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.”