books by American-Indian writers in just about every discipline except hard science. I am Indian, an immediate descendent of mother-right Indian society, Laguna Pueblo. I am also a poet and artist.

My book takes Pocahontas from the situation of victim to that of actor; from object to subject of her own story. Its primary context is Algonquin, not Anglo-American. I mention major issues that find no place in any other account, such as the free market and its influence on English policy, Algonquin/Powhatan conventions such as the Medicine Dance, Dream Visions, and other Algonquin/Powhatan institutions. I wasn't out to demonize the English but to connect them with the Powhatans. I don't know of any study that does that.

From an American-Indian context I can "read" data recorded by the early English in the region in a way that clarifies much that Mossiker and others find obscure or that they discount or dismiss out of hand.

JB: What makes your book a necessary read?

PGA: It gives a clear view of who we were (as Americans) and maybe of who we might be. It locates us now, four hundred years since we began. There is an old saying, "Begin each journey as you mean to end it," which I take to mean that the way you view your task and the attention and quality you give to your efforts define the result.

JB: Have you seen the statue at Jamestown of John Smith, with its inscription in Latin reading "To Conquer is to Live"?

PGA: By the way, Jamestown wasn't Jamestown in the period in question (1617-1623). It was James Fort. Maybe thinking of it as "Fort James" would make its role and significance clearer. It occurs to me that there are "Forts" all over the place, probably lots more of them than the Greco-Roman capitol buildings that symbolize the truth in our civilization/situation.

I salute the truthfulness of whoever did the statue and inscription; it's just too bad that smell isn't part of the bronze-effect! Smith really liked to travel and write about his adventures. Maybe the inscription in Latin should read, "To Brag is to Be."

I also like that he's looking out to sea. East-Coast Americans think the US is in Western England or Europe. Maybe sometime in the next century they'll realize it ain't so. One hopes.

JB: What do you think of the statue in Jamestown of Matoaka?

PGA: She looks like a 19th-century Plains Indian--a Lakota, Pawnee, or Kiowa. I found it aggravating. I guess the sculptor, or whoever commissioned the thing, worked on the principle "seen one, seen 'em all." There is a companion Pocahontas statue that was given to Gravesend by, I think, the Virginia Heritage Society, or some Virginia group involved in Pocahontas and Fort James history. It's beautiful, of course, but as I said, the Algonquins, including the Powhatans, didn't dress like Plains Indians. In fact, they didn't dress like they did in the centuries following the invasion. I would like a statue of Pocahontas in Powhatan undress, as I tried to get on the cover of my book (no luck there, either.)

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The penance of speech
The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, 244 pp, $22.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Rhonda Cobham

 

Edwidge Danticat Photo by Jill Krementz

ARISTIDE'S DESPERATE STRUGGLE to govern in Haiti is barely mentioned in Edwidge Danticat's new novel. Her focus is mostly on the ways in which events in the 1980s, near the end of the Duvalier regime, continue to haunt Haitians who have since migrated to America. Nevertheless, the nagging uncertainties surrounding Haiti's recent crisis reverberated like the shadow pain of an amputated limb all through my reading of The Dew Breaker. The narrator in Danticat's last novel, The Farming of Bones, bore witness to the genocide of Haitians at the hands of their Dominican neighbors in the mid-1930s. This time, however, both hunter and prey are the monstrous progeny of Haiti itself.

The narrative line in The Dew Breaker is strung across a series of linked short stories that leads to a single question: Can the tales we tell about our past offer us any alternatives in the future other than those of becoming either hunter or prey? The answer, like the answer to the riddle about trees and their shadows with which the book closes, depends on perspective: the angles from which the multiple plots illuminate character; the chronology the entire narrative imposes on events; the quotidian details--a stone in a glass of water, an overflowing ashtray, three snippets of fabric--through which the stories locate or sublimate pain. Danticat's unexpected juxtapositions intensify the quiet tragedies on the periphery of the action. Thus, a casual sexual liaison one story mentions in passing seems merely ornamental in a plot that focuses on the protagonist's reunification with his newly arrived wife. When the same liaison resurfaces at the margins of another story, from the perspective of the woman whose happiness it destroyed, we discover that the small cruelties we easily forgive in fictional heroes and close friends may be susceptible to the same scrutiny as the enormities of which we accuse our most sadistic enemies.

