Harriet: A History We Never Knew

Jim Cherry
3 min readNov 3, 2019
Focus Features

As little kids in school we all learned about Harriet Tubman, she was a leader of the underground railroad and free many slaves and there was usually a picture of an older woman, you didn’t really think about it, you accepted it, and it was filed away as history, benign facts in a dry book. Harriet fleshes out the story, gives us a full-blooded Harriet Tubman, who yes, freed slaves (estimated to be about 70) and was of the few women in the American military who led an expedition against an enemy position. Harriet Tubman was a dangerous woman.

Harriet is played by Cynthia Erivo who at the beginning of the film is being denied freedom her mother had been promised for her children, the slave-owner literally rips up in front of her, and she decides that she has to run for her freedom since the decision has been made to sell her and break up her and her family. Harriet, who at the time was known as ‘Minty’ makes the hundred mile journey to freedom, due to a friendly pastor, a Quaker, divine intervention (she has visions of God telling her what to do) and luck makes it to Philadelphia where she is taken under the wing of the Philadelphia anti-slavery league. A year later she decides she must go back to get her husband but is discouraged by the league, Harriet goes anyway. Fate intervenes and she rescues seven others including members of her family. Harriet goes on to make the risky trek, despite becoming known in Maryland as ‘Moses’ with a bounty on her head and being told she can’t or shouldn’t make the repeated trips because of the increasing danger.

Harriet is a well acted and dramatized story. I can’t think of one weak performance, but I wasn’t thinking of this movie as performances I was immersed into the plot and the action, in this day and age where we have manufactured super-heroes inundating us with over the top action it’s good to see a real life, people can look up to. Harriet was a hero, as defined, a hero is someone who overcomes the facts of existence, and Harriet Tubman certainly overcame them in her time. This is what a film is meant to be a distillation of reality that can be experienced by an audience, the ideas and themes a part of the fabric that are explicated and absorbed without the filmmaker being didactic about it. Harriet is a story and movie to be passed down generation to generation.

Harriet Tubman’s story is a message for these exact times with racism and racists raising their ugly heads. Harriett tells us they will ultimately fail because they’ve never had anything except fear, hate and violence. Hopefully this is the last iteration of racism and its hydra head will finally be severed and cauterized.

Harriet is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time at the end I did something I never do at a movie, I clapped, for Harriet Tubman, for the history and the great performances throughout.

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Jim Cherry

I’m a writer. You can find me in between the lines.