Reviews of Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
New biographies reflect great changes in the writing of Black history
“Night Flyer,” about Harriet Tubman, and “Nat Turner, Black Prophet” stress the importance of religion to their subjects and illustrate how history is being crafted right now.
Tubman is famous as the “Moses of her People” who piloted scores of family members, friends and neighbors across hundreds of treacherous miles as they escaped slavery. She is rightly celebrated as an antislavery icon, the epitome of American grit and courage. In biographies and children’s books, she towers as the heroine of the Underground Railroad, the informal network that self-emancipators used to flee the South. Traffickers lurked in the slave-owning South and border states, and the nominal free states were often little safer. But Northern states or, even better, Canada offered refuge. Tubman made an estimated 13 trips back to her Maryland Eastern Shore homeland to conduct some 70 people out of bondage. She did not accompany her friend John Brown to his raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859, but during the Civil War, she soldiered and reconnoitered.
After the war, she relocated permanently to Auburn, N.Y., just north of the Finger Lakes, where she had purchased a house and land shortly before the war. Tubman devoted her later years to the cause of women’s suffrage and to a home for elderly people in need. Her image graces a $20 bill that has been proposed to replace the one featuring President Andrew Jackson, a enslaver who enforced the genocide of Native Americans.
Like Tubman, Turner entered American history through blazing deeds of courage. But unlike Tubman, he opposed slavery through the most murderous of means, leading an 1831 uprising in Virginia’s Southampton County that killed at least 55 White people, the bloodiest slave insurrection in U.S. history. More than 100 Black people were executed over the rebellion, including Turner; he was hanged on Nov. 11, 1831, and his body was desecrated. Turner’s actions, like Tubman’s, entered the literature of American history before he died, and, like Tubman, he has inspired numerous works of history, literature and drama in the nearly 200 years that he’s been gone.
This year offers two spectacular books that stress the importance of religion to Tubman and Turner, and that illustrate — one visually and contextually, one rhetorically — how far Black biography has traveled in the past quarter-century. Both books benefit from earlier works published when biographies of individuals had to do the work of social history in general, filling in the people, institutions, dates and places around which and during which their subjects operated. Now, at last, authors of Black biography can concentrate on the specificities of their protagonists.
Tiya Miles’s stunning “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake” won the 2021 National Book Award for nonfiction. In “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People,” Miles offers an “ecowomanist” account that portrays Tubman as a mystic who drew strength and knowledge from a God-Spirit. For Miles, the head injury that Tubman suffered as a child not only yielded spells of disability, but also opened access to visions and voices that delivered an unearthly understanding of the world — the one physically experienced as well as the one normally unseen. The themes of spirituality and ecology shape Miles’s presentation of a woman who was “startlingly spiritual and eerily smart” and “the most famous Black woman ecologist in U.S. history.”
The genius of “Night Flyer” is interdisciplinary. Along with maps showing Tubman’s routes from slavery to freedom, it adds poetry, historical visual representations, and historical and contemporary photographs, exceeding the archival photographic portraits of Tubman in youth and maturity that one would expect to find in a conventional biography. Here also are recent color photographs of the natural world that Tubman traversed. As Miles notes, art can convey meanings that text alone cannot.
Miles surrounds Tubman with Black women, opening the book with an evocation of her African-born grandmother. Presenting Tubman as a woman of faith, Miles wraps her in the testimony of Black women preachers from the 19th century: Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw and Julia Foote. Contemporary Black women scholars and naturalists, like Katie Cannon, Delores Williams and Melanie Harris, supply intellectual context. All in all, “Night Flyer” is a triumph of Black women’s studies, a powerful representation of what Black studies — an interdisciplinary field ranging far wider than history alone — can offer our understanding of the past. Read it to learn about Tubman. Read it to see what Black women’s studies can do.
At first glance, “Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History” seems more rooted in older traditions of social history, even though it persistently centers Turner’s self-concept as a prophet and as a general prosecuting a war with biblical resonance. The book, written by Anthony E. Kaye with Gregory P. Downs, contains only one illustration, a map drawn from an older biography that focused on the White people Turner and his warriors slew, White people who are well represented in conventional historical archives. The map does not trace Turner’s deadly itinerary.
But let’s not stop at first glance. This heartfelt, painstaking account does so much more than social history. It plants Turner, with his visions and sanguinary mission, in the world of early 19th-century American Methodism, with its interracial churches, its warlike imagery, its evocations of the Book of Revelation and its appeal to the people who were the most oppressed. This meticulous, collaborative investigation (historian Kaye died in 2017; Downs is a professor of history at the University of California at Davis) presents Turner as both extraordinary in the strength of his convictions and very much a man of his times. This Nat Turner is enslaved, yes. He took the strongest possible measures against slavery, yes. But he also acted within a particular and widespread religious environment that was not exclusively Black. Where “Night Flyer” comes out of Black women’s studies, “Nat Turner, Black Prophet” leans heavily on scholarly social history, notably David Allmendinger’s “Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County,” from 2014.
These two fine books offer decidedly 21st-century gifts. They emerge out of an era when the abundant scholarship of Black history has made their biographical subjects more universally known. And they benefit from an increased, widespread interest in Black history. It’s too simplistic to ascribe that increased interest and the fact that the market for Black history has become far more visible to, say, President Barack Obama or the uprisings of the George Floyd summer of 2020. But let those stand in for the atmosphere that could lead to the publication of these two books by major presses — books that are being widely publicized, widely bought and widely read. Quite a change, and a very good one, from the previous century.
— By Nell Irvin Painter. Read the review as it appeared in The Washington Post.
Nell Irvin Painter is a professor emerita of history at Princeton University and the author of several books, including “Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol” and, most recently, “I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays.”
The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman
A new book conveys in dramatic detail what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery. Another addresses the love of God and country that helped her do so.
