THE RESCUER

raminta Ross, or “Minty,” was born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the 1820s. Catastrophe marked her early life. She was six years old when she was sent away from her mother to work as a weaver; three of her sisters were sold into the Deep South. As a teenager, Minty suffered a blow to the head, delivered by an overseer, that left her prone to chronic pain, nightmares, visions, and epileptic seizures. In her early 20s, she adopted her mother’s given name and her husband’s surname—and that is how history remembers her, as Harriet Tubman. “Names were important to enslaved people,” Tiya Miles writes in Tubman was hardly the ˜rst formerly enslaved person to reinvent herself. But most people did so after escaping bondage; Tubman began using her new name when she was still in captivity—an early strike against her so-called masters, Miles speculates, that “casts a glow of foreshadowing over her story.”