Danticat's use of language raises the stakes in the wider debate over the most effective way to represent the Creole voice on the page. Unlike Patrick Chamoiseau's Martinican Creole in his Prix Goncourt-winning novel Texaco, which acquires a patina of innocence in response to the corrupting dominance of colonial French, Danticat's Haitian Creole is used by state officials as well as ordinary Haitian people. Consequently, her narrators cannot claim to speak a language that has no alliances with institutional authority. Moreover, Danticat sees Caribbean Creoles as vital, increasingly metropolitan, phenomena that change continuously in response to new political and linguistic challenges. The title The Dew Breaker, for example, is one translation of shoukèt laroze, an expression that refers to the silent, magical way in which dew "falls," or "breaks," as they say in Haitian Creole, on the early morning leaves. As Danticat explains, Haitians under Duvalier's regime often used the term ironically to name the state-sponsored torturers who typically descended upon their victims in the silence before dawn. But Danticat's title also signifies on Jaques Roumain's 1946 novel, Les Gouverneurs de la rosée, translated into English by Langston Hughes as Masters of the Dew. Roumain co-opts the picturesque, rural imagery of shoukèt laroze into his novel's rewriting of Romeo and Juliet as Haitian pastoral. His translation of the Creole phrase allows him to connect Haiti's feudal past to his utopian vision for a triumphant proletariat future in a modern nation state, where men will be masters of the elements, capable of transcending narrow allegiances to family and clan. At the time Roumain was writing, nationalism in Europe already had demonstrated a sinister proclivity for co-opting "authentic" folk customs and language to support the agendas of totalitarian regimes. However, Roumain's translation of shoukèt laroze elides that possibility in the Creole context. Danticat's alternative translation suggests violence as well as mastery. It makes visible the excesses of the nationalist, socialist, and capitalist ideologies that have stunted Haiti's growth during the six decades that separate The Dew Breaker from Masters of the Dew.

Freed from the myth of a morally untainted Creole, as well as from the assumption that Creole-speaking subjects never think or speak on their own behalf within the discourse of modernity, Danticat can use any language register she chooses to carry her message. All the registers available to her characters make their appearance in the stories. The text indicates their presence by meticulously documenting the media through which these multiple languages are filtered. There are New York am talk radio broadcasts in French and Creole; answering machine cassettes containing messages in stilted English that start off with "Alo!" ; notebooks crammed with English sentences in barely decipherable script; tables bearing food or drinks over which American English is peppered with Haitian expressions like sezi--the Creole word for crazy--or Kennedy--Creole slang for secondhand American clothes. Much of this linguistic variety is transcribed onto the page in English, but Danticat alerts the reader each time the language shifts. In one tense exchange between the protagonist, Ka, and her father, for example, the three language registers represented are crucial to the emotional nuance of the passage. Ka's continued identification with the father she can no longer trust; his need, after year's of silence, to explain himself to her; the necessity and impossibility of their communication-all are indicated in their awkward shifts between Haitian English, Haitian Creole, and American English:

"I say rest in Creole," he prefaces, "because my tongue too heavy in English to say things like this, especially older things."

"Fine," I reply defiantly in English.

"Ka," he continues in Creole, "when I first saw your statue, I wanted to be buried with it, to take it with me into the other world."

"Like the Ancient Egyptians, " I continue in English.

He smiles, grateful, I think, that in spite of everything, I can still appreciate his passions. (p. 17)

And then there are the endless, empty silences that leave their bearers scarred and bloated: A reflection in a shiny metal elevator door grotesquely inflates the body of a woman who can speak to no one about the pregnancy she has aborted. The bruised, calloused hands of a child bear silent witness to the daily torture of the classroom. Like the novice journalist who interviews a wedding seamstress in one story, the reader is challenged to imagine "men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives. Maybe there were hundreds, even thousands, of people like this, men and women chasing fragments of themselves long lost to others." For these silent characters, the issue is not one of authenticity--which choice of language is most politically correct for describing their pain--but of ontology--how does one begin to describe a pain that exists beyond language?

THE ANSWER, FOR DANTICAT, seems to be that stories must be told with whatever words we have--even the stories about their victims that torturers revisit in their dreams. One crucial moment of storytelling occurs deep in the Haitian countryside. The scene is reminiscent of Joseph Zobel's 1955 novel Rue Cases-Nègres, better known to American audiences in its 1983 adaptation for the screen by Euzhan Palcy as Sugar Cane Alley. The film follows the conventions of the Caribbean narrative of childhood, in which Creole communities figure as sites of rural innocence that the boy protagonist celebrates, even as he moves away from femininity, orality, and pastoral freedoms towards masculinity, text, and the disciplines of modernity. Danticat's story inverts this paradigm. Instead of sitting with the child protagonist at the feet of a wise old griot who instructs us in the myths of his people's origins, we lounge with the teenager Claude, as he imports the hip-hop idiom of Flatbush Avenue into a new myth of origins about a son who destroys his father in order to feed his drug habit. Claude cannot speak Creole, yet he is one of the few protagonists in the novel who comes close to achieving absolution through narrative. Another man writes down his story in a formal letter addressed to his unborn child. A woman learns how to "parcel out [her] sorrows" in stories and songs among her friends, "each walking out with fewer than we'd carried in."

Like Danticat's previous novels, The Dew Breaker succeeds in transforming Haiti and its diaspora from an abject spectacle to a symbol of the persistence of human dignity in the face of terror. Even the hunters in this grim passion play seem to struggle for redemption through the penance of speech. Like their prey, they carry on their bodies the scars left by the indignities they have suffered and inflicted. And yet those same bodies continue to yearn for beauty and order and the possibility of love. There is nothing sentimental about Danticat's novel. It has etched into my imagination images I would prefer to think have no basis in reality. But, like the mouth that contains both speech and silence in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, from which Ka gets her name, this novel's unlikely combination of shadows, rhythms, and silences captures the aspirations all immigrants bring with them, the nightmares we are trying to escape, and the fantasies of joy, loss, and longing that tie us inextricably to imagined homelands in the Caribbean, in Brooklyn, and beyond.

