Night Flyer joins nearly a dozen biographies of Tubman, but it doesn’t march in a linear way through the same familiar chronology. Miles’s book is a world-building enterprise, with a novel’s sensitivity and a poet’s sensibility rooted both in Tubman’s daily life and in her more mystical inclinations. Our understanding of Tubman has long been shrouded in myth. “At no time in the history of the Republic has such womanhood ever attained a higher level of excellence than the indomitable heroism of a runaway slave named Harriet Tubman,” wrote literary and social critic Albert Murray in 1970. But how should we account for the mistakes she made? Or the heartbreak she suffered? During her rescues, Tubman pushed herself beyond the point of exhaustion. She likewise disciplined those in her charge with threats of violence or death. On one of her first trips south, she’d gone to bring back her husband, only to discover that he had taken a new wife. When he refused to go with her to Philadelphia, she found others who would, expanding her reach beyond immediate family and friends.
What did Tubman desire for herself? Miles, a professor of history at Harvard, seeks to discover “who she was on the inside.” Primary sources offering insight into Tubman’s early life are few. (Sometimes this was by Tubman’s own design: historians still aren’t certain of the precise route of her initial escape.) Much of what we know has come to us from well-meaning white women, antislavery advocates who nonetheless held a paternalistic view of Black women and their traditions. Miles, by focusing her research on ecology and spirituality, offers us a more complex portrait. She positions Tubman as an intellectual who employed an ecowomanist liberation theology, embodied in her rescues as well as in her speeches, songs, work as a healer, and activism. According to Melanie L. Harris, a professor at Wake Forest University, ecowomanism is a methodology in which “ecowisdom,” defined by “spirit, nature, and humanity,” is practiced by women of African descent. Tubman, in this view, was more than a brave spirit acting on instinct; she was a practitioner of a cogent set of ethics Miles calls “Tubman’s Way,” which had clear origins and lasted until the end of her life.