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.