Just how far down did Moses go? The spiritual does not say, but one of the prophet’s namesakes—the woman who sang “Go Down, Moses” along the rivers and roads of the Eastern Shore of Maryland as she helped some seventy people escape slavery via the Underground Railroad—went as far south as she could. Harriet Tubman returned not only to the border state from which she herself had escaped; defiantly courageous, she ventured deeper into the land of bondage to liberate hundreds of others during the Civil War.
Her greatest feat may also be among her least known—a raid of Confederate rice plantations on the Combahee River, in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, which liberated more than seven hundred enslaved Americans. She did not lead the raid, as some recent histories suggest, but she was integral to its success. For more than a year, Tubman gathered intelligence from formerly enslaved men and women fleeing the Confederacy, and she recruited troops, scouts, and pilots from around Port Royal, South Carolina, to help the Union Army fight its way through enemy territory.
On the night of June 1, 1863, five months after the Emancipation Proclamation and a few weeks before the Battle of Gettysburg, Tubman accompanied Colonel James Montgomery and the newly freed men of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers as they boarded three steamboats off the coast of Beaufort. Their paddle wheels turned quietly in the dark as the vessels advanced toward St. Helena Sound. From the pilot house of the lead steamer, Tubman watched a full moon rise, its light a welcome guide for the raiders as they avoided pluff mud and mines, following a serpentine, twenty-five-mile route up the river. By the next morning, Montgomery’s men had landed and driven off the few remaining Confederate pickets, most enemy soldiers having fled the so-called sickly season, when malaria and yellow fever ravaged the coast. Thanks to Tubman’s intelligence, the Union troops faced almost no resistance besides a few skirmishes; after destroying a pontoon bridge they marched on seven plantations, burning whatever they could not confiscate. Millions of dollars in property was left smoldering as soldiers made away with rice, cotton, corn, chickens, pigs, and horses, but the soldiers were soon overwhelmed by a different kind of “contraband.”
Tubman later remembered how enslaved people of all ages emerged like “startled deer” from the fields and the forests along the shoreline, running for the boats like “the children of Israel, coming out of Egypt.” It was as if a “mysterious telegraphic communication” had gone from one rice field to the next, with laborers sharing the news that “Lincoln’s gun-boats come to set them free,” she said. Hundreds of refugees began rushing the rowboats; once those were filled, the oarsmen, worried about capsizing and afraid of being stranded, began beating people back. Seeing the chaos, Montgomery called out to Tubman for help: “Moses, you’ll have to give ’em a song.”
Above the screaming, the splashing, and the gunfire, Tubman’s voice rang out. “Of all the whole creation in the east or in the west, / The glorious Yankee nation is the greatest and the best,” she sang. “Come along! Come along! Don’t be alarmed, / Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm.” After every verse of the abolitionist anthem, the clamoring crowds let go of the boats, raised their hands, and shouted, “Glory!” The rowboats returned to the steamers, and the three steamships returned to Beaufort, with more than seven hundred newly freed people.
That dramatic scene, with all its danger, grace, and tragedy, is wonderfully staged in Edda L. Fields-Black’s new history, “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War” (Oxford). Where some have seen the raid primarily as Tubman’s story, isolating her from the broader network of Black liberation, Fields-Black powerfully situates the abolitionist among her contemporaries—controversial military geniuses who advanced the war effort through espionage, river raids, and guerrilla tactics, and fellow freedom seekers who, like Tubman, chose not to flee but to go back down to pharaoh’s land and fight.
“Combee” is one of two notable books out this year to wrestle with less familiar aspects of Tubman’s legacy. The other is “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People” (Penguin Press), by Tiya Miles. Fields-Black conveys, in elaborate detail, what America’s Moses did to help abolish slavery; Miles addresses the far more elusive question of why she did it.
Neither “Combee” nor “Night Flyer” is a cradle-to-grave biography, though both Fields-Black and Miles are drawn to the cradle that Tubman’s father made for her, from the trunk of a sweet-gum tree. Born Araminta Ross, to Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, around 1822, Tubman was first known as Minty. There were tender moments—she recalled being rocked in that hand-carved cradle—but her early years in Tidewater Maryland were filled mostly with physical torture and emotional terror.
Tubman was the fifth of nine children. Three of her sisters were sold and sent to the Deep South. Her parents were owned by two different families who separated them not long after her birth. While still a young girl, Tubman was taken away from her mother and forced to work as a maid, a nanny, a trapper, and a field hand. She was whipped constantly and regularly deprived of food and clothing. Short and frail, she was often debilitated by beatings and was once struck so hard with a two-pound iron weight that she suffered seizures for the rest of her life. What was never beaten out of her was an innate sense of liberty—the knowledge, self-evident to her, that God intended for her to be liberated from bondage, spiritually as well as literally. “God set the North Star in the heavens,” she said later. “He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free.”
Tubman’s concept of freedom was not only hoped for, like faith; it was something she observed in the world around her. Like Frederick Douglass, born just a few towns away, Tubman saw the reality of liberation early, interacting with formerly enslaved people who had worked to buy their freedom or been manumitted by their owners. In Tubman’s lifetime, the Black population in Maryland was almost evenly divided between enslaved and free; the year before the Civil War started, the state had more free Black people than any other in the country. She married one of those free men, John Tubman, and after taking his name she took her mother’s, too.
But marriage did not make Harriet Tubman free. Owing to the perverse absurdities of antebellum slave laws, she remained enslaved, and any of her children would be as well—born the property of the man who owned her. In 1844, when her wedding is thought to have taken place, that man was Edward Brodess, whose mother had owned Tubman’s mother. Tubman’s father had been manumitted by his owner, but Brodess had inherited Tubman, hiring her and her siblings out to neighbors for seasonal work, whether trapping muskrats or clearing land. Then, struggling with debt, Brodess decided that selling his inheritance would earn him more money than hiring them out.
