A WOMAN CALLED MOSES by MARCY HEIDISH 308 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $9.95.
As Harriet Tubman crouches behind a stand of trees that edge the slave quarters of a Maryland plantation, her song wafts across the dark night. "Who's that yonder dressed in red?/ I heard the angels singing./ Looks like the children that Moses led./ I heard the angels singing." The plaintive melody is a mythic signal, readily understood: she is the "Moses" who is leading her people out of bondage. Moments after Harriet's song has ended, the passengers join her on the Underground Railroad, moving North to freedom.
In Marcy Heidish's fictionalized narrative, the heroine recounts her role as hope to the "bondfolk" of the South, terror to plantation owners (the reward for her capture rose to $40,000) and major figure in the abolition and women's suffrage movements. Harriet Tubman, a short, muscular woman, was born into slavery around 1820 on Maryland's Eastern Shore. At 15, she suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw an iron weight at her. The blow left Harriet with permanent brain damage; for the remainder of her life, she would suffer periods of unconsciousness.
She suffered no such lapses of responsibility. After fleeing to free territory, she organized 19 forays into the South, bringing out 300 men, women and children. But she continued to worry about the unreachable. In Heidish's stream of conscience, Tubman murmurs: "I began to dream continually on numbers . . . Three million the abolitionists said there were; that figure loomed large in my brain, nearly blotting the others out. I was unable to picture what a million or two or three million looked like, so I dreamed instead of fingers, counting them, fingers spread, pointing, webbing together, locking at the knuckles, breaking apart, stretching."
In this evocative first novel, the rescuer emerges as an invincibly courageous woman, guided by a deep, mystical religious faith and a tenacious vision. Harriet Tubman used her great intelligence in the service of a passionate love for her people. She was, to the end of her days, illiterate. But she did more than read or write a book. She inspired one—and millions of followers, down to the present.
THE AUCTIONEER by JOAN SAMSON 239 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.
Perly Dunsmore is an auctioneer with the suave, hypnotic ease of a political campaigner. Settling into the little New Hampshire town of Harlowe, he begins his auctions with a benefit for the one-man police force. But he is not in town for charitable purposes. Before long, the townspeople's most precious possessions—including, eventually, children—fall under Dunsmore's hammer. Wisps of evil drift through the book, perceived through the eyes of the Moores, a proud old farming family. "You'll pay worse if you try to say no," warns Mim Moore. "Somebody—some head guy somewhere's bound to catch on and put the lid on the whole thing," a friend counters. "This is still America." But when Mim's husband John finally protests to the authorities, he is dismissed as a crank.