Harriet Tubman, pre-mummification.(Flashback: To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero)(Biography)

Araminta Ross, later known as Harriet Tubman, is perhaps the historical personage most familiar to the latest generation of American schoolchildren. An American Moses, this preternaturally wise conductor never lost a passenger on the Underground Railroad. The bare facts of her life--escape from slavery, daring raids to liberate other bondsmen from servitude, untimely fits of narcolepsy, service as a Union spy in South Carolina--are extraordinary.

Yet most textbooks fail to convey any sense of what Harriet Tubman was really like. If only a good novelist had known her, the reader murmurs. Well it just so happens....

Later in life, Tubman made her home in Auburn, New York, on property that had belonged to Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward (an ardent admirer of Tubman's). And it was in Auburn, a generation removed from the Civil War, that Harriet met a boy named Samuel Hopkins Adams.

The fortunate son of a notably cultured upstate New York family, Adams inherited an ample sense of sell-worth from his grandsires (who became the subjects of his best book, Grandfather Stories). Walter Edmonds, author of Drums Along the Mohawk, once told me that when Adams visited his home for the first time, "he went all around the house ... saying what furniture was worth having and what was bogus. He was a very forceful old boy."

When he was a forceful young boy, Sam was often visited by "Aunt Harriet" Tubman. His great aunt, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, had written a pair of books about Tubman, and it was because of Aunt Harriet that young Sam and his friends played slaves and overseers rather than cowboys and Indians.

Tubman would walk the two miles to the house of Sam's Grandfather Hopkins, who would ask, "Harriet Tubman, will you sing for my ...