Fearful that she would be separated from her family, Tubman turned to God. “I groaned and prayed for old master,” she told an early biographer. “Oh Lord, convert master! Oh Lord, change that man’s heart!” Brodess, evidently having as hardened a heart as the one Moses confronted in Exodus, did not relent. Tubman, on hearing that she and her brothers were to be sold into the Deep South, altered her petition. “If you ain’t never going to change that man’s heart,” she remembered pleading, “kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way.” Brodess died within the week.
Brodess’s wife, though, still planned to proceed with the sale, and on the night of September 17, 1849, Tubman, who had spent her entire life hearing God’s voice and having visions of God’s mercy, decided to act on her faith, and she fled into the darkness with two of her brothers. The brothers grew frightened and soon persuaded her to turn back, but she set off again later, on her own. “I’m bound for the promised land / On the other side of Jordan,” she sang while leaving, hoping that her friends and family would understand where she was headed.
That promised land was both geographical, the American North, and theological, God’s Kingdom on Earth. Many readers today will find such a concept confounding; some of Tubman’s contemporaries did, too. But resurrecting her spiritual life is the unusual project of Miles’s “Night Flyer.” Noting that Tubman “oriented to the world from a place of immersive religious belief,” Miles argues that we might never understand her if we don’t try to occupy that same “experiential space of integration between what she knew and what she felt, between rational thought, intuition, spiritual sensation, and landscape awareness.”
Abolition was a legal and social movement, but it was also a religious one, populated and promulgated by men and women of faith, who operated out of sincere and sweeping spiritual convictions. Tubman carried a pistol, but when questioned about her safe passage she once declared, “I just asked Jesus to take care of me.” And although she has rightfully been compared to intellectuals such as Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, Miles suggests that Tubman should also be considered alongside Black evangelists of the era, including Jarena Lee, the first female preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church; Zilpha Elaw, a mystic and a minister; Old Elizabeth, a spiritual memoirist; and Julia A. J. Foote, a leader in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement.
“Night Flyer” is a welcome corrective to the sorts of biographical portraits that reduce religious faith to psychoanalytic case studies or medical mysteries. It takes seriously the spiritual life of a people who, despite their enormous suffering, emerged with a robust and restorative religious tradition all their own. Rather than suggesting that Tubman’s prophetic visions and potent prayers were merely the product of temporal-lobe epilepsy or narcolepsy, Miles explores Tubman’s own explanation for their origin—the Lord God Almighty. Tubman and these other pioneering Black women “came to view themselves as ‘sanctified’ or ‘holy,’ after an emotionally wrought process of spiritual transformation,” Miles writes, and they shared a profound theology of universalism, inspired by St. Peter’s declaration in Acts that “God is no respecter of persons” and St. Paul’s assertion in Galatians that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The little we know about Tubman’s motivations comes robed in Scripture and prayer—blinding garments for modern eyes, but Miles helps us see. Raised in the Baptist Church, Miles, a professor of history at Harvard, studied womanist theology in her early academic career and has lately focussed her scholarship on the environmental humanities, connecting ecology with spirituality in careful, creative studies of nineteenth-century America. One of those studies won the National Book Award, in 2021: “All That She Carried,” a beautiful, braided story of a single South Carolina family, told through a cotton sack passed from one generation to the next.
That book, Miles wrote, “leans toward evocation rather than argumentation and is rather more meditation than monograph.” The same approach serves her well in “Night Flyer,” which portrays Tubman as the living embodiment of an extraordinary faith that helped her escape the estuarine ecology of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and master the salt marshes of the South Carolina Lowcountry. “Among the best preserved of Tubman’s speech acts are her prayers,” Miles notes. She has collected many of them in “Night Flyer,” along with modern poems and contemporary liturgies that give the book a spiritual texture not often encountered in narrative nonfiction. The result, like “All That She Carried,” is not an academic study of nineteenth-century Black history but a moving account of Tubman’s intellectual life—“her belief in God, heaven, and unseen powers” and “her belief in the integrity and import of relationships among all natural beings.”
Aflock of Christian witnesses surrounds Tubman in “Night Flyer,” while a different cast of characters joins her in “Combee.” Some readers may balk at the equal attention that Fields-Black gives to Tubman’s many compatriots in the Combahee River Raid and the many South Carolinians liberated by their efforts, but the book’s more than seven hundred pages rescue neglected lives and, in the process, reconstitute an entire society.
For Fields-Black, those people are not just historical figures but family. Like Diane McWhorter’s “Carry Me Home” or Margot Lee Shetterly’s “Hidden Figures,” “Combee” derives some of its power from the author’s personal connection to the national history she recovers. In McWhorter’s magisterial account of the Birmingham campaign of the civil-rights movement, she teased out her own family’s complicity with the Ku Klux Klan. As a child, Shetterly, whose father worked with the “human computers” at nasa’s Langley Research Center, was surrounded by the pioneering Black engineers, mathematicians, and scientists who later filled her book. Fields-Black, for her part, grew up visiting relatives around the Lowcountry, touring the region with her Gullah Geechee-speaking grandparents. She is a great-great-great-granddaughter of Hector Fields, one of hundreds of men who liberated themselves from the Confederacy and then fought to liberate others in the Combahee River Raid.
Aided by the Center for Family History at the International African American Museum, in Charleston, Fields-Black found military records and plantation archives that helped her plot Hector’s journey from enslavement in Beaufort to enlistment in the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers. He was denied a federal pension, but his brother Jonas had a two-hundred-and-fifty-five-page Army pension file that allowed Fields-Black to recover the story of the ancestors whose headstones she still visits at her family cemetery in Green Pond. Hector’s story is as important to Fields-Black as Tubman’s not only because of their family ties but because she understands that without men like him the Combahee River Raid would never have succeeded. As singular as Tubman was, her efforts depended on other freedom fighters.
