In ‘Night Flyer,’ author Tiya Miles takes a closer look at Harriet Tubman as a spiritual figure

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.