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

“Night Flyer reminds readers that even the most unlikely of persons can impact their worlds, for good or evil. With Harriet Tubman, it was undoubtedly for the good.”

Moses led his people out of bondage, guided and shielded by God. It’s no wonder that abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison dubbed Harriet Tubman “Moses,” since she led her people out of bondage, as well, also guided and shielded by God. For original Moses, bondage was enslavement in the land of Egypt. For second Moses, it was enslavement in the American South of the pre-Civil War 1800s.

There is very a significant difference: Because of an act of anger during forty years of wandering in the wilderness, original Moses was not permitted to enter the promised land. Second Moses, faithful to a fault, not only entered the promised land, but she went back and forth between it and the land of bondage multiple times to retrieve and repatriate scores of her people. Undoubtedly, she was the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad to freedom.

In Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, author Tiya Miles presents the factual story behind the legend of Harriet Tubman and reveals that the old cliché is real: sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Rather than a “cradle to grave” biography, the author touts Night Flyer as a “faith biography.” And that’s exactly what it is.

Tubman, born into slavery as Araminta “Minty” Ross in Maryland, suffered a traumatic brain injury at the age of 12 or 13 at the hands of an overseer, which resulted in a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. The injury may explain the dreams and visions she later experienced that, along with the sale of her sisters, were motivating factors for her later actions as second Moses.

Or maybe the injury simply heightened her awareness of those dreams and visions that were God’s way of speaking to her. The author writes that Tubman, “awakens to a sense of the sinful world and her place in it, joins with a spiritual force that she identifies as God/Jesus, comes into an awareness of her God-given capacities to challenge slavery, and ‘preaches’ a gospel of freedom through spoken words and radical actions in various environments.”

She changed her name upon marrying, at approximately 22—there are no precise records—to a free Black man named John Tubman, taking his last name, and her mother’s first name, Harriet. Thus, Minty Ross, the slave, became Harriet Tubman the liberator. Acting with a deep, abiding faith and belief that “God championed freedom,” she was shored up by a confidence that if she did his will by freeing her people, “God would be there to guide and protect her.”

Tubman is credited with multiple round-trips along the underground railroad, conducting approximately 70 enslaved people to freedom. During the Civil War, itself, she also functioned as a military scout and spy, and she proved essential in a June 1863 raid into Confederate territory that freed nearly 750 slaves. Even with the end of the war and slavery, she carried on her mission for God, managing a boarding house and assisted living center in her home in the north.

Unlike most historical biographies, Tubman didn’t leave a written legacy of diaries and letters. Miles must pull much of her info from recollections of others who knew, spoke with, or heard Tubman speak. Miles also provides analogies to similar life stories, at least in terms of mission, of other “historical figures who considered themselves to be Black, female, and holy in the nineteenth century.”

The lack of writings left by Tubman gives rise to some speculation throughout, or at least educated guesses, with words and phrases such as “may have,” “perhaps,” and “probably” sprinkled liberally throughout to describe her thoughts, feelings, and reactions. And while there is value in a side-by-side comparison with others, each person has their own personal stories, and it is a little troublesome to try to draw any hard and fast conclusions by inference from the others. While the comparisons are certainly valid in some respects, Harriet Tubman was unique and holds her own place in American history.

Night Flyer reminds readers that even the most unlikely of persons can impact their worlds, for good or evil. With Harriet Tubman, it was undoubtedly for the good. As Willie Nelson wrote in his song “Yesterday’s Wine,” “Miracles appear in the strangest of places.” Minty Ross was one such miracle. “Whether or not we hold her religious convictions, we bear witness to the power she unleashed by believing in something larger than herself.”