Already famous for her furtive work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Tubman arrived in Beaufort in the spring of 1862, a few weeks after the Union general David Hunter declared martial law and ordered the emancipation of the local enslaved population. Tubman had the endorsement of Hunter’s friend John Andrew, who was the governor of Massachusetts—and a member of both the Boston Vigilance Committee, which provided assistance to fugitive slaves, and the Free Soil Party, which fought slavery in the Western territories. President Lincoln reversed Hunter’s emancipation order and rebuked him publicly, but Hunter began recruiting Black soldiers anyway.
Like Tubman, these soldiers were anomalous even among abolitionists, risking their freedom and safety by remaining in Confederate states. Thousands of them enlisted all around the country, forming regiments like the 1st South Carolina Colored Volunteers, the 1st Kansas Colored Infantry, and the 1st Louisiana Native Guard. They soon swelled the ranks of the Bureau of Colored Troops, joined by dozens of Northern regiments. By the end of the war, more than two hundred thousand Black men had volunteered for the Army or the Navy; nearly twenty per cent of them died fighting for the Union.
“Combee” studies the pension files of these veterans to reconstruct their lives before and after the Civil War, paying close attention to the Gullah Geechee people of the Carolina Lowcountry. We meet Old Heads, Prime Hands, and Pikins—what the Gullah Geechee called elders, enslaved laborers, and children—whose work, harvesting billions of dollars of Sea Island cotton and Carolina Gold rice, made the Combahee River one of the most profitable agricultural regions in the country. Some had already escaped to Port Royal in the first year of the war, after the Union Army captured the city and surrounding islands, joining the ten thousand refugees left behind after Confederate forces fled.
It was the Port Royal Experiment, an early attempt at Reconstruction, that drew Tubman to the Deep South, where she worked as a nurse and a cook, then established a kitchen and laundry where refugees could earn a living baking gingerbread and pies, making root beer, and washing clothes. At the same time, she interviewed all the “contrabands” she could, gathering information about the land they’d left behind, recruiting people who could navigate local byways and waterways, and encouraging able-bodied men to enlist. She became one of the Union’s most valuable spies, equipped with “secret service money” for paying informants and official travel papers that read “Pass the Bearer, Harriet Tubman, to Beaufort and back to this place, and wherever she wishes to go, and give her free passage at all times on Government transports.”
General Hunter had issued Tubman that pass, and he was eventually joined in the Department of the South by other white officers with abolitionist sympathies, eager to expand the use of Black troops. “Combee” celebrates two of these officers in particular, allies of Tubman who offered her opportunities to serve. Both were ministers who left their pulpits to fight for abolition, leading two of the first Black regiments at a time when the Army would not commission Black officers. Thomas Wentworth Higginson hailed from Massachusetts; after studying theology at Harvard Divinity School, he was called to a Unitarian church in Newburyport, then found a more radically abolitionist congregation in Worcester. Although remembered by some today as an early reader and mentor of Emily Dickinson, he was one of the Secret Six, who sent arms to Kansas and funded John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry.
Higginson regarded Tubman as the seventh member of Brown’s Secret Six. He’d met her in Boston, before the war, and in a letter to his mother he described her as “the greatest heroine of the age.” “Her tales of adventure are beyond anything in fiction,” he wrote, “and her ingenuity and generalship are extraordinary.” Higginson commanded the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, and he often led actions with James Montgomery, who commanded the 2nd South Carolina. Montgomery had been raised a Congregationalist, in Ohio, but after moving to the slave state of Kentucky he found himself drawn to a more evangelical faith, the filings of his soul aligned magnetically by the spiritual fervor and social revolution of the Second Great Awakening. He became a Campbellite preacher and moved his family west, to Kansas, where he developed a reputation as one of the most zealous Jayhawkers, attacking pro-slavery households and retaliating against border ruffians. Although Tubman had known Higginson for longer, some sources say she told Hunter that she would accompany troops on the Combahee River Raid only if the fervid Montgomery was in charge.
What Tubman accomplished a hundred and sixty-one years ago deserves to be celebrated in the annals of military history, and Fields-Black argues that it should be celebrated as a revolutionary act in the history of Black liberation, too—as notable as the Stono Rebellion, in South Carolina, or Nat Turner’s revolt, in Virginia. Her characterization of the Combahee River Raid as “the largest and most successful slave revolt in U.S. history” is debatable, given the decisive assistance of the Union Army; other revolutionaries could presumably have succeeded at a similar scale if backed by its might. But it is true, as Fields-Black suggests, that those involved were crucial links in a long chain of brave individuals connecting this country to its most honorable ideals of freedom and equality. And she does not shy away from how often and how cruelly the United States has failed to uphold those ideals, including after the Civil War, when Tubman and countless other Black veterans were denied their pensions outright or had to spend decades fighting for the compensation that they deserved.
Tubman died famous but in near-penury. She received some money as the widow of a war veteran, her second husband—and, belatedly, through congressional appropriation, only a portion of the money she was owed for her service as a scout, a nurse, and a spy. Yet she never lost her faith, in her country or in her Creator. The beauty of “Combee” and “Night Flyer” is that, taken together, they remind us of the redemptive possibilities of patriotism and religious belief, ideologies that today are too often associated with the reactionary rather than the radical. On her deathbed, Tubman invoked the Gospel of John, paraphrasing the promise that Jesus made to his disciples of their place in Heaven, and also echoing her own promise to bring about that Heaven on earth: “I go away to prepare a place for you, and where I am you also may be.”
— Written by Casey Cep. View this review as it originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Harriet Tubman’s story told through lens of her faith, spirituality
Araminta Green-Ross’s first memories involved lying in a wooden cradle, probably carved by her father. According to Tiya Miles, it may well have been the only space of physical safety and emotional security the enslaved child would know until she was a young adult.
As a toddler, “Minty” was no longer watched, comforted, or instructed by her parents, who worked from dawn until well past dusk and slept elsewhere on plantations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. At age six, Minty was leased out to a different white family.
When two of her sisters were sold and carried away on a chain gang, she witnessed the grief of her mother and despair of her father and began to ask, “Why should such things be?”
