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The Site of Harriet Tubman’s First Act of Defiance
When Harriet Tubman was around 15 years old girl, sometime around 1835. She was sent to the Bucktown store shown here in this photo. Here she encountered a slave owned by another family, who had left work in the fields without permission. The overseer, angry, and demanded that Tubman help stop the young man. She refused, and as the slave ran away, the overseer threw a two-pound weight at him. While standing in the the doorway of this store the weight struck Tubman instead. She said the weight "broke my skull". She later explained her belief that her hair which "had never been combed and stood out like a bushel basket" saved her life. While bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was sent back to her owner's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without care for two days. She was sent back into the fields , "with blood and sweat rolling down my face until I couldn't see." Her boss said she was "not worth a sixpence" and returned her to Edward Brodess, who tried unsuccessfully to sell her. She began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. These episodes were alarming to her family, who were unable to wake her when she fell asleep suddenly and without warning. This condition remained with Tubman until she underwent an operation on her skull at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital in the late 1890s. She had received no anesthesia for the procedure, and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.
At the time this happen, Bucktown was a busy community with two stores, a shopkeeper’s home, blacksmith,farms, and shipyards on the nearby Transquaking River.
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The United States is one of the most diverse countries on earth, jam packed full of amazing sights from St. Patrick's cathedral in New York to Mount Hollywood California.The Northeast region is where it all started. Thirteen British colonies fought the American Revolution from here and won their independence in the first successful colonial rebellion in history. Take a look at these rolling hills carpeted with foliage along the Hudson river here, north of New York City.The American south is known for its polite people and slow pace of life. Probably they move slowly because it's so hot. Southerners tend not to trust people from "up north" because they talk too fast. Here's a cemetery in Georgia where you can find graves of soldiers from the Civil War.The West Coast is sort of like another country that exists to make the east coast jealous. California is full of nothing but grizzly old miners digging for gold, a few gangster rappers, and then actors. That is to say, the West Coast functions as the imagination of the US, like a weird little brother who teases everybody then gets famous for making freaky art.The central part of the country is flat farmland all the way over to the Rocky Mountains. Up in the northwest corner you can find creative people in places like Portland and Seattle, along with awesome snowboarding and good beer. Text by Steve Smith.