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Pepper in the soup
Millicent Fenwick: Her Way by Amy Schapiro. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003, 282 pp., $29.00 hardcover.
Pat Schroeder: A Woman of the House by Joan A. Lowy. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2003, 216 pp., $24.95 hardcover.
Fire in My Soul by Joan Steinau Lester as authorized by Eleanor Holmes Norton. New York: Atria Books, 2003, 370 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Marie Shear

IN THEIR BOOK ABOUT the president they've called "Shrub," Bushwhacked, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose call Americans "tough, funny, sassy, brave, smart, and full of fight. They get pissed-off, they endure, they fight like hell, they start all over--whatever it takes." Ivins and Dubose might be describing the politicians in these biographies--Millicent Fenwick, Pat Schroeder, and Eleanor Holmes Norton. The books are, in order, an able work about a late-blooming aristocrat, a good journalist's report on a piquant feminist, and a passable account of a protean activist.

Few women born in 1910 eventually served four terms in the US House of Representatives as Millicent Fenwick did. Born into immense wealth and entrenched power, Amy Schapiro writes, Fenwick felt "terrible" when she wasn't allowed to join a fox hunt at age four.

Intellectually curious and an avid reader, Fenwick had to leave school at 15: Her stepmother considered education unimportant for girls. Fenwick's husband, a charming liar and playboy, abandoned her and their children. Needing to earn her way for the first time, she began a 14-year stint at Vogue magazine. Pressured into writing a book about etiquette--a topic she thought trivial--she became the primary author of a bestseller, Vogue's Book of Etiquette, drawing 13,000 people to one event on her book tour.

In 1952, having left Vogue, Fenwick became a civic volunteer in New Jersey, helping the NAACP, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, legal aid, and prison reformers. She climbed the Republican Party ladder. After service in the state assembly and as state director of consumer affairs, she was elected to the US House in 1974, one of 18 women among 435 representatives.

Millicent Fenwick reading the New Jersey newspaper. From Millicent Fenwick.

In the House, her assertiveness and patrician aura combined with her gender and age to make her distinctive. Garry Trudeau fans followed the adventures of her alter ego, Lacey Davenport, in Doonesbury cartoons. She opposed congressional pay raises, fought for Soviet dissidents, and led in establishing a commission to monitor international compliance with the Helsinki Accords on human rights--an effort that forms the most substantive section of Schapiro's book. Yet Fenwick dealt with constituents' problems by handwriting thousands of letters instead of seeking systemic solutions.

She supported the Equal Rights Amendment and was committed to abortion rights. But according to Pat Schroeder, "[I]t was hard for her to understand the women who don't have money." Schapiro says, "[W]omen's organizations did not embrace her, nor did she embrace them."

She was reelected three times before losing the 1982 US Senate race to a Democrat, Frank Lautenberg, in a campaign Schapiro describes as inept; Fenwick cited the building of a public swimming pool in the 1950s as her greatest achievement. NOW did not back her, Schroeder later observed, because it wanted Democrats to control the Senate. The following year, President Reagan appointed her ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, a position she held until she retired in 1987.

You have to give Fenwick her props for opposing President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon and for learning to care about abortion rights, inner-city poverty, and racism. "[O]ne thing people cannot bear," she said, "is a sense of injustice." Yet I grew restless while she made corsages as a Republican volunteer at about 50, feeling that anyone spared the exhaustion of poverty, and even the time-consuming chores of middle-class life, had had ample freedom to involve herself in policy before then. At her funeral in 1992, a grandson said that Fenwick "showed that indeed one can fight for change without breaching decorum."

MERCIFULLY, PAT SCHROEDER AND ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON are indecorous. Roughly 30 years younger than Fenwick, coming of age in an era ripe for civil rights and feminism, both had a shorter chronological and psychological trajectory to the US House, and neither has a whiff of dilettante about her. Two years before Fenwick won her House seat at age 64, Schroeder, a Colorado Democrat, was elected at age 32. When she left the House 24 years later, she had fought for women's rights with memorable wit; withstood venomous personal attacks; been passed over as vice presidential candidate in favor of the less experienced and less independent Geraldine Ferraro; and become a "hero to legions of liberals who admired her uncompromising championship of underdog causes." At her best, writes Joan A. Lowy in Pat Schroeder, she welcomed the role of maverick, "skewering her ideological foes and invigorating her supporters."

The child of populists, she made Phi Beta Kappa, then earned a degree from Harvard Law School. When she applied to law firms, they asked whether she could type.

The House climate was scarcely balmy. The feudal lout who chaired its armed services committee humiliated her. Democratic leaders distrusted her and never let her chair a full committee. Other Democrats, who privately agreed with her on issues, clammed up or envied her national stature. The military detested her challenges to its bloated spending. For seeking punishment of the brass hats who assaulted nearly 100 women at the Tailhook convention or protected the perpetrators, she was showered with sexist slime, which Lowy unfortunately does not quote.

She pushed for controversial programs like the Women's Health Equity Act and for abortion rights and day care. She worked for lesbians and gays in the military and against deadbeat dads, congressional pay raises (like Fenwick), the Vietnam War, and nuclear weapons testing. She insisted that women be included in all-male government medical testing and promoted funds for breast cancer research.