When she married John Tubman, Minty called herself Harriet, her mother’s first name. She escaped to Philadelphia, returned to the South to rescue at least 70 people, including family and friends, resettled many of them in Canada, and subsequently served as a scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War.
Celebrated these days as the most famous Black woman in U.S. history, Tubman will soon replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill.
In “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People,” Tiya Miles—a professor of history at Harvard University and MacArthur Fellowship recipient—draws on a plethora of sources, such as newspaper accounts, dictated letters and the experiences of enslaved women in an elegant, evocative, and empathetic account of Harriet Tubman’s “faith journey.”
According to Miles, when Minty was about 13 years old, a 2-pound iron weight thrown by an overseer at a young slave hit her instead, breaking her skull. The religious state she achieved following the injury, from which she never fully recovered, left her with a “skintight intimacy with God,” headaches, strange sleep patterns, spurts of energy and lethargy, an amplified, second or future sight, and mysterious gifts.
She came to believe that God, with whom she talked every day, had heard her call to free those she called “her people” from the hell of slavery. Also, she believed that the will of God dovetailed with the doctrine of natural rights enshrined in the founding documents of the United States.
To reassure runaway slaves, Tubman often recited psalms and sang songs: 10,000 angels “are always hovering round you, Till you reach the heavenly land.” Despite the desolation of their location, the desperation of their situation, and Tubman’s manifest physical ailments, Miles speculates, “they must have believed her, or wanted to… After all, God could uplift the weak and imbue them with secret strengths.”
Reliance on nature
Tubman’s knowledge of and reliance on nature, Miles suggests, was second only to her faith in God, “and seemed at times to be fused with it.” She had an uncanny sense of when and how to hide behind trees, in “potato holes” and swamps. And when to coax runaways to walk into rising streams.
Tubman’s tool kit also included reliable information, social connections along the road to freedom, money and material.
Tubman hired people to take down notices for escaped slaves soon after they were posted. She attempted rescues in the winter, when the nights are long and dark, and people stay in their homes.
During the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, in which 750 individuals were liberated, her Civil War scouting service and spy ring tapped the expertise of self-emancipated Blacks who knew the terrain, could travel undetected and pinpoint Confederate positions.
Tubman risked lives, at times recklessly, Miles acknowledges, to protect the group. She told mothers to keep their babies quiet by drugging them with substances that could cause overdoses or even death. Always carrying a gun, she threatened to shoot runaways who got scared and tried to turn back.
That said, Tubman was at least as harsh and unforgiving toward herself. A willing martyr, she declared that when the time had come, “the Lord will let them kill me.”
“Harriet knew the North Star,” an associate recalled, “that was one thing she insisted she was always sure of.” And, as Tubman herself was wont to say, “Every goodbye ain’t gone.”
— Written by Dr. Glenn C. Altschuler, Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. View this review as it appeared in the Florida Courier.
In ‘Night Flyer,’ author Tiya Miles takes a closer look at Harriet Tubman as a spiritual figure
Months before embarking on a journey to eventually become the most renowned “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman sought divine intervention. It was the winter of 1848-49, historian Tiya Miles recounts in her new biography of the abolitionist, and Tubman had been suffering from a long illness. Her “owner” Edward Brodess, unable to hire out Tubman’s labor for a fee, was impatient awaiting her recovery — so he decided to sell her.
At first, as Miles relates in “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People,” Tubman prayed for a change in Brodess’s heart. But when she became apprised of more concrete plans for her to be sold into a chain-gang, Tubman implored her heavenly father to kill him instead. “‘Next thing I knew,’” Miles quotes Tubman, “‘I heard he was dead [. . .],’”
Brodess’s death in March 1849 at the age of 47 not only thwarted Tubman’s impending sale, but also served to strengthen her relationship with God. Tubman believed she was in direct communication with her creator and began to pray all the time. This episode is one of many Miles recalls in “Night Flyer,” which emphasizes how Tubman’s spirituality — as well as her intimate connection with nature — influenced her social activism. By elucidating Tubman’s Christian faith and close relationship with her natural environs, Miles succeeds in bringing Tubman’s larger-than-life “magical” persona back down to earth and situate her as a woman of her time.
Specifically, Miles accents Tubman’s “multifaceted faith tradition,” which “combined Christian conviction with enslaved people’s quest for justice, a belief in second sight, and the use of natural protections (like charmed roots and pouches of dirt and other sacred materials) based in West African, Native American, and Southern folk thought.” The genesis of this “eco-spiritual worldview,” Miles argues, was not some paranormal happenstance lacking logical explanation, akin to the origin story of a comic book superhero. Rather, as Miles argues, this perspective was a byproduct of Tubman’s peculiar historical predicament — that is, of being an enslaved woman who dared to insist on her own liberation.
As for Tubman’s ecological insight, Miles largely attributes this to her upbringing in rural Maryland by a father, Ben Ross, who developed the skills of logging and foresting while enslaved by a man in the timber business. After gaining his freedom in 1840, he hired Tubman, (then still going by her birthname Araminta or ‘Minty’ Ross), who started working on her father’s crew as a teenager. “As she worked,” Miles explains, “Araminta absorbed new information about trees, plants, weather, and animal behavior while honing her skills in reading both landscapes and people” — an ability that would prove advantageous when Tubman would ferry approximately 70 enslaved people through backwoods routes and safe houses into “free” states.
For Tubman, the forest was a place of “spiritual refuge,” where “she could feel more free, widening that notch of autonomy that she had realized she needed and fought for even as a young enslaved child.” Tubman’s facility with the outdoors was also a consequence of her loathing of domestic labor, which had made her feel “smothered, hampered, and patronized.”
