BEFORE: I'm back on the Black History beat, and by no means did I intend to offend when I "moved" my acknowledgement of Black History Month on my calendar, it's just that I never get to pay respect to the occasion, because I'm always covering the topic of romance in February. Every year for a while now, I kept saying, "If the romances run out..." but they never do. So for me, focusing on Black History in April and May just made more sense, I don't expect anyone's else's observance to move, I'm just following the linking, and I saw a way to tie a bunch of films together on this topic. We'll cover Harriet Tubman today, and Malcolm X for the next two days, and then it will be Mother's Day. OK?
Clarke Peters carries over from "Freedomland". And here are my acting links for the rest of the month: Leslie Odom Jr., Michael Imperioli, Angela Bassett, Damian Young, Peter Dinklage, Andy Nyman, Jessie Buckley, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Ben Hardy, Rami Malek, Charlie Hunnam, Odessa Young, Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Woody Harrelson. Yes, I know that's only 17 people and there are 25 days left in May, but some of those people are in 3 or 4-film chains. That's how I roll.
THE PLOT: The extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman's escape from slavery and transformation into one of America's greatest heroes, whose courage, ingenuity and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history.
AFTER: There's a new series on Amazon called "The Underground Railroad", which of course is the name for the network of safe havens, secret paths and friendly local residents who helped slaves escape from the pre-Civil War southern U.S. and the name was, of course, metaphorical. But the new series (based on a prize-winning book, apparently), depicts an ACTUAL railroad operating below ground, which of course you can do in a fantasy novel, write about something that didn't really exist in that way. But as far as history goes, "No, no, no, NO!" - this is not what should be depicted in film or TV, because our students are currently dumb enough already, and if this leads even a small percentage of people to think that there were somehow underground trains operating in the 19th Century southern states, then maybe somebody should re-think this. We're trying to FIGHT mis-information right now, concerning things like election fraud and the safety of vaccines, and anything that distorts history or causes more confusion could be like throwing gasoline on to a burning fire, it's making things worse, plus that gas can could blow up in your hands.
As things already stand, I bet if you asked high-school students who invented the subway system and you made Harriet Tubman one of the choices, a substantial percentage would pick her - because the subway's just an underground railroad, right? Let's ignore for a minute all the obvious problems with that, like who dug the space for the train, how did they do that in secret, and where would all the smoke from the locomotive engine go? Now on top of everything else, in a few years we'll have to dispel another urban myth about how slaves were smuggled to safety. OK, so one author misunderstood what the name of the "underground railroad" implied, but once he figured out what reality was, why did he have to infect others with this bad idea by writing a fantasy novel about it? This is, instead, a perfect opportunity to teach your kids what a metaphor is, and how symbolism was used in this case for the purposes of subterfuge.
Everybody back then knew what a railroad was, a network of stations and what conductors did on rail lines, so it really was just verbal shorthand. It still required maps, quick thinking and probably an enormous amount of luck to travel on this "railroad", plus it all happened at night, before there was electricity or phones or GPS systems - and maybe we don't even know about all the missions that took place that didn't succeed, because those who failed were either killed or put back into the plantation system, never to emerge again.
It was under this system that escaped slave Harriet Tubman (formerly Araminta "Minty" Ross, I did not know that...), returned to the South, again and again, sometimes dressed as a man, to rescue members of her family and then other slaves, at least 13 times, to rescue over 70 slaves. And then after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the task became even more difficult, getting escaped slaves not just into the Northern states, but all the way to Canada. Later Tubman served as a spy for the Union during the Civil War, and also led a brigade of soldiers during the raid at Combahee Ferry, which freed over 750 slaves. I don't think that any film, not even this one, could possibly capture the difference that this one woman made in the world. To date, she's one of the few women to ever lead a U.S. military assault.
