The Tubman Command: "I Got An Insurrection To Plan." Harriet Tubman

When I read She Came to Slay, Erica Armstrong Dunbar's biography of Harriet Tubman for Black History Month, I learned about Tubman's great military achievement, the Combahee River Raid (1863).  There is a non-fiction book about it listed in Dunbar's bibliography, but I was unable to obtain it through libraries, and purchasing it was beyond my current means.  So when I was asked to list books that I'm reading for Women's History Month on a Goodreads group called Read Women, I selected a historical novel about the Combahee River Raid, The Tubman Command by Elizabeth Cobbs, as one of them.

I am particularly pleased to be reviewing a book about Harriet Tubman today because March 10 is the day assigned to Tubman in The Little Book of Feminist Saints by Julia Pierpont.

I read both history and historical fiction.  I feel that each of them have their strengths.  I was looking forward to getting a window into the mind of Harriet Tubman, and feeling the impact of her leadership role in a Civil War military operation through the pages of  The Tubman Command.

                        

Harriet Tubman was clearly a born leader who had a talent for planning and was a gifted speaker.  She was also determined to achieve her goals, had tremendous courage and believed strongly that the visions she received were messages from God. Elizabeth Cobbs portrays her as a character with these traits, but also shows us her vulnerable side as a woman who wanted a relationship with a man.  Her Tubman seemed wary of trusting men on an intimate level.  Based on what I read about her in She Came To Slay, I think she had good reason to be untrusting.

A romantic possibility for Tubman is a sub-plot in The Tubman Command, but it isn't a major focus of the narrative. So I wouldn't call this a romance.  It's mainly about a historic military operation that resulted in the rescue of 750 slaves.

The quote from Harriet Tubman in the title of this review is a fictional one from this novel.  Harriet Tubman was illiterate.  So she herself wrote no accounts of her life.  

The Combahee River Raid was made possible because of Harriet Tubman's status as the leader of a team of Black scouts for the Union Army.  The Tubman Command shows how Tubman persuaded the officers involved in decision making to support her plan.  I felt that there was a great deal of suspense involved in its implementation even though I already knew the result.

In the midst of  all this drama, there was also comic relief in the form of an unexpectedly funny scene involving the antics of Tubman's cat, who was appropriately named Trouble. I was charmed by this scene and was glad it was there.

The fictional elements of The Tubman Command didn't cause me to lose confidence in Cobbs' accuracy.  There is a back cover blurb praising this book from Edda L. Fields-Black, an African American academic who has been working on a scholarly book about the Combahee River Raid that is forthcoming.

I found The Tubman Command moving, insightful and well-written.  I thought it was also original because I had never read a novel dealing with this significant event. This is my first five star read of 2020.  It will certainly be a candidate for my top ten of the year.





                     

Balm: A Post Civil War Novel of Healing Review and Giveaway

About Balm

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Amistad (May 26, 2015)

The New York Times bestselling author of Wench—called "a fascinating and tragic story" by NPR.org, "deeply moving" by USA Today, and "lyrical and devastatingly beautiful" by People magazine—returns to the Civil War era to explore history's next chapter in this powerful story of love and healing.

The Civil War has ended, and Madge, Sadie, and Hemp have each come to Chicago in search of a new life.

Born with magical hands, Madge has the power to discern others' suffering and ease it, but she cannot heal her own damaged heart. To mend herself and continue to help those in need, she must return to Tennessee to face the women healers who rejected her as a child.

Sadie can commune with the dead, but until she makes peace with her father, she, too, cannot fully engage her gift.

Searching for his missing family, Hemp arrives in this northern city that shimmers with possibility. But redemption cannot be possible until he is reunited with those taken from him.

In the bitter aftermath of a terrible, bloody war, as a divided nation tries to come together once again, Madge, Sadie, and Hemp will be caught up in an unexpected battle for survival in a community desperate to lay the pain of the past to rest.

Beautiful in its historical atmosphere and emotional depth, Balm is a stirring novel of love, loss, hope, and reconciliation set during one of the most critical periods in American history.

REVIEW

I’ve read books dealing with slavery and the emancipation of the slaves after the American Civil War.  I’ve read books dealing with traditional herbalists from a variety of cultures. I’ve also read books that deal with trance mediums who can contact the spirits of the dead. Yet I’ve never read a book that focused on all three of these themes.  Balm by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is that book.  I received two copies of this book for free in return for this review. They are a paperback ARC directly from the publisher, and a digital ARC via Edelweiss. 

Because I have two copies, I decided to give away the copy of the print version to a lucky reader. Scroll down for the Rafflecopter Giveaway.   