When she won a battle, others snatched her laurels. After her eight-year campaign for parental and medical leave, she was relegated to the audience as President Clinton signed it into law, surrounded by male senators and representatives basking in the photo op. She decided not to run for president in 1988, finding the process dehumanizing, cried briefly in public when she announced her decision, and was bitter about the scorn her tears evoked.

When her 12th term ended in January 1997, Republican zealots, by then in the majority, were frog-marching the House back to the Stone Age, having already razed the congressional women's caucus she had cofounded and led. She was "weary and disheartened," Lowy says, and chose not to run again. "I wanted to go out at the top of my game," said Schroeder.

Pat Schroeder in an Aunt Sam costume, campaigning on the 16th Street Mall in Denver, accompanied by supporter Philippa Troxell. From Pat Schroeder.

Lowy is an appreciative, though not uncritical, biographer. She reports that Schroeder exaggerated one cheesy incident with the head of the armed services committee. In her autobiography, 24 Years of House Work (1998), Schroeder wrote that he forced her and a black male representative to share a single chair when the committee met. Lowy says the incident lasted one day, not two years, though the bigotry was relentless. (Another critic for the Women's Review and I unwittingly spread the inflated story, as have writers for other publications.)

Schroeder was "the preeminent supporter of women's rights in Congress," Lowy concludes. "When it came to articulating and defending the liberal viewpoint--a role as valid as that of legislative mechanic--she had few equals." Today she heads the Association of American Publishers.

Among these books, Pat Schroeder is the best match between a quotable subject and a capable writer. Lowy's well paced work is enlivened because Schroeder would "wield political ridicule like a whip," and her sallies don't date. Of Pentagon pork she said, "If it's designed to shoot or fly or go boom, we'll buy it." On activism she said, "If you see something, pounce on it. To the pouncer goes the mouse." On the double standard she said, "Women who sleep around in [Washington] are called sluts. Men who do it are called senators." On political independence she said, "I was hard to paper-train."

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON's life is uncommonly vivid, stretching from protests in college to combative, pragmatic advocacy in and out of government. Fire in My Soul, by Joan Steinau Lester "as authorized by" Norton, quotes extensively from 54 interviews with her because, Lester says, African-American women's voices are too seldom heard. During the 45 years the author has known her, Norton has "both educated and infuriated me, sometimes simultaneously." Lester sees in her "the warrior's complexity."

With roots as far from Fenwick's as you can get, Norton, great-grand-daughter of slaves, was born to parents who prized education. Stimulated by family talk of race, politics, and civil rights she was groomed from childhood to be outspoken.

Already a magnetic speaker and impressive organizer at Antioch College, Norton proceeded to Yale Law School as one of a minuscule number of African-American students and--like Schroeder at Harvard Law--one of a handful of women. She risked her life to support the Southern civil rights movement.

Norton brought her keen analytic mind and what a friend called "a passion that is more than most people can take" to the American Civil Liberties Union, as an attorney for Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Muhammad Ali, white supremacists, and the female researchers who sued Newsweek for sexism.

Twice named to chair New York City's Commission on Human Rights, she identified discriminatory patterns in public schools, real estate, and banking, and tried to stem white flight. Seeking systemic remedies, she successfully pressed the state of New York to bring household workers, who were chiefly women of color, under the minimum wage law.

She went national when President Carter chose her to head the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), an agency choked by neglected cases, whose offices were infested with rodents. Within a year, Lester says, the EEOC had been "transformed." Combining boldness with an understanding of process, Norton issued EEOC guidelines on affirmative action and sexual harassment for use by courts hearing such cases. Thanks to President Reagan, she was succeeded by Clarence Thomas, who quickly undid her accomplishments.

Back in the private sector, by then "an icon of the civil rights and women's movements," Norton taught law, wrote, and spoke. She urged blacks and liberals to seize the initiative by defining fresh agendas, instead of merely defending themselves against the "virulent" Right.

Her 1990 campaign for delegate to the House of Representatives from Washington, DC, nearly blew up: Her husband had repeatedly failed to file their city taxes. The betrayal ended their marriage of 25 years. Despite the scandal, she won the election and still holds the seat.

In October 1991, she joined Schroeder, Barbara Boxer, and five other female representatives striding up the Senate steps to demand hearings into Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, whom the elected President Bush had nominated to the Supreme Court, thereby becoming part of what I have called the women's Iwo Jima photograph. Even after hearing Hill, most male senators didn't "get it." Thomas was confirmed--by Democrats. Republicans were a Senate minority. Had majority leader George Mitchell gotten three of the 11 Democrats who voted yes to vote no, Thomas would have been defeated.

In the House, Norton strove for statehood and home rule for the District of Columbia and full voting rights for its delegate. She was opposed by Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican who is currently House majority leader, who called the nation's capital "a liberal bastion of corruption and crime" with a "hug-a-thug attitude."

All along, she has woven connections with an array of outsiders--scholars, socialists, civil rights activists, Jewish organizations, civil libertarians, feminists, and union members--crisscrossing class and color lines. She has called herself "a black militant" and "a feminist who tries to be realistic." Lester calls her "ever the realpolitick strategist--a trait some leftists would ever fault."

