(Edward) Brodess Farm. "This young woman who was very small and very strong and very fast and very, very brave. Send me updates about Slate special offers. But The Times report notes that, as soon as Edward Brodess died in 1849, Harriet and her brothers fled from the farm.
He became the owner of Tubman after she and her siblings were relocated from his stepfather's farm to his own in Dorchester, Maryland. To his (and my) surprise, Long is a black man. Robert felt Edward Brodess “was not fit to own a dog.” Ben was more to the point: “Where I came from,” he later recalled, “it would make your flesh creep, and your hair stand on end, to know what they do to the slaves.”. History: Harriet Tubman The Edward Brodess Farm was the home of one … Harriet Tubman later told an interviewer that she seldom lived with the Brodesses. All rights reserved. The fact that Harriet is the first feature-length film to tell the story of one of the most famous women in American history may sound improbable, but it’s no less improbable than many of the facts of her life. Edward Brodess, with a small farm and few livestock, did not have enough work to fully employ all of his slaves. He was “never unnecessarily cruel; but as was common among slaveholders, he often hired out his slaves to others, some of whom proved to be tyrannical and brutal to the utmost limit of their power.” Harriet’s brothers, Ben and Robert, recalled harsher treatment at the hands of the Brodesses. In the movie, as in real life, Harriet’s journey to freedom is kicked into high gear upon the death of her master, Edward Brodess. "Cook set her to watching his musk-rat traps, which compelled her to wade through the water," biographer Sarah Bradford wrote in Harriet: The Moses of Her People. Despite that, her owners still called her by the name they gave her, as evidenced by the Oct. 3, 1849, advertisement for the return of “Minty” taken out by Tubman’s mistress Eliza Brodess when she eventually escaped. Upon noticing the escape of Harriet’s brothers, the vengeful Gideon hires Bigger Long, a slave catcher who is rumored to be the best in the area. Just as described in the movie, the real-life Tubman was, as a teenager, struck in the forehead by a 2-pound weight thrown by a white overseer. And though it's Edward who initially refuses to free Harriet and her family despite the fact that his great-grandfather promised to let them go by an agreed upon time, Gideon becomes the main antagonist as he eventually inherits everything and decides to put Harriet and her siblings up for sale to keep the farm afloat. (In an interview with Slate, Lemmons described the “spells” as Tubman’s “Spidey sense.”) As in the movie, Tubman believed that the visions she experienced were messages from God. Thanks for signing up! While it’s true that John did remarry in Harriet’s absence, her trip back to Dorchester County wasn’t her first rescue. A … He was not only one of the most successful black businessmen in the city but one of the busiest conductors on the Underground Railroad, helping hundreds of fugitive slaves settle in the city or continue farther north. Though the movie may leave the impression that she only took on the name Harriet Tubman when she reached freedom, she seems to have taken it when she was married, taking Harriet from her mother, Harriet Ross, and Tubman from her husband, a free black man named John Tubman. But outside of the South, or even in border states, we know that rings of kidnappers used free black people to lure in their prey, who were far more likely to trust a black person than a white one and who wouldn’t realize they’d been duped until they were en route to being sold as a slave. Her father helps her tap into the Underground Railroad through a local free black preacher—based on Dorchester County’s real-life freed slave, preacher, and Tubman collaborator Reverend Samuel Green—and after an almost 100-mile journey, she makes it to Philadelphia.