Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
Using these facts as a trellis, Miles tries to coax out Tubman’s personality ... 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.
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By elucidating Tubman’s Christian faith and close relationship with her natural environs, Miles succeeds in bringing Tubman’s larger-than-life "magical" persona back down to earth and situate her as a woman of her time ... Miles’s Night Flyer adds needed texture to Tubman’s historical caricature, and a big part of its charm is in leaving open the question of whether Brodess’s death was the will of God or the fulfillment of a curse.
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Miles places Tubman in an important Black faith continuum ... There will always be gaps in Tubman's biography. To Miles, this is no impediment ... More than many, this book finds beauty in history's unanswerable questions.
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