Indeed, it was while running a domestic errand that Tubman sustained a devastating injury that would change her life. Having accompanied a cook she labored with to a nearby store, Tubman, standing outside, witnessed an overseer chase an enslaved boy into the shop. Once inside, the overseer grabbed a two-pound weight off the counter and threw it at the boy. On instinct, Tubman stepped in front of the young boy and interceded the weight, which struck her in the head and fractured her skull.
Tubman would never fully recover from this trauma to her brain, which induced frequent dizzy spells and her lapsing into narcoleptic states that she could not be readily awakened from. However, such symptoms — consistent with a modern-day diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy — also “supercharged her spiritual life,” Miles writes, activating the visions and prophetic dreams Tubman has since become known for.
Most famously, as directly relayed by Tubman to an early biographer, she had dreamed while enslaved of “flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them like a bird’ […],” which uncannily turned out to represent actual physical geographies of Maryland that she had not seen. Before the American Civil War, and after Tubman had taken flight and liberated herself, she also had a visual precognition of the emancipation of the enslaved, and even a dream or vision in which she saw the likeness of the abolitionist John Brown prior to meeting him in person.
As Miles elegantly put it, Tubman’s “diminished physical capacity coincided with ‘exceedingly fine’ spiritual antenna.” This is certainly a fine explanation, in that Tubman’s brain injury preceded the emergence of her prophetic gifts. And, like the female African American evangelists whose memoirs Miles consults to explore parallels between their own and Tubman’s story, such “second sight” was a sporadic occurrence among similarly situated women — who, like Tubman, attributed such capacities to their direct communion with God. Although Miles does not reduce such phenomena to mere coincidence, in her effort to bring Tubman back down to earth, she elides their mystery. These incidents do seem, for lack of another word, “magical.”
In the end, the portrait Miles draws of Tubman is that of an Obeah woman — a practitioner of conventional religious and African diasporic spiritual systems who may be consulted upon by seekers to confer with “spirits” and manipulate the natural elements. The creolized practice of Obeah is also characterized by herbal medicine, which Tubman used to attend to wounded Black Union soldiers while stationed as a nurse during the Civil War. Obeah, moreover, has been practiced by colonized and enslaved peoples to resist their oppression.
There’s a fine line between “magic” and “faith,” and, by association, between a prayer and a spell, or healing and deliverance. Miles’s “Night Flyer” adds needed texture to Tubman’s historical caricature, and a big part of its charm is in leaving open the question of whether Brodess’s death was the will of God or the fulfillment of a curse.
— Written by Hawa Allan. Read the review as it appears on The Boston Globe.
National Book Award winner humanizes Harriet Tubman in ‘Night Flyer’
National Book Award winner Tiya Miles has delivered an innovative vision of Harriet Tubman’s life in her groundbreaking biography “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People.” Pushing past the mythology of Tubman as the “hyperracial oddity” that previous biographers have portrayed, Miles takes painstaking care to present Tubman as a God-fearing freedom fighter in all her life stages. From an adolescent who survives a head injury to a woman who suffers greatly while toiling to free others from enslavement, Tubman was a mortal woman who relied on her faith and connection to nature to persevere.
“Night Flyer” is the first work in “Finding Your Roots” TV host Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s intellectual megaproject called Significations. In partnership with publishing giant Penguin Random House, Gates is spearheading a collection written by contemporary authors who analyze the life and significance of Black cultural figures through a modern lens. Over two-dozen pairings have been announced, with exciting works such as Imani Perry reflecting on Stevie Wonder and Roxane Gay exploring Beyoncé slated for the future.
In Significations’ first installment, Miles has constructed a “faith biography” to frame her exploration of Tubman’s remarkable life. Miles confesses in “Night Flyer’s” preface that before she began researching Tubman, the famed emancipator seemed “prepackaged in a box of stock stories and folksy sayings.” Seeking to portray “the woman behind the cardboard cutout,” Miles begins by establishing Tubman as a deeply spiritual human.
Harriet Tubman entered the world in 1822 as Arminita “Minty” Green-Ross, one of nine children born to a married couple who were enslaved on neighboring plantations in Dorchester County, Maryland. Under slavery laws, Harriet “Rit” Green and Ben Ross had no control over their lives or their children’s futures.
Miles paints a heart-rending picture of Tubman’s early years, envisioning her struggle to care for her siblings and perform household and farm labor from her youngest days. Citing the twin forces of threat and neglect as foundational experiences that shaped Tubman’s character, Miles suggests that feelings of insecurity, shame and purpose primed Tubman to endure the hardships she would later face.
In Miles’ account, Tubman clings to her faith to survive tough times. While rooted in Christianity, Tubman’s religious exposure expanded beyond traditional Christian teachings to include beliefs shared by other enslaved people. A quest for justice, an innate thirst for freedom and “a belief in second sight and the use of natural protections” gathered from West African and Native American traditions rounded out her spiritual worldview.
In the author’s note, Miles asserts that “Night Flyer’s” difference from previous Tubman biographies is her effort to place Tubman in a broader “Black female faith culture.” As she moves through Tubman’s life, Miles continuously references a collective of influential women who share Tubman’s “deep religious conviction and took radical action to preach and act on what they believed.”
By drawing parallels between Tubman’s experiences and those of the preachers Old Elizabeth, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw and Julia Foote, Miles pushes past the notion of the “magical Tubman” by placing her in the company of like-minded contemporaries.
Old Elizabeth and Tubman were both born into slavery. They experience early separation from their parents and are sent to work on neighboring farms as adolescents to diversify their skill sets. Both flee in the night, return to their mothers and are forced back to their foreign environments. Ultimately, they seek to escape their enslavement through divine intervention and both are successful in actualizing freedom for themselves and others.
A traumatic brain injury in adolescence leaves Tubman with epileptic seizures and is the source of much of her suffering. Miles chronicles how Tubman is forced to work following her injury, existing in a state of misery so horrific she only survives by using her hardship to fuel her spirit. Her seizures provide a vehicle for the voices, visions, dreams and conversations with God that feed her quest for freedom. These incidents also contribute to Tubman’s supernatural mythology.
