Minty: A Story of Young Harriet Tubman

by Alan Schroeder and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney

New York:  Dial Books for Young Readers, 1996

In this unconventional juvenile biography, Schroeder and Pinkney tell the story of Harriet Tubman as a child.  Although, as Schroeder notes before the story, some details of the story are fiction (conversations, for instance, and some isolated scenes), the facts presented are true and real, placing this text in the biography genre.

Harriet Tubman's given name was actually Araminta, which led to the nickname Minty.  When the reader meets Minty for the first time, she is hiding from her slave master, already a rebellious young girl.  The story continues as Minty gets herself into trouble time and time again for various offenses:  setting free muskrats instead of catching them, hiding in the barn instead of doing work, and having a rag doll she wasn't supposed to.  As the story progresses, Minty becomes more and more determined to one day run away from the plantation and slavery, and her father even takes her out into the nearby woods to teach her survival skills.  Without these, Schroeder says, she would not have been successful later in life.  The book ends when Minty is still young, and she has just passed up one opportunity for flight because she became scared.  However, there is a brief afterword that explains the more well known aspects of Harriet Tubman's free life, complete with direct quotes and historical backing.

This was an interesting text.  I found it a little strange that a book that included fictional aspects could be in the biography section, which is actually one of the main reasons I ended up choosing it.  The story itself was somewhat disjointed, and it was hard to tell if time was passing or if all of the events took place around the same time period.  Another issue I found was in the depiction of slavery.  Although it obviously portrayed it as wrong, I thought isolated events could have been stronger.  As it was, I finished the book without any real sense for what Minty's plight was (separating, of course, my prior knowledge of slavery from what has been directly presented in this text).

The illustrations, however, were beautiful.  Full of bright colors and vibrant imagery, each page showed the emotion and events of the text.  Even on such a dark topic as slavery, I thought it was nice that Pinkney included some brighter, happier colors:  sunflowers, for instance, show up on several pages, as do other types of flowers.  Harriet Tubman was a brave and important woman, and we know that her story was a successful one.  These brighter colors represent not only her eventual escape from slavery, but also the hope she had always carried for a better life.