“When Harriet Met Sojourner” by Catherine
Clinton, illus. by Shane W. Evans (Amistad, 9780060504250, $16.99, 32 pages,
age 4 and up)
Historian Catherine Clinton draws her inspiration for this outstanding
children’s picture book and double-biography from an intriguing footnote in
history: on one day near the end of the Civil War, the lives of two
legendary freedom-fighters intersected, but the specifics are lost to us:
“When their paths crossed in Boston that October in 1864, there was no
photographer to record the occasion, no newspaper interview to highlight
this historic meeting.”
Rather than try to imagine what might have happened on that blank day when
Harriet Tubman met Sojourner Truth, Clinton instead takes us on a tour of
the two heroic women’s lives, and with the help of striking illustrations by
Kansas City artist Shane W. Evans, she shows us how their fearless
determination helped remake a nation torn by injustice.
Born into slavery in upstate New York just before 1800, Sojourner Truth, or
Isabella Bomefree as she was called then, was raised to speak Dutch, the
language of her owners. Her surname meant “tall tree” in Dutch, and she grew
to be six feet tall and thirsty for freedom. When New York abolished
slavery, she walked out of captivity despite her owner’s attempts to stop
her, and when her former master illegally sold her son away, she took the
man to court and won her child back. It was then that she gave herself the
name Sojourner Truth as a symbol of her rebirth into freedom.
Araminta Ross, the girl who would become Harriet Tubman, was born in
Maryland in 1825 to a loving family that could not protect her sisters from
being sold South or her from being hired out from the age of seven. “Minty”
pieced together escape plans just like she pieced together patchwork quilts,
and when she saw her chance, she ran northward to freedom, holding tight to
her determination to come back for every member of her family.
In their audacious, unprecedented careers, Sojourner Truth preached and
lectured for emancipation across the North with a voice that inspired
bravery and a keen eye that encouraged her opponents not to contradict her
when she spoke out about women’s strength and rights. Araminta, taking the
freedom name Harriet Tubman, became a legendary conductor on the Underground
Railroad and a spy for the North during the Civil War. On more than a dozen
missions, she brought hundreds of people into freedom, often taking them all
the way to Canada, and her badge of honor was her perfect success rate: She
never lost a passenger.
Clinton relates these remarkable and humbling life stories with a kind
eloquence, and Shane Evans illustrates them perfectly in pictures that seem
stitched into the text with painted panels that have the visual textures and
colors of denim cloth and rough-spun wool. Each page, with its background of
bright stars and quilt blocks, seems suitable for framing.
Whatever Truth and Tubman might have spoken about that October day in 1864,
Clinton and Evans make it clear that their meeting was a grand moment in two
lives lived well and for the betterment of a people and a nation.
Review by
Mark David
Bradshaw, January
24, 2008
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