The concept of suffering leading to an expansion of faith is also experienced by Tubman’s cohorts. Zilpha Elaw miraculously survives a fall, resulting in her ability to have direct conversations with God. Losing an eye compels Julia Foote to exist in “a secret place of prayer” that leads to deep spiritual conversion. And Jarena Lee believes God spoke to her in a series of dreams that foretold of her failing health. Each experience fortifies these women for their future work.
Tubman’s faith may have provided the mental fortitude to break free from the “demon called Slavery.” But how does she physically survive circumstances that killed many others, especially once she achieves her own freedom and repeatedly returns to inhospitable territory to aid those still enslaved?
Miles asserts it’s Tubman’s connection to the natural world that fuels her physical fight. A youthful Tubman is forced to toil in harsh conditions. This develops into a preference to work outdoors. Eventually Tubman recognizes the potential for land and water to “provide sustenance or refuge.” As with the aforementioned freedom fighters, Tubman considers nature a tool God provides to facilitate her autonomy.
Harriet Tubman was much more than a mythical Grandma Moses who led the enslaved to freedom. She was a human being who used the constraints of her life to fuel her resistance. Through Tiya Miles’ meticulous research and an unwavering focus on Tubman’s humanity, “Night Flyer” has transformed a fantastical figure from a bygone time into an accessible, modern-day inspiration.
— By Leah Tyler. Read the review as it appears on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Night Flyer — Harriet Tubman and her place in Black American history
Tiya Miles revisits the pivotal achievements of a woman who helped dozens escape slavery via the Underground Railroad
No matter the distance of years — two centuries have passed since her birth — the circumstances of the childhood and adolescence of Araminta Green-Ross remain shocking, perhaps all the more so for how common they were in that time and place.
Born into enslavement in Maryland in around 1822, “Minty” was left to fend for herself while her parents were forced to work for those who claimed to own them. Aged about six, she was “rented”, without warning or explanation, to a neighbouring overseer to mind a baby; ignorant of what was required, “Minty would learn, like other enslaved children, that the teaching tools of slavery’s classroom were the whip, or stick, or rod.”
However, Minty was not broken by this unimaginably harsh treatment, not even when, as a teenager, her skull was cracked by a blow to the head intended for an enslaved boy she was trying to protect. The injury would cause life-long neurological impairment — probably temporal lobe epilepsy — and yet it only made her more determined to remedy the unfathomable injustice to which she and millions of others were subjected. Later, she would be known by her mother’s name — Harriet — and by the last name of her first husband John Tubman.
Harriet Tubman is a star in the firmament of American history. She was called “Moses” by the dozens she led to freedom at great personal cost. Her own 1849 escape to Philadelphia, then to Canada, was miraculous enough — yet she would return again and again to guide others through the wilderness to freedom. It is estimated that as a conductor on the Underground Railroad she led approximately 70 people from enslavement to freedom.
Miles seeks to present a ‘flesh-and-blood woman of her antebellum age’ and demonstrate how her ‘perilous life’ offers lessons for the 21st century
She was also an effective spy for the United States during the American civil war and the first woman to play a leadership role in an armed raid by the US military. In her later years — she lived until 1913 — she built a remarkable community in Auburn, New York state, offering shelter to the ill, the elderly, the infirm. Her home there still stands; today there is a Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and visitor centre in her native Maryland. She is due to replace Andrew Jackson — about time, too — on the $20 bill.
As Tiya Miles acknowledges in her fascinating new book Night Flyer, Tubman is the subject of several excellent modern biographies, most notably by Kate Clifford Larson and Catherine Clinton. Tubman’s first official “as told to” biography was published as early as 1869 and was written by Sarah Bradford, one of several white abolitionist women who supported Tubman in her work. Yet in part because Tubman herself never had the time to learn to read or write, the archive is a “murky paper trail seeped through with porous channels like the coastal ground of the Eastern Shore where Tubman was born,” as Miles writes.
Miles is a professor of history at Harvard University and the recipient, in 2011, of a MacArthur Fellowship (sometimes called the “genius grant”). Her previous book All That She Carried was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2021 National Book Award, among many other prizes, for its story of a simple cotton sack that was carried across generations of enslaved women.
Now, with originality and flair, she sheds new light on Tubman’s remarkable story by setting her deeply in the context of her faith and within the natural world that offered her shelter and succour. This makes her book less of a biography and more of a resettling, a re-examination of the ways in which Tubman and her work and her life has been considered.
Miles is clear about the dangers that lurk in conjuring the trope of the “magical Negro”, the singular Black saviour set outside place and time. She wishes to present “a flesh-and-blood woman of her antebellum age” and demonstrate how her “perilous life” offers profound lessons for the 21st century.
She sets Tubman’s story within a tradition of African-American women’s spiritual narratives. Women such as Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Old Elizabeth and Julia A Foote told their stories of religious devotion during the eras of slavery, civil war and reconstruction; Miles uses their accounts to build a firm foundation for Tubman’s religious faith and show the manner in which Christian religious faith offered these women narrative of resistance.
Tubman’s own escape to freedom was not enough; she fought the vast wrong that enslaved her family and her people. “I would make a home for them in the North, and the Lord helping me, I would bring them all there,” she said. And as Frederick Douglass wrote to her in 1868: “The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom” — it was her deep knowledge of the natural world, which Miles brings beautifully to life, that enabled her and her charges to survive their perilous passage.
Miles’s Tubman is “startlingly spiritual and eerily smart”, “a guru for her time and ours” — not magical, but ferociously determined and astonishingly brave. By showing the nexus of relationships that guided her, Miles brings Tubman to vivid and rounded life.
— By Erica Wagner. Read the full review as it appears on the Financial Times.
