Harriet Tubman Food Metaphors

Tubman was the daughter of a cook. Her mother Harriet (Rit) Ross worked in the “big house” on the plantation in Dorchester County, MD., where Tubman was raised. An early food-related incident is testimony to the future General Tubman 's strong-willed character. (Martyris). As a child Harriet learned how to cook and later on she ran an eating house in Beaufort. Tubman grew up on a farm throughout her life. She reached for earthy food metaphors to express herself. "I felt like a blackberry in a pail of milk," she said when she, an illiterate black woman, bid for and bought a parcel of land in Auburn, N.Y., that would eventually house the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Infirm Negroes. (Martyris). Tubman was able to express herself in many ways using simple food metaphors to compare herself to other people or how she felt but using food to describe it.

In 1849, Tubman feared she would be sold like her two sisters had been and Tubman escaped to Philadelphia. She travelled to Baltimore and New Jersey, where in order to support herself and raise money to go back to rescue her family, and spent the summer of 1852 working as a cook in a resort at fashionable Cape May, N.J. She used her wages to pay for a raid that freed nine slaves. Tubman cared for others knowing that she had to do so much to get where she needed to go. During the civil war, Tubman

Tubman married a civil war veteran named Nelson Davis. Harriet and Nelson adopted a baby girl named Gertile. (Harriet Tubman). Harriet left her other husband to escape to freedom and she knew that she was sacrificing a lot that she would had to leave behind. Harriet continued to give freely in spite of her economic woes in 1903. She donated a parcel of her land to the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Auburn. The Harriet Tubman Home for the aged opened in 1908. (Harriet Tubman). Tubman still continued to help and give, no matter what she had to sacrifice, she still wanted to help