The slavery and emancipation theme was movingly portrayed through the perspective of Hemp Harrison.   Since he found his slave name demeaning, he decided to name himself after the crop at the plantation where he was a slave followed by the surname of his former owner.  I have often wondered why emancipated slaves chose to identify with slave owners.   Hemp actually had an important reason.  He was trying to reunite with his wife who had been sold away. He had no idea where he would find her.  Hemp thought that his name might be a way for his wife to recognize that it was him searching for her.  A great many slaves were in his situation after the Civil War.  Dolen Perkins-Valdez depicts the affliction of separated African-American families through Hemp’s story. 

Madge, an African American woman who was born free, was the herbalist.  She was brought up in a family of rootworkers who made their living as healers.  Herbalists were often suspected of practicing witchcraft.  Madge did have a paranormal gift that facilitated her diagnosis of the conditions of her patients.  She wanted independence and a successful career, and she was confident that she could achieve these goals.  Yet something was missing in her life, and it took her some time to discover what that was. 

The medium who heard the voices of the dead was Sadie, a white Civil War widow.   I was particularly impressed by the fact that Sadie’s talent was genuine.  I’ve read many books dealing with fraudulent mediums who are eventually exposed.  I find that story line predictable and formulaic.  Sadie had to deal with the voice of a dead man who sometimes came to her involuntarily without being summoned.   She had to struggle to reclaim her freedom from that voice.  She was in a state of inner conflict about her mediumship.  I appreciated the complexity of Sadie’s characterization.

 Sadie decided to employ Madge as a servant.  The relationship between the two women was unsentimental and honestly portrayed.  So if you’re looking for a novel about a heartwarming friendship that transcends the post-slavery rift between the races, Balm is not that book.  I'm glad it isn't that sort of book since I don't subscribe to the delusion that two women could somehow cut through centuries of prejudice within a single generation. 

This is a book that is primarily about healing.  It's about the slow process of healing from the wounds of slavery, divided families and the mental anguish that resulted from these experiences.  I am grateful for the artistry of this author that allowed her to shape a tale of three individuals that is also the story of the beginning of America's emergence from a terrible time in its history.  

                                            

                                                    

Purchase Links

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IndieBound | Barnes & Noble

About Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Wench. Her fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, StorySouth, and elsewhere. In 2011 she was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction. She was also awarded the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine. A graduate of Harvard and a former University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, Dolen Perkins-Valdez lives in Washington, D.C., with her family.

Find out more about Dolen at her website, and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.



a Rafflecopter giveaway

Slave and Sister: The American Civil War in a Jewish Context

Adelaide Mannheim and her slave Rachel share a shameful secret. Adelaide’s father, a Jewish planter in Cass County, Georgia, is Rachel’s father, too. Adelaide marries neighboring planter Henry Kaltenbach, a Jew deeply troubled by slavery, and watches with a wary eye as her husband treats all of his slaves—including Rachel—with kindness. As the country’s conflict over slavery looms ever larger, Henry and Rachel fall in love, and as the United States is rent by the Civil War, the lives of mistress and slave are torn apart.

When the war brings destruction and Emancipation, can these two women, made kin by slavery, free themselves of the past to truly become sisters?

**********REVIEW**********

Slave and Sister by Sabra Waldfogel deals with the Mannheims, a wealthy Jewish slave owning family in 19^th century Georgia.   There are two female protagonists.  One is Adelaide Mannheim, the white child of privilege. The second is her more versatile and intelligent sister, Rachel, a slave of mixed race who was bound to Adelaide as a maidservant and companion.  This was actually a common though sordid family drama in the ante-Bellum plantation world.  What makes this novel different is that it also deals with Henry Kaltenbach, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, who knew that slavery is wrong.  When he became involved in the lives of these two sisters, he transformed their relationship and their expectations about their futures.    

I was intrigued by the Jewish aspect of this book, and received a free copy via the blog tour for Slave and Sister in return for this honest review.                                                                                                     

It’s important to realize that slavery was part of ancient Jewish history.  The Biblical patriarchs owned slaves. Abraham had a child with the slave Hagar who was Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arab peoples. Just like the Mannheims, the household of the patriarch Abraham contained Isaac, his heir who was the son of his wife, and Ishmael, the son of a slave, growing up side by side.

 So Henry Kaltenbach’s abolitionism was not Biblically based.  It was an ethical conviction rooted in his profound sense of human equality.  In Germany, he had been a revolutionary, and he brought this background to the New World.   He was actually quite an extraordinary man, but he never seemed to realize it.  I admired both his principles and his innate humility.  He was a decent human being in a society where cruelty and injustice abounded.  In Yiddish, the word for decent human being is mensch.  Henry Kaltenbach was a true mensch.

