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National Book Award-winning author Tiya Miles explores the history and mythology of a remarkable woman in “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People” (Penguin).
Read an excerpt below.
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Delivery is an art form. Harriet must have recognized this as she delivered time and again on her promise to free the people. Plying the woods and byways, she pretended to be someone she was not when she encountered enslavers or hired henchmen—an owner of chickens, or a reader, or an elderly woman with a curved spine, or a servile sort who agreed that her life should be lived in captivity. Each interaction in which Harriet convinced an enemy that she was who they believed her to be—a Black person properly stuck in their place—she was acting. Performance—gauging what an audience might want and how she might deliver it—became key to Harriet Tubman’s tool kit in the late 1850s and early 1860s. In this period, when she had not only to mislead slave catchers but also to convince enslaved people to trust her with their lives, and antislavery donors to trust her with their funds, Tubman polished her skills as an actor and a storyteller. Many of the accounts that we now have of Tubman’s most eventful moments were told by Tubman to eager listeners who wrote things down with greater or lesser accuracy. In telling these listeners certain things in particular ways, Tubman always had an agenda, or more accurately, multiple agendas that were at times in competition. She wanted to inspire hearers to donate cash or goods to the cause. She wanted to buck up the courage of fellow freedom fighters. She wanted to convey her belief that God was the engine behind her actions. And in her older age, in the late 1860s through the 1880s, she wanted to raise money to purchase and secure a haven for those in need.
There also must have been creative and egoistic desires mixed in with Harriet’s motives. She wanted to be the one to tell her own story. She wanted recognition for her accomplishments even as she attributed them to God. She wanted to control the narrative that was already in formation about her life by the end of the 1850s. And she wanted to be a free agent in word as well as deed.
From “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People” by Tiya Miles. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Tiya Miles.
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