Friday, September 18, 2009

I keep thinking, this week in particular, of the natural acumen of both Nana Harriet Ross Tubman-Davis and Mother Sojourner Truth, as spiritual business women. They did absolutely everything, significant and minor, only after deep
consultation with the Divine and that included their business work which was that of freedom marketing, promotion, and distribution.

Neither of them could read or write "a lick", as the Tennessee elders would say,
but they supported themselves and many of those in their world by the sale of their biographies which they themselves could not read. Many biographies have come and gone off the world scene, but biographies of these two supremely great souls continue to abound from myriad literary corners.

Heading off somewhere with a wagonload of her books, Mother Truth would get to a crossroads and not knowing just where to go, would say to the Divine, "You drive, God." I have learned to say that myself, not only at life's crossroads but throughout this sometimes joyful, sometimes arduous journey.

Nana Tubman, (like her mother in whose honor she took the name Harriet Tubman--her birth name was Araminta), at any rate, she could really cook and oftentimes sought to fill her meager coffers with proceeds from the sales of her delicious gingerbreads and ginger ale (made from fresh herbs, for like her father, Ben, she was an herbalist.) She used that knowledge of herbology, you will recall, on her many freedom treks. Later biographies reveal that she'd taken her cooking skills to another level by having a restaurant at least for a brief time
in Gullah/Geechee country of South Carolina, if my memory serves me correctly.

She also taught the Gullah/Geechee women how to set up laundering businesses to support their families by providing these services to the Union soldiers during the Civil War. Mother Truth taught the women in the Freedmen's Villages in the Washington area about hygiene, health, and housekeeping.
They were both superb spiritual businesswomen and l9th century multitaskers long before that word became popular. And all this without being able to read or write "a lick". They were Spirit-bred and Spirit-bred. Among the great contemporary poet, Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Women."

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