The many quotations from Norton in Fire in My Soul are a mixed blessing. They spare us an author's faux omniscience about her subject's thoughts and feelings. But Norton's lifelong habit of glossing over conflicts tends to flatten the book. One of only four African-American women in the House when she was first elected, Norton claims that "there were no male-female difficulties." Such sunniness or denial may help her focus on work and minimize stress, but it makes for bland reading. And yet bland she's not. At work, Lester says, Norton can be a ferocious martinet. When displeased, an EEOC staffer said, Norton would "do open-heart surgery on you."

Quotations aside, Fire in My Soul has too many mistakes: missing and misspelled names, erroneous dates, and modifiers dangling like fruit bats. Some references to feminist history are inaccurate. The huge women's march in New York occurred in August 1970, not September. Hoary fictions about bra burning and the way that the word "sex" became part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are perpetuated. Time for ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment ran out in 1982, not 1984 (although a network of advocates at www.ERACampaign.net maintains that the ERA can still be ratified if three more states agree). Norton herself, with her formidable intellect, dedication to justice, strategic savvy, foul temper--and joyous, celebratory dancing--makes this account worth reading. But publishers should quit skimping on copyediting.

Rollicking Schroeder, flaming Norton, and even elegant Fenwick have all had to devise their own roles as steely pioneers. Fenwick and Norton have been personally reticent, refusing to discuss their broken marriages, while Schroeder, who remains married and seems to be the most successful mother, has based some of her political action on personal experience. All three are driven, tenacious in adversity, indefatigable workaholics, and admirers of Eleanor Roosevelt. Schroeder and Norton, in particular, have put pepper in our political soup. © 2004 Marie Shear

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Motherless daughters
Occasions of Sin by Sandra Scofield. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, 256 pp, $24.95 hardcover.
Wishing for Snow by Minrose Gwin. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2004, 230 pp, $24.95 hardcover.
Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003, 244 pp., $23.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Judith Barrington

HOPE EDELMAN, IN HER EXCELLENT BOOK, Motherless Daughters (1994), points out that even though we live in a country full of motherless children, "the loss of a mother is one of the most profound events that will occur in a woman's life, and like a loud sound in an empty house, it echoes on and on." The ways in which the loss of a mother echoes into each of these writers' adulthoods is likely to resonate with many readers, whether they have actually lost a parent or simply missed out on some of the mothering we all need.

Cover photo from Occasions of Sin.

Sandra Scofield's mother, Edith, died in 1959 at the age of 33. The author was in high school at the time, and her mother, who had long been sick with a kidney disease had, in many ways, been absent from the author's childhood. Minrose Gwin's mother, Erin, suffered from mental illness, probably chronic depression, throughout her daughter's childhood, which was marked by Erin's rages, nervousness, unpredictable moods, and physical violence: "[S]he would scream at us and hit us with vigor and determination, as if this were part of her job." As a young adult, Gwin had to commit her mother twice to mental institutions until, in 1988, Erin died of cancer.

At the end of Virginia Holman's book, her mother, Molly, is alive but institutionalized. This mother suffered her first psychotic episode in 1974 when Holman was in third grade. Believing she had been inducted into a secret army, Molly kidnapped her two daughters and holed up with them in a summer cottage, whose windows she painted black while she set it up as a field hospital for the war she believed was on the way.

Scofield and Gwin both focus on their searches for an adult understanding of their mothers' lives. As Scofield writes:

Why, when my mother was buried, was her person forgotten? Why did no one give me reason to admire her, my mother, my model? We never spoke of her accomplishments or her dreams… Did no one stop to think that I might turn out just like her, just like I thought she was? (p. 20)

Scofield is an accomplished novelist who moves into the memoir genre with grace, taking pains to let the reader know what is remembered, what surmised, and what learned from other sources. Gwin, a lyrical writer whose prose is a delight, uses the poetry her mother wrote in later life, as well as the diaries she kept as a child in the 1930s, to piece together her portrait.

MEMOIR, EVEN WHEN IT FOCUSES on someone other than the author, is different from researched biography: It is a story from the author's memory, supplemented by the tales others tell and, in some cases, by diaries or other documents. Gwin, like Scofield, tells us what we can count on as personal recollection and what we cannot. She includes phrases like, "…at least this is what I've been led to believe by everyone concerned," or "Someone, I don't remember who, told me…"

The periodic attacks on memoir, based on its potential for factual inaccuracy, are probably responsible for these authors' anxiety to acknowledge that their memories might be faulty. But the anxiety is unnecessary: When memory is mined for detail and merged with the insights of an adult who can step outside her story and shape it into art, as both these authors do, the genre shines with authenticity.

Virginia Holman Photo by Marion Ettlinger

Holman's book is more problematic. She has a startling set of events to work with, but she fails to use the strengths of the genre and the resources of language to make the most of them. Her prose is uneven, and the form she has chosen does nothing to enhance her narrative. She alternates scenes from the past with passages set in a time closer to the present, but her inconsistent shifts in verb tense are distracting. Instead of bringing the reader closer to events, as she may intend, her present-tense narration of childhood episodes, by sliding unpredictably into past tense, undermines her reliability as a narrator and interrupts the flow of what should be a gripping story.