The Rescuer
In search of the Underground Railroad’s legendary conductor
Araminta Ross, or “Minty,” was born into slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the 1820s. Catastrophe marked her early life. She was six years old when she was sent away from her mother to work as a weaver; three of her sisters were sold into the Deep South. As a teenager, Minty suffered a blow to the head, delivered by an overseer, that left her prone to chronic pain, nightmares, visions, and epileptic seizures. In her early 20s, she adopted her mother’s given name and her husband’s surname—and that is how history remembers her, as Harriet Tubman. “Names were important to enslaved people,” Tiya Miles writes in Night Flyer. Tubman was hardly the first formerly enslaved person to reinvent herself. But most people did so after escaping bondage; Tubman began using her new name when she was still in captivity—an early strike against her so-called masters, Miles speculates, that “casts a glow of foreshadowing over her story.”
That story is well known. In 1849, Tubman fled her captors and headed north. Under cover of darkness, she walked nearly 150 miles through dense woods and along the banks of creeks and rivers until she reached the safety of Philadelphia. Within a couple of years, at great risk, she began trekking back into slave country to rescue relatives, associates, even strangers. Tubman, five feet tall and slight of build, made 19 such trips in the years prior to the Civil War—at a time when the Fugitive Slave Law meant she or any of her charges could have been apprehended. In the face of this, Tubman began leading road-weary freedom seekers farther north, into southern Ontario, beyond the bounds of American law.
Night Flyer joins nearly a dozen biographies of Tubman, but it doesn’t march in a linear way through the same familiar chronology. Miles’s book is a world-building enterprise, with a novel’s sensitivity and a poet’s sensibility rooted both in Tubman’s daily life and in her more mystical inclinations. Our understanding of Tubman has long been shrouded in myth. “At no time in the history of the Republic has such womanhood ever attained a higher level of excellence than the indomitable heroism of a runaway slave named Harriet Tubman,” wrote literary and social critic Albert Murray in 1970. But how should we account for the mistakes she made? Or the heartbreak she suffered? During her rescues, Tubman pushed herself beyond the point of exhaustion. She likewise disciplined those in her charge with threats of violence or death. On one of her first trips south, she’d gone to bring back her husband, only to discover that he had taken a new wife. When he refused to go with her to Philadelphia, she found others who would, expanding her reach beyond immediate family and friends.
What did Tubman desire for herself? Miles, a professor of history at Harvard, seeks to discover “who she was on the inside.” Primary sources offering insight into Tubman’s early life are few. (Sometimes this was by Tubman’s own design: historians still aren’t certain of the precise route of her initial escape.) Much of what we know has come to us from well-meaning white women, antislavery advocates who nonetheless held a paternalistic view of Black women and their traditions. Miles, by focusing her research on ecology and spirituality, offers us a more complex portrait. She positions Tubman as an intellectual who employed an ecowomanist liberation theology, embodied in her rescues as well as in her speeches, songs, work as a healer, and activism. According to Melanie L. Harris, a professor at Wake Forest University, ecowomanism is a methodology in which “ecowisdom,” defined by “spirit, nature, and humanity,” is practiced by women of African descent. Tubman, in this view, was more than a brave spirit acting on instinct; she was a practitioner of a cogent set of ethics Miles calls “Tubman’s Way,” which had clear origins and lasted until the end of her life.
Tubman came of age during the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening. She “oriented to the world from a place of immersive religious belief,” Miles writes. This was due, at least in part, to her upbringing: she attended a Methodist Episcopal church alongside other Black Marylanders who infused West African traditional practices and beliefs into their Christianity. She prayed often, maintaining a constant stream of communication with the divine that involved songs and incantations, many of which were preserved in interviews. She believed that God spoke to her in the form of dreams and visions. Before her first escape, Tubman endured a series of emotional and spiritual trials, common occurrences in the accounts of many mystics. “Whenever she closed her eyes,” Miles writes, “Harriet saw white men on horseback hunting her people, hunting her.” She dreamed of open fields, border crossings, of flying like a bird. An active belief in the supernatural was not uncommon among “holy” Black women of her era, such as Zilpha Elaw, Old Elizabeth, and Julia A. J. Foote. For them, as for Tubman, their personal relationships with the divine provided the courage necessary to challenge their own subjugation. Tubman saw slavery as an evil that she would fight with God at her side. Miles believes Tubman’s acts of rescue were her form of ministry.
The 19th-century Black women who wrote and preached against slavery believed that the natural world could be a conduit to an encounter with God. Tubman, “arguably the most famous Black woman ecologist in U.S. history,” writes Miles, spoke to trees, memorized the directions of streams, foraged for food, and knew the healing salves that could be extracted from particular plants. She took refuge in the natural world and, during the Civil War, provided intelligence for a Union Army raid on Confederate plantations and supply depots along South Carolina’s Combahee River.
Miles acknowledges that many questions about Tubman’s life remain unanswered. Who taught her so much about the land? What was her meeting with John Brown like? What were the circumstances of her grandmother Modesty’s capture by slave hunters? Still, Miles broadens our understanding of Tubman by treating her as part of a collective of like-minded Black women whose piety and belief in the supernatural she shared—and which emboldened her to set out on a righteous but dangerous path.
— Read the review as it appeared on The American Scholar
Let’s Get Lit: Essence Top 15 Book Picks For Summer 2024
Activist Harriet Tubman is often presented one-dimensionally, but with this new historical book, author Tiya Miles offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on the persona of Tubman that popular culture likes to portray. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Night Flyer showcases Tubman as a woman of extraordinary faith, her unwavering commitment and service to freeing and empowering people, and her unique acts of heroism. Additionally, Night Flyer is a part of the Significations Series, which “pairs authors and historians with Black historical figures to re-examine their lives and legacy through new lenses.”
June 2024 Reads for the Rest of Us
Well-researched and endlessly readable, Night Flyer invites readers to experience the many sides of Harriet Tubman, most of which we’ve not fully understood until now. Miles focuses on her mysticism, knowledge of the natural world and boundless dedication to truth and liberation.