Who Was Harriet Tubman? A Historian Sifts the Clues.

Jennifer Szalai

Harriet Tubman led such an eventful life so filled with hardship, extreme peril and close calls that even an atheist might find it hard to deny that her nine decades of survival on this Earth were nothing short of miraculous.

Tubman herself credited God with guiding her dangerous work as a conductor on the Underground Railroad during the 1850s; she made an estimated 13 trips below the Mason-Dixon line and spirited as many as 80 souls north, often all the way to Canada. Tubman’s own escape in 1849 was legendary. After a first attempt with her brothers, who were so frightened that they insisted on turning back to their enslaver’s estate near the Chesapeake Bay, an undaunted Tubman made the treacherous 90-mile journey from Maryland to Pennsylvania on her own.

“Where others saw shut doors and unscalable brick walls, she dreamed into being tunnels and ladders,” the historian Tiya Miles writes in “Night Flyer,” a short biography of Tubman that is the first in a new series, called Significations and edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., about notable Black figures. For decades after her death in 1913, Tubman’s extraordinary life was mostly relegated to books for children and young adults. Thorough, probing biographies by the historians Catherine Clinton and Kate Clifford Larson were published two decades ago. More recently, Tubman was the subject of a Hollywood biopic and “She Came to Slay,” an illustrated volume by the historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, featuring a drawing of a pistol-toting Tubman on the cover.

Perhaps inevitably, all the pop-cultural attention has been double-edged, commemorating Tubman’s formidable accomplishments while also making it harder to discern who she actually was. Miles admits that before she started this project, Tubman “had become a stock figure in my imagination, a known hero in the cast of characters that we might call the abolitionist avengers.” Recognizing Tubman’s idiosyncrasies and physical ailments “resizes Tubman the cultural icon to human scale.”

Miles calls “Night Flyer” a “faith biography,” emphasizing Tubman’s spirituality along with her ecological awareness, expressed as a profound attentiveness to the natural world. Miles also draws on the life stories of “similar women,” such as the preachers Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw, to try to illuminate some of the more interior experiences that Tubman took care to keep hidden.

Such gaps in the historical record are familiar to Miles. Having written about Indigenous people and African Americans, including in the National Book Award-winning “All That She Carried,” she frequently faces what she has called “the conundrum of the archives.” Tubman did not read or write; she dictated her life story to “typically white, middle-class, antislavery women,” like her first biographer, Sarah Bradford. Although usually “well-meaning,” Tubman’s amanuenses sometimes “demeaned” her, casting her as an exotic, almost otherworldly figure.

Not to mention that Tubman herself was a skillful performer, someone whose feats of bravery were made possible by guardedness and caution. “She wanted to control the narrative,” Miles writes. By the end of the 1850s, Tubman was actively shaping her persona in spoken-word performances, “understanding that if she did not, others would make a character of her for their own ends.”

“Night Flyer” briskly narrates the major events of Tubman’s early life. She was born Araminta “Minty” Ross sometime around 1822, to Rit Green and Ben Ross on the eastern shore of Dorchester County, Md. After sustaining a severe head injury at 12 or 13, when she stepped between an enslaved boy in a shop and a two-pound weight that was lobbed by his overseer, Tubman began to have seizures that she associated with religious visions. She changed her name after marrying John Tubman, a free Black man, around 1844. By then, having seen two of her sisters “carried away” to the Deep South on a chain gang, Tubman was already asking herself a question that would animate the rest of her long life: “Why should such things be?”

Using these facts as a trellis, Miles tries to coax out Tubman’s personality. Tubman had always preferred being outside. As a child, in an effort to escape a beating for sneaking a lump of sugar, she hid for five days in a pigpen. In the 1830s, her enslaver hired her out to heavy, outdoor labor driving oxen, cutting wood and hauling logs. Tubman deemed such work preferable to the domestic chores she hated (even though, after her escape, she would take on domestic work in order to help fund her rescue missions). Recreating the scene of Tubman’s eventual escape from slavery, Miles imagines the spongy soil of the wetland woods and the swamp blackberry she may have eaten.

But it wasn’t all about survival in the woods. Tubman also had a refined sense of style, Miles says and a sense of humor about it, too. During the Civil War, she worked as a military scout and spy, and accompanied a regiment on the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina. Tubman recalled how her finery was not quite suitable for the occasion: “I started to run, stepped on my dress, it being rather long, and fell and tore it almost off, so that when I got on board the boat there was hardly anything left of it but shreds. I made up my mind then that I would never wear a long dress on another expedition of the kind, but would have a bloomer as soon as I could get it.”

“Night Flyer” includes an insert of color photographs by Amani Willett, of sites connected to the Underground Railroad. The last one shows a marker for the Mason-Dixon line. What’s especially striking is how ordinary it looks a worn stub of stone, surrounded by overgrown greenery, that once marked an existential division between slavery and freedom.

Tubman lived for nearly half a century after the Civil War ended, sheltering people in her home in Auburn, N.Y., and establishing a care center for the elderly and disabled. Toward the end of “Night Flyer,” Miles admits to struggling with her project trying to get closer to someone who left such a “murky paper trail.” She derides the as-told-to biographies, explaining that the white women who wrote them, despite their good intentions, “could not have told Tubman’s story with the fullness, clarity and philosophical depth that Tubman would have, had she written it herself.”

The claim is banal in one sense, and unsupported in another. Miles tells us that Tubman always took care not to expose “her own private feelings”; there’s little reason to think that she would have wanted to reveal more of herself to a hungry public. The Tubman who emerges from “Night Flyer” is still extraordinary, and still elusive. As one colleague put it to Miles: “No one could catch her then. It’s going to be hard to catch her now.”