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.
The genius of Night Flyer is interdisciplinary. Along with maps showing Tubman’s routes from slavery to freedom, it adds poetry, historical visual representations, and historical and contemporary photographs, exceeding the archival photographic portraits of Tubman in youth and maturity that one would expect to find in a conventional biography ... A triumph of Black women’s studies, a powerful representation of what Black studies — an interdisciplinary field ranging far wider than history alone — can offer our understanding of the past. Read it to learn about Tubman. Read it to see what Black women’s studies can do.
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.