The book reads as if Holman is still too close to the child who experienced the horror of being imprisoned inside her mother's hallucination to revisit that time in retrospect, adding the layers of insight that would make the work more than simply a shocking story. Vivian Gornick, in The Situation and the Story (2001), claims that events such as those recounted in Rescuing Patty Hearst comprise the "situation." The "story" emerges when the writer hones her language and digs deeply into the situation. To some extent, Holman's book is engaging simply because of the drama, which takes the reader into a frightening world where a psychotic mother is in thrall to her voices. But memoir, no matter how extraordinary the events, demands thoughtful interpretation that gives meaning to them.

Holman's mother remains more of a sketch than either Scofield's Edith or Gwin's Erin, both of whom are named within the first two lines of their stories. Holman's mother Molly remains "my mother" or "mom" until page 29, when an aunt addresses her by name. This is symptomatic of the fact that this mother never becomes a complete character in her own right; she is still, by the end of the book, the mentally ill mother whose delusions her adult daughter is just beginning to challenge. Because she is not fully present, the focus of the book falls on the writer herself as she relies on her childhood predicament to capture the sympathy of the reader.

Scofield and Gwin, in contrast, focus their books squarely on the women whose problems influenced them for life. This does not mean that they are absent from their own stories: Indeed, through their fully realized portraits of their mothers, they reveal themselves. Foregrounding their mothers allows them to become essential characters without evoking the self-preoccupation of many memoirs.

Minrose Gwin Photo by Ruth Salvaggio

BOTH OF THESE MEMOIRS address the many challenges of mother-loss. For example, according to Edelman, it is common for motherless children to experience difficulty with intimacy. They may go to great lengths to avoid grieving, which, she says, is something that teenagers are not yet equipped to do. Instead, they become excessively involved in romance or brief sexual affairs. "Sometimes, parked in a car with a boy who hardly knew me, I would wonder what my mother would say if she could see us," writes Scofield, addressing this issue with the directness that characterizes her book. Her sexual behavior both distracted her from her grief and enabled her to think she was getting even with her mother, who just a few weeks before her death had had herself photographed naked. "You're not the only one! I might have been screeching to heaven," says Scofield of her feelings at these times.

Another challenge is the anger a daughter inevitably feels towards an inadequate or absent mother. Although expressing such anger is for many a real taboo, Gwin describes it with honesty, conveying the complexity of simultaneously loving and being furious at the mother whose mental illness presented her with so many seemingly insoluble dilemmas. In one memorable passage, she describes the strange beauty of her mother singing "Somewhere over the Rainbow" as she pushes her cart along grocery store aisles:

When she sang, it was as if she were pushing something too large through her throat and mouth, sound that was more than sound, that was somehow being forced into voice, and by being forced, became beautiful.

Shhhhhh, we would say. Mama hush. (p. 71)

This tenderness in no way precludes Gwin from admitting her anger on the next page: "In the end all I wanted was to shut my mother up, lock my mother up."

Erin's poems add a rich layer to the picture that Gwin paints of her, and the mother is marvelously present throughout the book. She even appears in Gwin's adult world as a ghost, talking back to her daughter in a way that reminds me of the long-dead father in Mary Gordon's memoir The Shadow Man (1996), with whom Gordon has imaginary dialogues. "All that talk," says the ghost of Erin, "and you don't know the first thing about it." By continuing to put words into her mother's mouth, Gwin reveals the depth of her effort to understand what life must have been like for her mother:

I was in my prime. All you children. Long nights and the smell of the mimosa. Dog-tired all the time and when he'd finally come home after being on the road all week he'd never even talk to me. Just threw himself down like a stone. If he'd just said something to me how's the weather been here or how's your mother or what have you been up to all week it might have been all right. (p. 80)

Rescuing Patty Hearst, in spite of Holman's intriguing idea to merge her personal story with the turbulent public events of 1974, never quite rises to the heights of the other two books. Their luminous language, together with years of reflection that have obviously led to real retrospective wisdom, make Wishing for Snow and Occasions of Sin both graceful and enlightening.

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Sojourner Tubman and Harriet Truth
Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton. New York: Little, Brown, 2004, 288 pp., $25.95 hardcover.
Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories by Jean M. Humez. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, 458 pp., $45.00 hardcover.
Bound for the Promised Land by Kate Clifford Larson. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003, 380 pp., $26.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Adele Logan Alexander

 

Woodcut of Harriet Tubman in Civil War scout attire. From Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Stories

THIS IS A TRUE STORY (at least I heard it on FM radio and read it in the New York Daily News, and therefore take it to be true): In the fall of 2002, a deservedly famous liberal candidate for the United States Senate took her campaign to the Sojourner Truth School. During her photo-op appearance that day she told the attentive, all-female, mostly African-American students how fortunate they were to have for their "role model" the inspirational black woman who had escaped from slavery in the South via the Underground Railroad and then returned over and over again to emancipate others of her race by bravely helping them follow the North Star to freedom.

The students seem to have been appropriately reverential to their distinguished guest and attempted to suppress their giggles. Only later did someone from the press point out to Hillary Rodham Clinton that she had presented the biography of "General" Harriet Tubman--not Sojourner Truth.

