Book Review: Night Flyer
Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles (Penguin Press, 2024).
There have been any number of biographies of Harriet Tubman, the legendary woman who rescued some 70 enslaved Black people in the 1850s and ’60s. But Tiya Miles has chosen to write her new Tubman biography differently from most. Miles has written what she calls a “faith biography,” which places Tubman’s beliefs, values, and relationship with God at the center of the story.
“If we are to come closer to knowing her,” Miles explains at the beginning of Night Flyer, “we must recognize the centrality of her faith in the context of her vulnerability and in the development of her rebellious, antiestablishment character.” She rejects the common perception of Harriet Tubman as some kind of “superhero with vague ‘woo-woo’ powers,” arguing that this romanticized treatment gets in the way of seeing the person she really was: a person with both strengths and weaknesses, whose heroism was all the greater because of it.
So Miles—whose previous book, All That She Carried, I reviewed here three years ago—concentrates on Tubman’s love of God, family, and nature as she takes us through her early years, showing how these things shaped her into the remarkable woman she became. Born Araminta “Minty” Ross in Maryland “around 1822” (she would later rename herself Harriet after her mother), she was taking care of babies while she was still little more than a baby herself, and doing heavy outdoor work soon after that. She was emotionally scarred by losing family members to the slave trade; she was physically scarred when she deliberately stepped in front of an overseer as he threw an iron weight at another slave, leaving her with an injury that caused her seizures and headaches for the rest of her life.
Her injury also brought on a succession of dreams and visions, which Minty took very seriously as messages from God. Miles, to her great credit, takes them seriously as well, showing how they visibly strengthened the young woman’s faith.
Struggling with the cruelty of “the demon Slavery” and the havoc it wreaked on innocent lives, Minty, soon to become Harriet, came to believe that God meant for her people to be saved from bondage. And she was willing to take a desperate leap of faith to receive that salvation, for herself and for her loved ones.
So Miles portrays Tubman not as a lone wolf, but as a sensitive, highly intelligent woman deeply rooted in her faith, her community, and the natural world that she knew and loved. She relied on all of these for support as she brought slave after slave to freedom, often displaying what really did look like supernatural instincts.
“Harriet’s divine compact had solidified at the inaugural crossing of the northern border,” Miles writes, “where she informed her deity that she intended to rescue others with his help. … In the mid-1850s, as her liberation mission concretized and she found that through experience that God was holding up his end, she acted with greater confidence, believing she understood the duties of each party in the compact. She would do God’s will in freeing the people, and God would be there to guide and protect her.”
Miles acknowledges that, because Tubman left no writings of her own and because of her rather enigmatic nature, it’s hard for us to know her well. But by focusing on the things that mattered most to Tubman, Miles has helped us at least take a big step in that direction. Though at times (just as in All That She Carried) she’s forced to rely pretty heavily on speculation, and though her language and her analysis occasionally get a little academic for a popular book, Miles’s “faith biography” is firmly grounded in the truths that guided Tubman’s life and work. It makes Harriet Tubman all the more inspiring by making her human.
(Cover image copyright Penguin Press.)
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