How a Young Harriet Tubman Found Solace in Syncretic Religion

Childhood trauma led Minty Ross (Harriet Tubman) to seek divine intervention. This was an experience, and a reaction, that she shared with other unfree girls. Black women who published spiritual memoirs in the nineteenth century spoke of early separations from parents, states of captivity as slaves or servants, and appeals to the God of their belief that echoed Minty’s.

The girl who would become the traveling preacher known as Old Elizabeth recited a memoir that accords most closely with Harriet Tubman’s early years. Born in Maryland to enslaved parents in 1766, Elizabeth told her story at age ninety-seven to an unnamed person who wrote it down (we must assume with a degree of editorial license). Elizabeth’s family lived together when she was a young child, presumably on the grounds of the person who enslaved them.

Her parents were practicing Methodists. Her father was literate and read the Bible aloud to his family each Sunday morning. “When I was but five years old, I often felt the overshadowing of the Lord’s Spirit,” Elizabeth narrated, “and these incomes and influences co[n]tinued to attend me until I was eleven years old.” But Elizabeth’s domestic stability cratered when, like Minty, Elizabeth was leased out by the man who owned her family. At the age of eleven, Elizabeth was taken. “My master sent me to another farm, several miles from my parents, brothers, and sisters which was a great trouble to me. At last I grew so lonely and sad I thought I should die, if I did not see my mother,” she later wrote.

Desolate, Elizabeth escaped to find her mother, wandering twenty miles before she was successful. She remained with her mother for several days until she was sent back to her new placement of bondage, which “renewed [her] sorrows.” Elizabeth’s mother had one parting gift for her child, the stark advice that Elizabeth had “‘nobody in the wide world to look to but God.’” Elizabeth repeated these words to herself like a mantra— “none but God in the wide world”— as she trod back to the farm where the overseer stood waiting to tie her up and beat her. Elizabeth remembered her mother’s words, clung to them like a lifeboat, and tried to look to God over the following difficult weeks and months. “I betook myself to prayer, and in every lonely place I found an altar. I mourned sore like a dove and chattered forth my sorrow, moaning in the corners of the field, and under the fences.” She seemed to feel that God alone could understand her pain, bearing out the truth of her mother’s adage.

Minty and Elizabeth were not alone in their desperate appeal to an unseen presence for emotional comfort in the wake of familial separation and physical abuse. Zilpha Elaw, who would preach in private homes in the States and then abroad in London in the 1840s, also turned to God to ease her childhood sufferings. Zilpha was born free in Pennsylvania to “religious parents” around the year 1790.

She was then orphaned as a child and sent to live and work as a servant in a white Quaker household. Zilpha felt lonely in this new home, especially in the absence of familiar Methodist religious rituals observed by her deceased parents. Punctuating this pall of loneliness were her mistress’s “very severe rebukes.” A desolate Zilpha turned to God in her troubles. “How vast a source of consolation did I derive from habitual communion with my God; to Him I repaired in secret to acquaint him with all my griefs, and obtained both sympathy and succor,” she attested. Her sense of a divine and compassionate listener, introduced by her then absent parents, eased her suffering.

Minty Ross likewise took an early religious education with her when she was sent by her enslavers to labor on distant estates as a child. Her mother, Rit, and father, Ben, were practicing Christians. Bazzel’s Church, a small Methodist Episcopal denomination in Dorchester County surrounded by marshy ground and forest, was remembered by local residents as a place where Tubman’s family sometimes worshipped. Ben fasted on Fridays as an act of religious devotion. His practice suggests a Catholic or Episcopalian influence, though Tubman told her biographer, Bradford, that he did it for conscience rather than for denominational adherence.

As an adult, Tubman would continue this dietary observance. Ben may also have held non-Christian beliefs espoused by other Black enslaved people who revered ancestral spirits and made protective talismans out of natural elements like roots. The informal institution of the pre-emancipation Black church drew on “West African religious concepts… blending them syncretistically with orthodox colonial Christianity,” explained the theologian Katie Geneva Cannon. Oral historical and archaeological evidence supports this picture of enslaved people embracing a Christian faith enhanced by West African influences and practices. A white man whose great-grandfather bought Anthony Thompson’s land, where Tubman’s family had once been enslaved, remembered that his grandfather believed in witches and sought a remedy for dispelling one from a local Black woman.

The Maryland state-sponsored archaeological study conducted at a cabin that may have once served as a slave quarters on Thompson’s land uncovered an unusual assemblage of objects currently interpreted as a “spirit cache.” The collection of special items, including “a glass heart-shaped perfume bottle stopper, a white ceramic dish, and a copper alloy button,” might have been positioned near the fireplace to ward off evil spirits. The religious faith of Minty and her family, like that of other local residents, was most likely richly variegated, lending Minty access to various channels of fortitude, relief, and appeal as she was shuttled about from farm to farm.

According to Sarah Bradford, the mature Harriet Tubman claimed to “always know when there [was] danger near her” and said this gift of foresight had been “inherited” from her father, who accurately predicted the weather as well as future events such as the U.S. war with Mexico in 1846. If Ben Ross was Catholic, he may have been even more inclined to combine African-derived faith practices with Christian beliefs, an approach commonly associated with enslaved people in the Caribbean and Brazil who adapted the Catholicism of their Spanish, French, and Portuguese enslavers. Rit Green and Ben Ross were religious people who instilled in their children a sense of a spiritual reality beyond the mundane, visible world.

“I have known many of her family,” Sarah Bradford said of Tubman; “they all seem to be peculiarly intelligent, upright and religious people, and to have a strong feeling of family affection.” Acknowledging Bradford’s bias here in labeling a smart Black family as “peculiar,” we can still gather from this observation a sense of the family’s moral grounding and religious devotion. The Green-Rosses, along with fellow enslaved families across the Eastern Shore of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, participated in cultures of integrated belief, story, and ritual.

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Excerpted from Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles. Copyright © 2024. Available from Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.