‘Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War’
By Edda L. Fields-Black
Oxford University Press, 776 Pages

‘Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert: a Novel’
By Bob the Drag Queen
Gallery Books, 240 Pages

Harriet Tubman, as Bob the Drag Queen notes, has become a national icon. Her exploits in liberating her fellow slaves, her extraordinary effectiveness as an intelligence agent for the Union army, and her work after the Civil War on behalf of civil rights and the equal treatment of all citizens have been documented in several excellent biographies. Yet until the early 2000s, her life had been relegated mainly to biographies for children.

What changed so that Tubman is likely to receive the kind of attention that will make her a perennial subject? Beginning in 1970 with Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda, Scott Fitzgerald’s talented wife, followed in 1980 by Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James, then the nearly forgotten sister of her novelist brother Henry, biographies of women as significant participants in American culture and history began to proliferate, catapulted by the second wave of feminism and the advent of Black History Month in the 1970s.

Edda L. Fields-Black is a descendent of a participant in the Combahee River Raid, in which Tubman deployed a spy ring and other informants behind Confederate lines that resulted in the freeing of 730 South Carolina slaves, some of whom went on to fight against the South, joining several hundred thousand Black men who Abraham Lincoln deemed as essential to Union victory.

Ms. Fields-Black includes a Timeline that combines what historians call macro and micro history, a zooming out to encompass centuries and a zooming in to the months and days of Tubman’s life and achievements. The first page of the Timeline begins:

1632, June 30 Maryland Colony is established

1663, March 24 Carolina Colony is established

Shortly thereafter, slave masters establish plantations and a slave economy. By 1708, slaves constitute a majority of the Carolina colony. By the end of the Timeline’s first page, the 1820 Missouri Compromise divides the new territories into the enslaved and the free. 

Tubman’s birth, in 1822, heads the Timeline’s second page. Seven Timeline pages later, in June 2021, Tubman is “finally recognized for her service as a spy, scout, and leader of a group of spies, scouts, and pilots during the Civil War when she is inducted as a full member into the US Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.” In a New York Sun review (June 27, 2007) of three Tubman biographies, I suggested a woman of her caliber today would be running the CIA.

Yet what was she like then? How did she speak? What did it feel like to be in her presence? No memoir or biography can ever quite capture this down-to-earth woman with an air of command. One way to convey her authority is to take the Ishmael Reed tack in his novel “Flight to Canada,” which is anachronistic in its presentation of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and mixes historical periods to portray the past as if it actually intrudes into the consciousness of the present.

So we have “Harriet Tubman Live in Concert,” written by a television host, actor, and activist, Bob the Drag Queen. Harriet wants to create a hip-hop version of her life. She calls on Darnell Williams, music producer, to create an album she can take on the road. He is properly in awe of her reputation as “America’s first Black superhero”: “If intuition, foresight, and navigation can be considered superpowers she is basically the Avenger,” also known as, “Iron Woman.”

Bob is really into it, imagining himself as a runaway slave, dogs at his heels, with one other runaway apparently ready to return to the safety of the plantation as Bob screams at him, “Keep going!” This, of course, is what Tubman said to slaves on her rescue missions.

But I’m not giving away much more of this racy tale. Here’s just a taste: “I am so pleased to meet you,” Darnell tells Tubman. “Look baby,” she replies, “your words are kind, but we don’t have all day.” Then he fondly remembers “the invite she sent me, a lovely little handwritten note: ‘Nigga, get over here.—Harriet Tubman.’ With the address of the studio. I think I’ll have it framed.”

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography” and writes about Tubman in “Female Icons.”