Truth was a remarkable woman, but she was a full generation older than Tubman, and from the North. She gained her freedom when slavery ended in that region and never lived in the South or had any affiliation with the Underground Railroad. For much of her life she was a New Yorker, and the school bearing her name is appropriately situated in Manhattan. At nearly six feet, Truth was almost a giant for her day, while Tubman was physically tiny.

When confronted by reporters about Clinton's historical gaffe, a campaign aide somewhat testily explained no real "mistake" had been made (note how the passive voice avoids any assignment of responsibility) because the moral of her candidate's story remained the same.

Perhaps the real question should be why even the most well intentioned and well informed white Americans usually have room for only one antebellum black woman in their pantheon of heroes, or why black women seem so easily fungible. Without doubt, both Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman should rank as American icons. Two US postage stamps, dozens of laudatory "juvenile" books, several antiquated biographies, and thousands of visual images attest to Tubman's heroism and her continuing celebrity. But Truth and Tubman should not be confused with one another, nor should they be black female "role models" (a term that drives me up the wall because it's used only in reference to minorities and women, white men presumably not needing any). Hillary Clinton may have "channeled" Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House for her own purposes, but how often are those two former first ladies mistaken for one another?

With their new autobiographical studies, Catherine Clinton (no relation, I presume, to the esteemed senator), Jean M. Humez, and Kate Clifford Larson contribute notably to overcoming the all-too-prevalent perception that a black woman is a black woman is a black woman, and that black women's life stories can be freely substituted for one another and then conveniently trotted out during Black History Month--when, we must admit, all of these books were published. More than 60 years have passed since the most recent "adult" biography of Harriet Tubman appeared, and we might ask why, in 2004, we suddenly see three new ones. But regardless of why, they are welcome.

Humez, a professor of women's studies and the author of Gifts of Power and Mother's First-Born Daughters, takes only about 100 pages to recount, tersely and well, the facts of Tubman's life. The remainder of her book is comprised of a thoroughgoing analysis of the copious contemporary stories and more recent texts about Tubman. Clinton uses roughly 200 pages to relate the same story and Larson a total of 300. The vast differences in length are not correlated with quality, but say a lot about how each writer went about her task, and whom she most likely sees as her audience.

Clinton's biography is the most readable of the three, though I gasped at so fundamental an error as the assertion that Delaware was a free state, from an acclaimed professor whose works include The Plantation Mistress: Women's World in the Old South and The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. This book also seems less extensively researched than the others. It almost feels as if Clinton rushed to publish in order to get her book out to the public along with the others. She compensates well, however, with a true storyteller's narrative voice and insightful speculations about details that she cannot know for sure.

Studio portrait of Harriet Tubman, probably from the late 1860s. From Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Stories

Larson's work, her first book, still retains the meticulous characteristics of the superior dissertation that it once no doubt was, and it does credit to this Simmons College lecturer who also works on behalf of the soon-to-open Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. But she sometimes overwhelms the reader and clutters Tubman's story with insignificant characters presented only in passing. More than 250 names appear in her index only once! Once she found a tidbit, no matter how small, neither she nor her editor seems to have been able to bear to leave it out. Nonetheless, her loving attention to detail enriches the story and adds enormously to our understanding of Tubman's evolving worlds.

Humez, with obvious scholarship, cogently argues that the creation and dissemination of the Tubman legends, often by Tubman herself, are in many ways as important as the biographical facts themselves. Not to confuse the two heros once again, but in her splendid analytical biography, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol, Nell Irvin Painter does a better job than Humez of analyzing symbolism and explaining that "the symbol we require in our public life still triumphs over scholarship."

Most of Humez's book is devoted to the multiple presentations of Tubman over the past 150 years. These stories, culled from a huge variety of sources and often excerpted at length, provide even more vivid portrayals of Tubman's life than Humez's biography itself. The long tradition of slave narratives is represented here, as well as primary sources that mirror the racism of the times in which they were written, especially in their condescending, often puzzling and contradictory images of black Americans.

Tubman herself deliberately shaped many of these stories. Humez is at her best when she analyzes the oral storytelling traditions in which Tubman (who never learned to read or write) was raised. "Tubman's motives for public performance of her life stories," she writes, "were a mixture of the practical, the political, and the religious."

All three books provide the facts of Tubman's life, as much as they can be known. And all three authors also appropriately acknowledge their (or anyone's) inability to determine beyond doubt such basic biographical details as Tubman's exact date of birth, number of siblings, or sexual experiences.

HARRIET TUBMAN, ARAMINTA ROSS at birth, was born on an Maryland Eastern Shore plantation sometime around 1820. Araminta chose the name Harriet for herself as a young woman and took her first husband's surname when she married. Interestingly, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass was born in a neighboring county at virtually the same time, although none of these authors speculates about the commonality of their experiences.

Tubman grew up in a fractured but loving family and experienced all of the traumas associated with American slavery--physical abuse, dire hardship, deception, separation from loved ones, and lack of education. An overseer hurled a heavy metal weight that hit Harriet on the temple, resulting in what all three authors agree was an acute form of temporal lobe epilepsy. As a result, Tubman often heard voices and music and received inspirational visions. Throughout her life she periodically fell into deep trances from which she could hardly be roused. There seems little question that this trauma-induced narcoleptic condition was inextricably intertwined with her deep religious beliefs. Thus all three authors have, by necessity, written spiritual biographies of Tubman.

