Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman

Old Rit was Harriet Tubman’s mother. Her full name was Harriet “Rit” Green Ross, and at the time of Harriet’s birth, she was enslaved by a white woman named Mary Pattison Brodess and living on the farm of Brodess’s second husband, Anthony Thompson. A few years later, Rit and her children were sent to live on the farm of Mary’s son, Edward Brodess. She and her husband, Ben—who stayed on the Thompson farm—managed to see one another periodically, and in total, they had nine children, of which Harriet was the fourth. Sometime between 1854 and 1855, Ben informally purchased her freedom, and although legally still enslaved, Rit was able to move into her husband’s house and live as a free woman. When she was nearly 70, in June of 1857, she and Ben were brought north by Harriet. Rit lived in St. Catharines, Ontario, for several years, and then she and Ben moved into a house with Harriet in Auburn, New York. She died in October 1880, at nearly 100 years of age.

In Freedom Train, Rit is portrayed as a loving but fearful mother exasperated by Harriet’s risk taking and self-sacrifice. Rit shows her love for Harriet by nursing her with great devotion when she gets the measles, when she is beaten by Sarah, and when she receives a terrible head injury. Because Rit works in the fields herself, she imagines that working in the “Big House” is an easier life, and this is what she wants for her daughters. She does not have the same burning drive to be free that Harriet has, and she believes that Harriet should make the pragmatic decision to compromise her own dignity and act subservient enough to be assigned to work in their enslavers’ home. Rit worries about Harriet’s safety when she shows defiance toward their enslavers and when Harriet becomes a conductor on the Underground Railroad. She does not understand why her daughter is willing to sacrifice so much for others. Rit is portrayed as a mildly comic complainer and scolder; for instance, she chastises her husband for illegally hunting food for their family, complains that St. Catharines is too cold and that she needs to be moved down to New York, and fusses over Harriet’s money management in their later years. This portrayal of Rit provides a contrast with the text’s characterization of Harriet, highlighting Harriet’s courage, dignity, and capacity for self-sacrifice.

In Freedom Train, Miss Sarah is the wife of Harriet’s enslaver and functions as an antagonist to Harriet and her family. She is also referred to as “the Mistress,” a generic title that enslaved people were expected to use for a female enslaver. Miss Sarah is an entirely unsympathetic character. She forces seven-year-old Harriet to work around the clock, verbally and emotionally abuses her, and viciously whips her for small offenses like trying to take a lump of sugar from the table. She constantly threatens the people she has enslaved with being sold to cotton plantations in the deep South and breaks up families by sending enslaved people to work on neighboring farms and by actually selling some people to cotton plantations.

In reality, for most of her years in slavery, Harriet was enslaved by Edward Brodess and his wife, Eliza Ann Brodess. She was loaned out to several different families and did not consistently live on any one farm. Miss Sarah functions as an amalgam of the various cruel women who tormented and oppressed Harriet in her early years.

Daddy Ben, or Benjamin Ross, was Harriet Tubman’s father. In Freedom Train, he is portrayed as a loving father who appreciates Harriet’s inherent dignity and self-worth and who encourages her to live according to her own beliefs. Like Harriet, he is willing to take risks on behalf of others—he illegally hunts in order to feed his children, and, late in life, he helps a freedom seeker escape and is jailed for the offense. He is the one who teaches Harriet to navigate outdoors, and he expresses faith that Harriet can achieve what she sets her mind to.

Although Sterling portrays Ben as an enslaved man living with his family and functioning as a supportive father figure throughout Harriet’s childhood, the truth is more complex. It was very common for enslaved families to be separated by their enslavers, and this is exactly what happened to Harriet’s family. Ben was born into slavery and enslaved by a man called Anthony Thompson. He met Rit when her enslaver, Mary Pattison Brodess, married Anthony. Harriet was born while Ben and Rit were living together on the Thompson property. Shortly after Harriet’s birth, Rit and the children were moved to the Brodess farm by Mary’s adult son from an earlier marriage, Edward Brodess, who claimed legal ownership of Rit and her children. This separated Ben from Rit and the children for many years.

When Harriet was about 14, Anthony died. His will stipulated that Ben be freed five years after his death and given a piece of land from the Thompson property. By 1841, Ben was a free man. He sold his land back to the Thompson family, and when the new head of the family—Anthony’s eldest son, also called Anthony—moved to another area of Maryland, Ben went with the Thompsons to work as a timber inspector. This put even more distance between Ben and his family, but he made the move for good reasons: He saved up enough money doing this work to buy Rit’s freedom from the Brodess family in 1854 or 1855. This transaction was not technically legal, however, because a recently passed law in Maryland made it illegal to free enslaved people over 45 years of age. Even though the Brodess family allowed Rit to move in with Ben and live essentially as a free woman, she was still not legally free. Because the focus of Freedom Train is Harriet, not her father, these complexities of Ben’s relationship with the family are not explored.