 If the characters in this novel were compared to those in Gone With The Wind, many would agree that Henry could be considered like Rhett Butler, and that Adelaide has some similarities to Scarlet O’Hara.  Yet Rachel has no parallel in Margaret Mitchell’s classic masterpiece.  Mitchell was limited by her values and perceptions.  She couldn’t have imagined a literate slave with a powerful intellect, and a pragmatic understanding of the business of running a plantation.  Yet I should also point out, that in the period when GWTW was published, few would have believed that a character like Rachel could have existed even if Margaret Mitchell had been capable of imagining her.   I was born nearly twenty years after the publication of GWTW.   Although current America is scarcely a utopia, there have been some remarkable changes in attitudes in the literary world.  I ­­­ consider Rachel a credible protagonist due to what I know of African American history, and my belief in racial equality.

I didn’t always like Adelaide, but I eventually came to respect her. When Adelaide Mannheim was a child she never expected to become her mother until she found it happening as an adult, and it was not a pretty sight.  A woman’s realization that she has become something she once detested is a very critical moment in her life.  What she does then will count for a great deal.  

I was delighted to learn about abolitionist Rabbi David Einhorn from Sabra Waldfogel’s  historical note at the end of this book.  She said that reaction to his 1861 speech against slavery forced him to leave Baltimore.  From the article about him on Wikipedia I discovered that his speech inspired a riot, and that his Baltimore congregants had wanted to tar and feather their Rabbi.  In the sources for the Wikipedia article, I discovered a link to the text of David Einhorn's Speech Against Slavery which I consider an important document in the history of abolitionism and Biblical exegesis.

In conclusion, the characters and the dramatization of the novel’s themes through its compelling plot makes Slave and Sister a novel that I recommend to readers who like to see unusual perspectives in historical fiction.

                                  

About the Author

Sabra Waldfogel grew up far from the South in Minneapolis. She studied history at Harvard University and received her Ph.D. in American History from the University of Minnesota. She has worked as a technical writer and has written about historic architecture for Old House Journal and Arts and Crafts Homes. Her short story “Yemaya” appeared in Sixfold’s Winter 2013 fiction issue. Slave and Sister is her first novel.

For more information please visit Sabra's website. You can also connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

Slave and Sister Blog Tour Schedule

Monday, October 27

Spotlight & Giveaway at Passages to the Past

Tuesday, October 28

Interview at Caroline Wilson Writes

Wednesday, October 29

Review & Giveaway at Forever Ashley

Review & Giveaway at Peeking Between the Pages

Thursday, October 30

Guest Post & Giveaway at Historical Fiction Connection

Monday, November 3

Review at Book Babe

Tuesday, November 4

Spotlight at I'd Rather Be Reading

Wednesday, November 5

Review at With Her Nose Stuck in a Book

Thursday, November 6

Spotlight at CelticLady's Reviews

Friday, November 7

Interview at Mina's Bookshelf

Guest Post at Just One More Chapter

The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier: A Disquieted Quaker

Although The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier involves the Underground Railroad which helped runaway slaves to safety, the theme of the novel is not slavery nor is its central focus really the Underground Railroad.  I saw some disappointed reviews from people who expected to find out more about how the Underground Railroad functioned from this novel.  For them, I recommend The Runaway Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini in which a quilter learns about her ancestors' participation in the Underground Railroad and the role of quilts in assisting runaway slaves.  It was a really fascinating book, but that's not the type of book that Tracy Chevalier has written.

                                                   

 The protagonist Honor Bright is a very principled Quaker.  She is surrounded by other Quakers all of whom are opposed to slavery.  Yet not all of them are willing to act on their principles.   I feel that this is the central theme of The Last Runaway.  Why are so many people afraid or unwilling to take a stand?  Should they be judged for their inaction?  When it comes to an important issue such as slavery, there were consequences for both action and inaction which are fully illustrated in this book.

Quakers have a history of spiritual silence, but they also have a history of activism.  I have seen a book called Mothers of Feminism by Margaret Hope Bacon about prominent 19th century Quakers who were involved in the suffragist movement. Susan B. Anthony was one of them.  There are many modern Quaker activists for peace.  The readers of The Last Runaway might think of Honor Bright as a typical Quaker because of her activist tendency, but her stance causes trouble in her community.

I found this book compelling and provocative.  It gave me a more complex view of 19th century Quakers.  The interplay of silence and activism in the life of Honor Bright was unexpected, and the Quakers who were in conflict with her turned out to be worthy of respect.

I think I would like to read Slavery and the Meeting House: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma by Ryan P. Jordan which Chevalier mentions in her acknowledgements.  Chevalier did show us that it was a dilemma.  This caused me to reflect on issues in my life where activism and dissent could represent a dilemma.   I think this was the best book that I've read by Tracy Chevalier so far.