But, here's the thing, she was apparently never paid for her services - not by the military, not by abolitionists, not by whoever sponsored the Underground Railroad. She lived for most of her life in poverty, though she worked various jobs and friends and family sometimes raised money to support her. The U.S. government, not so much - even if they put her image on the $20 bill in the future as some have planned to, that hardly counts as compensation. Sales of her published biography in 1869 brought her about $1,200 (not adjusted for inflation), but that's also how much Senator William Seward charged her for a house and small parcel of land in Auburn, NY. She'd come back to the U.S. from Canada after the 1857 Dred Scott Decision - that's when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution was never meant to include citizenship for black people, despite the fact that black men voted in 5 out of 13 states in 1789. (This ruling caused the Panic of 1857 and, you know, that whole Civil War thing.)
But that's a bit outside the scope of this film, which starts with "Minty" as a slave, living on a plantation in Maryland. The middle child out of nine, she was struck in the head by a weight thrown by an overseer and was unconscious for days. After the incident she had terrible headaches and seizures, but also experienced visions and vivid dreams, which she believed were premontions from God. Though she couldn't read, she was familiar with Bible stories and followed the Old Testament teachings - naturally the ones about slaves rising up and escaping to freedom.
Harriet's parents were released from slavery at the age of 45, and the agreement was supposed to also extend to their children, however the plantation owners who owned them refused to honor this agreement - because what slave would have the recourse to hire a lawyer and dispute them? Somehow, in 1844 Harriet married a free black man, John Tubman. But the plantation owners argued that her slave status would apply to her children, so she and John never had children. This type of marriage wasn't uncommon, it's possible that the free husbands would be able to work toward eventually buying the freedom of their wives. And as this film shows, Harriet's owner was trying to sell her, once she got to a certain age or became ill, he wasn't interested in selling her to her own husband, so this is the type of complicated situation that led her to escape alone, without her husband or other family.
(EDIT: For brevity's sake, the film omits an earlier escape attempt Harriet made with her two brothers, while they'd been loaned out to another plantation. This could explain why they almost succeeded, their owners were less likely to notice their absence, since they escaped from another location. But one of her brothers had recently become a father for the first time, so the brothers turned back and convinced Harriet to return, also.)
Other than that, the film seems quite accurate in its portrayal of Tubman's forays back into the South as "Moses" to rescue other slaves. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Maryland to rescue her husband, she learned that after her escape, John Tubman thought she was dead and married another woman. Instead of making more trouble, Harriet decided he wasn't worth it and rescued other slaves instead while she was in the neighborhood.
It's true that she carried a revolver, for protection from slave-catchers, but also to threaten any of her charges who had second thoughts and tried to return to the plantations. Thankfully this story is powerful enough already, and the filmmakers rightfully chose not to turn Harriet Tubman into someone who fought either vampires or zombies. Again, you have to wonder about fantasy films - if you polled high-school students today, how many of them seriously believe this about Abraham Lincoln, thanks to cheezy movies? It's enough here that Tubman's episodes were treated as divine premonitions, because there's obviously no real proof of that.
Also starring Cynthia Erivo (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Leslie Odom Jr. (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Joe Alwyn (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Vanessa Bell Calloway (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Vondie Curtis-Hall, Jennifer Nettles, Janelle Monae (last heard in "Lady and the Tramp" (2019), Omar Dorsey (last seen in "Selma"), Tim Guinee (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Zackary Momoh (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Deborah Ayorinde (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Henry Hunter Hall, Rakeem Laws, Nick Basta, Tory Kittles (last seen in "Olympus Has Fallen"), William L. Thomas (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), Joseph Lee Anderson (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Antonio J. Bell, CJ McBath, Alexis Louder, Aria Brooks, Daphne Reid, Michael Marunde, Mitchell Hoog, Thomas Keegan, Jaben Early, Don Hartman, William Flaman (last seen in "Tammy"), Laureen E. Smith, Brian K. Landis, Willie Raysor.
RATING: 6 out of 10 NAACP Image Award nominations
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