Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

By Tiya Miles. Penguin Press, 2024. 336 pages. $30/hardcover; $15.99/eBook.

There are already quite a few exceptional biographies of Harriet Tubman, including Kate Clifford Larson’s Bound for the Promised Land and Catherine Clinton’s Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom, as well as the 2019 biopic Harriet. So what makes this new biography stand out?

Harvard historian Tiya Miles’s account of the woman born Araminta “Minty” Green-Ross focuses on her religious faith. Born into slavery in 1822, “Harriet Tubman . . . knew the God of the oppressed both as an individual and as a member of a faith culture,” Miles writes. “And if we are to come closer to knowing her, we must recognize the centrality of her faith in the context of her vulnerability and in the development of her rebellious, antiestablishment character.” When we put her faith at the center of her story, Miles adds, we must inevitably reevaluate the popular versions of her that have been handed down through history. We will come to see her, as Miles has, “as part of a group of Black women who shared her deep religious conviction and took radical action to preach and act on what they believed was God’s word.”

At age 12 or 13, Minty was hit in her head by an iron weight thrown by an overseer at a boy, an attack from which she never fully recovered. Miles explores the intertwined physiological, psychological, and spiritual effects of what today’s physicians would diagnose as temporal lobe epilepsy resulting from a traumatic brain injury. Quoting from accounts by four other enslaved Black adolescent girls from that era, she comments:

Like the Black women memoirists in her time who would call themselves sanctified, usually after a prolonged mental or physical illness, Harriet may have emerged convinced she knew God’s will for her life and committed to following it.

Friends may take particular interest in learning of Tubman’s close working relationship with White Quaker abolitionist Thomas Garrett, a stationmaster of the Underground Railroad, who provided money and material supplies for her liberation missions back to Maryland. Garrett reported Harriet’s faith in, and talking constantly with, God, whose guidance she followed explicitly and fearlessly.

Miles also reveals how much Tubman has to teach us about liberation and being attuned to nature. She describes the conceptual framework of Night Flyer as “an ecowomanist telling of Harriet Tubman’s life story,” which draws upon a school of thought developed by Black women theologians in recent decades. She claims Tubman “as a foremother” of this theological tradition, one that is “concerned as much with justice for the earth as with justice for people (inseparable goals, in reality).”

I enjoy reading and appreciate authors whose writing is engaging; flows well; and is accurate and documented by succinct footnotes, especially when they place persons and events in the context of time, locale, and the wider culture. Maps, photographs, and artwork all enhance my understanding and appreciation of the subject matter. On all of these points, Tiya Miles has created an excellent biography of Harriet Tubman for a new generation.

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Mike Fallahay is a member of North Meadow Circle of Friends in Indianapolis, Ind. His interest in Harriet Tubman and the history of abolition of slavery arose in his participation in the Civil Rights Movement and in reading the history of two Caribbean countries where he served in the Peace Corps: Saint Kitts and Nevis; and Guyana.