Harriet Tubman is often recognized as one of the top ten most famous Americans. Her impact on our historical memory runs so deep that a popular initiative to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill in 2016 was blocked by Donald Trump, who, by openly expressing his racist preferences, praised Jackson, the architect of the genocidal Indian Removal Policy and a federal fiscal policy that directly contributed to the collapse of the U.S. economy in 1837. A 2019 biopic about the woman who led a network of abolitionist activists and supporters to free over 70 enslaved people received critical acclaim and several Academy Awards.
Famously, Tubman, the courageous and skilled escape artist, military intelligence agent, warrior-abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and working-class hero, is reputed to have said, “I shall fight for my liberty, and when the time comes for me to go, the Lord will let them kill me.” Tubman passed away at approximately 91 years old in her home in 1913. One day in the fall of 1850, Tubman left with two family members and escaped enslavement in Maryland. While this initial attempt failed, she later tried again on her own to flee to Philadelphia, encountering the network of Black and white households that would come to be known as the Underground Railroad. After working for two years in restaurants, hotels, and resorts, she returned to Maryland to lead many of her family members and other willing escapees to freedom.
Her feats became so famous that enslavers placed thousands of dollars in bounties on her life. Her expert knowledge as a woods person, her extensive experience with the geography of the South, her keen insight into the social relations of slavery, and her strategic thinking skills led to her recruitment into the U.S. Army as an intelligence agent and leader of the renowned raid at Combahee River in South Carolina.
Despite her fame, there are alarmingly few scholarly books about Harriet Tubman. Of the five published in the last 25 years, one is a reference guide to the primary sources discussed here, while another examines how the myths surrounding her life were created. Most biographical works target a young audience of children and teenagers. Popular Front-era novelist Ann Petry’s biography, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, remains the definitive account of Tubman’s life. Daughters of Harriet, by Cynthia Parker-Ohene (2022), and They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems, by Quraysh Ali Lansana (2004), serve as admirable tributes to Tubman in verse.
Harvard University historian Tiya Miles’s new book, Night Flyer, is a valuable addition. It challenges perceptions of Tubman’s legendary status as a solitary figure with “superhero” powers, a leader among the “abolitionist avengers.” This book is particularly relevant at a time when, despite Americans’ generally waning interest in organized religion and traditional faiths, we have turned to beliefs in magic and gods depicted in Hollywood movies. Popular culture is filled with fantastical savior stories where a magical “one” confronts the forces of darkness; the police solve a crime through sheer intellect, or a superhero scientist helps us escape the hellscape of a dying Earth.
The widespread popularity of such myths may have their origins in the fables and legends shaped around the life of Harriet Tubman. Instead of drawing on this well of archetypes and engaging with the appeal of magical individualism, Miles presents a “faith biography” of one of several “Black holy women” who lived in a cultural environment that depended on careful attention to the arbitrary moods of white enslavers, the gifts and resources of nature, knowledge of geography and topography, and a profound connection between the present world and “spiritual reality.” “Tubman was heroic,” writes Miles, “but she was not a superhero beyond the reach of our understanding, identification, and compassion.”
Black culture in the early 1800s displayed a direct and widely perceptible synergy between the worldviews imposed by Christianity and those received from spiritual practices rooted in West Africa, the birthplace of many enslaved people living in the Americas. Miles’s exploration of Tubman’s “religious” cosmology provides a fresh and innovative research approach that helps create a clearer understanding of the abolitionists. While several biographies and “as-told-to” autobiographies were published during Tubman’s lifetime, a relatively small batch of archival sources (newspaper articles, transcribed letters, records of speeches, military records, and legal documents) illuminate her life significantly. Tubman never learned to write in English, so her self-authored accounts were confined to her speeches and sermons.
In addition to her careful analytical reading of this limited documentary record—shaped by the perceptions of sympathetic but generally patronizing Euro-American writers—Miles interprets Tubman’s thoughts and words through the lens of four other “spiritual biographies” authored by Black women who escaped slavery or other racist forms of servitude during Tubman’s lifetime. These women include Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Old Elizabeth, and Julia Foote. Each wrote “slave narratives” in the 1800s that helped to establish Black literature and contributed to Black radical political theory of human, gender, and racial equality. Miles argues, “Harriet Tubman was a member of a regional and racial collective, not a lone ranger or solitary hero of the deep woods.”
Miles reveals that the “centrality” of Tubman’s spiritual life—her faith in God and her connection to the rituals and practices of her inherited syncretic traditions—influenced her political theory, her focus on nature’s signs and wonders, and her dependence on carefully honed instincts and insights into human behavior and motives. Tubman’s “eco-spiritual worldview” was not uncommon among “Black women prophets.” This way of understanding the conditions of one’s life, one’s natural surroundings, and the social world necessarily translated into a political theory rooted in liberation and justice. Why could God attend to the needs and lives of a tiny Black person trapped in an unfair condition of violence and servitude if that person was not as valuable in his sight as any other person on the planet? And, how could white people’s professions of adherence to religious doctrines be, therefore, anything but hypocrisy and falsehoods?
Tubman’s unwavering faith in God, commitment to spirituality, and adherence to rituals and practices demonstrated their real power in her life. She viewed them as sources of physical protection, emotional nourishment, and communal ties with others. Instead of feeling distant from God, Tubman’s closeness deepened her lasting connection to the transcendent realm. Miles highlights this remarkable reversal of false white Christian pretenses that Black people were so far removed from God’s grace that bondage was warranted. Acknowledging the falsehood inherent in this ideological stance allowed Tubman to strengthen the link between religious experiences, imagery, and language to her emergent political and social analysis.
Through these experiences—her interactions with enslavers, her family and community life, and her shared reliance on natural settings for refuge and nourishment—Tubman developed “a political realization about the unfair nature of power” upon which slavery and U.S. society were founded. “There are two things I’ve got a right to,” she later told a biographer, “and those are Death and Liberty—one or the other I mean to have. No one will take me back alive.” In other words, there is no partial freedom or “second-class citizenship.” Either one is free, or one is enslaved. And Tubman intended never to return to the latter.
Night Flyer, with its carefully crafted and well-documented arguments, helps us understand how Tubman’s worldview and political and religious commitments were shaped and sustained. While many readers may never share Tubman’s spiritual beliefs or experience the transcendent world that influenced her reality, we can certainly appreciate and grasp the significance of a life devoted to the singular pursuit of freedom for herself and her people.
We may even envision ourselves as part of the clandestine network of activists, organizers, educators, and movement builders that made her repeated journeys to freedom possible. We may picture ourselves developing our own strategic, intellectual, and collective resources, as Tubman had done, which might lead to one or another heroic action significant enough to be remembered in the historical accounts of our times.
Night Flyer
New York: Penguin Press, 2024
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