The trauma of seeing two of her sisters sold, shackled, attached to slave coffles and taken south, and the probability of falling victim to the same fate herself, devastated Harriet and convinced her of the pressing need to escape, which she did in 1849. She fled through nearby Maryland and Delaware to the North and became affiliated with black and white leaders of the Underground Railroad, especially in Philadelphia. Thereafter she returned to Maryland about a dozen times in the 1850s, probably escorting out with her about 60 or 70 always-terrified, often-reluctant people formerly held in bondage. Most were relatives or close friends. The reports of Tubman emancipating thousands throughout the South via the Underground Railroad have been vastly exaggerated.

Within a few years, Tubman had achieved legendary status in abolitionist circles in many northern venues. For reasons of personal safety, she made her home in Canada, a short distance across Niagara Falls. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act endangered runaways anyplace in the country by subjecting them to recapture and return to their owners if they remained in the United States. She became a coveted and inspirational lecturer on the antislavery circuit; met with John Brown, who solicited her assistance in plotting his ultimately ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry; and became widely known as both "Moses" and "General Tubman."

Slaves could not actually enter into legal marital contracts, although they always believed their unions to be valid. All three authors devote ample attention to the devastating dissolution of Harriet's "marriage" to John Tubman, a free man of color in Maryland. Harriet and John married before her initial escape, but he declined to move north with his wife. On one return trip several years later, when Harriet hoped John might finally have changed his mind, she learned that he had remarried during her absence. Her heart was broken, but her emancipatory mission continued.

After the start of the Civil War, Harriet Tubman reluctantly took on menial assignments as a laundress and cook for Union troops, especially black ones. Far more importantly, she soon negotiated the opportunity to put her skills to better use as a spy and undercover scout for the Union, supplying crucial information through her affiliation and easy rapport with the already insurrectionary network of black men and women still enslaved in the South. Numerically, her leadership of a raid by Union troops in 1863 was more significant than all of her antebellum journeys on behalf of the Underground Railroad combined. During one single day of battle, she essentially negotiated the emancipation of 700 enslaved South Carolinians.

Harriet Tubman outside the Harriet Tubman Home, circa 1912. From Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Stories

For many years she tried to convince the government to acknowledge her wartime work. When her efforts were unsuccessful, she solicited the help of influential friends. Most of her claims were rejected, and she received only a small pension based on her work as a wartime nurse and cook, and ultimately as a "widow." Her efforts as a military leader of men--in time she came to be called "the black Joan of Arc"--while widely acknowledged during the war by a variety of Union officers and supported by her New York congressman, were never fully appreciated or rewarded by her country.

After the war she married again, presumably happily, though briefly, to Nelson Davis, who died in 1888. She remained close to the African-American church, which provided her with both spiritual and social comfort. She became committed to the cause of women's suffrage and spoke often on its behalf. I have to wonder what the politically correct, elite white suffragists really thought of an illiterate black woman such as Tubman. But, no matter. She served their purposes.

More important during her later years in Auburn, New York, were basic matters of survival and her own charitable campaigns on behalf of her extended family and other African Americans even needier than she. She turned to domestic work and pig farming for sustenance; fed, clothed, and housed dozens of her diverse relatives; and took special interest in and essentially raised a "niece," whom Clinton insightfully speculates may have actually been her own daughter--the product of rape by a white man. These efforts culminated in the creation of the Tubman Home, a modest residence for indigent black people that was supported by local and national groups, especially those comprised of middle-class black women. All three biographers portray Tubman as a truly dedicated, generous, and selfless woman, whose later years, while unheralded, may have been her finest. Her celebrity and mythic status increased as her health declined in her early 90s and she died, a long-time resident of the Tubman Home, in 1913.

IN ALL OF THESE BOOKS I missed a gender analysis of this woman who saw the need to wear bloomers in wartime and seems to have been called "General" or "Moses" far more often than "Aunt Harriet." What did it mean in the 19th century to be strapped with a masculine identity? How and why did that identity come about? Why is it that black women were and are so often asked to "prove" their gender? Consider Sojourner Truth's apocryphal "ar'n't I a woman," and her widely reported (true or not) baring of her breast to prove that she was a woman. (I'll resist the temptation here to speculate further about the inordinate outrage over Janet Jackson's recent exposure.)

Clinton, Humez, and Larson all, in their own appropriately individual ways, provide excellent insights into the life of Harriet Tubman and the changing world that shaped her--a world that she, in turn, reshaped. Sixty years in the making, these still may not be the definitive works on Tubman.

Let us now make room in our historic pantheon of American heroes, not only for Harriet Tubman, but also for a great variety of both heralded and unsung black women: mothers, daughters, and sisters; Northern and Southern; short and tall; enslaved and free; educated and illiterate; prophets, generals, and foot soldiers. We need to see not dozens but hundreds more biographies about these little-known women. And let's heed carefully the words of Nell Painter, who writes of Tubman and Truth: "Many people confuse the two because both lived in an era shadowed by human bondage, but [they] were contrasting figures." With three new biographies of Tubman, each full of insight and information, there is no longer any excuse for confusing her with Sojourner Truth.

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