[MUSIC- Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: It is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. now we'll celebrate this Juneteenth. 159 years after 250,000 or so enslaved Black people in Texas were freed from Confederate control and bondage by their owners. In honor of this day, let's revisit the history of one of America's most famous anti-slavery figures Harriet Tubman with a very special guest. You probably know of Harriet Tubman as somewhat of a superhero.

A woman who possessed great bravery, righteousness, and strength as she escaped slavery herself and proceeded to personally rescue 70 slaves over the course of 19 trips back to her home state of Maryland. Maybe this book suggests our tendency to mythologize Harriet Tubman has the unintended consequence of diminishing her achievements or the context of her life.

In her latest book, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, American historian Tiya Miles from Harvard offers a new perspective into the life of Tubman. We learn about different names she went by throughout her life and the significance of those different identities. We meet her as a woman of God and come to understand how her faith was informed by her connection to nature and experience of the world as a disabled person too.

Let's meet Harriet Tubman again. Joining me now is Tiya Miles, professor of history at Harvard University. Professor Miles may be best known for her 2021 bestseller, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, book that won the National Book Award for nonfiction. Professor Miles, we're honored that you're spending a little of your juneteenth with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Tiya Miles: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Why faith dreams in the title? What's a faith dream?

Tiya Miles: Faith dreams because as I was researching Harriet Tubman and trying to understand her life and story, it became clear that faith was one of the most important aspects of her experience. Her faith was often spurred by dreams that she had, dreams she had while sleeping, and visions that she had while she was awake. I took this notion of Harriet Tubman's dreams, which furthered her faith, and connected it to the entirety of Black people, the people that she hoped to save from slavery.

Brian Lehrer: Let's talk about this concept of a mythologized Harriet Tubman. You identify this notion that many Americans hold of her as a superhero, a superhuman being, and this idea will likely be perpetuated by us honoring her with a place on the $20 bill. What's the downside of that?

Tiya Miles: Of course, we can see the upsides of recognizing Harriet Tubman's incredible contributions to American history and the history of humanity, but the downsides are that she actually wasn't superhuman because no one is. She actually wasn't a superhero, she was a real person.

If we see her as some outsized larger than life figure, we're not truly seeing the whole of her. Which means that we can't see what she actually had to stand against and how she had to strengthen herself and gird herself to push forward an agenda that was quite powerful and revolutionary. Here's something else I want to say, Brian, about this.

If we think of Harriet Tubman as someone who was destined to be heroic because she was always larger than life, then we can't see ourselves as being anything like her because we know, of course, that we aren't superhuman. We recognize her as a person, I think we can begin to imagine being as brave as she was.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who wants to say or ask anything about Harriet Tubman or any question you always wanted to ask Tiya Miles since reading All That She Carried, or any of her books? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. This is not just Harriet Tubman the abolitionist, and suffragist or the hands-on emancipator of many enslaved people who she helped at great risk to escape their enslavers that you write about, but also Harriet Tubman in her spiritual life and Harriet Tubman in nature.

You call her an ecologist. Can you talk about Tubman the ecologist? How do you mean that word in relation to her?

Tiya Miles: Harriet Tubman is someone who lived her life in deep connection with and in community with other people. She was not a lone figure. She was enmeshed in relationship. I say that as a response to this question, Brian, because we are all actually enmeshed in relationship, we are all connected with other people. This notion that I developed in the book of Harriet Tubman as an ecologist, as someone who was environmentally conscious, does not originate with me.

It is one that I developed in community with other intellectuals, and particularly with Dorceta Taylor, who is an environmental sociologist, who talked with me about my research many years ago. Back then I was still working on Black women in slavery in various contexts. She pointed out that Harriet Tubman would've had to have been an environmentalist in order to carry out these many escapes through the woods and through parts of nature that presented a number of dangers to her and the people that she was aiding.

This notion is simply putting forward the idea that Harriet Tubman lived in a natural world as we all do, and she was hyper-conscious of it and seriously respectful of it. She brought nature into her vision of how she could change her society.

Brian Lehrer: On the largest context of that answer that you just gave, for you as a historian and biographer, do you think it's a shortcoming of many biographies? It's a shortcoming in our modern discourse of success in one's life, we focus too much on what an individual did or could do and not enough on the context, on the structural realities that determine how so many people's lives turn out?

Tiya Miles: We have a number of remarkable biographies that are about individuals, that are even about couples, that are about groups and cohorts of people. I think there are a number of creative ways that authors have and can reinvent that genre. Really at, at base, we expect the biography to be a life story, and there's an expectation of singularity within that framework. Of course, no one displays a single life story. We all live our lives in connection with other people.

Brian Lehrer: You tell other people's stories in this book, other Black women preachers and others. Maybe take a minute to introduce us to one of those women a little bit and describe how her story fits in the context of your book about Harriet Tubman. Can you do that?

Tiya Miles: Yes. This was a necessity in attempting to understand Harriet Tubman in a more holistic way. I had to move beyond her individual life story in order to know her better. That might sound a little counterintuitive, but the point relates to what I have just been laying out as well as to the fact that when it comes to the history of enslaved people in this country and also around the world, we confront a paucity of sources.

We just do not have the detailed documentary record that we wish we had in attempting to reconstruct these individuals' lives. We have to be creative in terms of the sources that we use. When I was working on all that she carried from a previous book that you mentioned a moment ago, I worked on developing a method in which I turned to the lives of other Black women.

Black women during the period of slavery who wrote their memoirs or told their stories, and also Black women in our contemporary time who wrote fictional narratives about slavery as a way to understand Black women who were living in the 19th century. I applied the same method to Night Flyer that is in trying to understand Harriet Tubman, I first wanted to identify other Black women who were living in her time period and who were living lives that were similar to hers.

This, to me, was a really fulfilling shift to make in the research because it actually took me back to my early graduate school years when I was studying a Black women's narrative of the 19th century in the context of doing a women's studies degree and many of these early Black women life storytellers and writers were deeply religious. Their narratives came in the form of spiritual memoirs, which could also be read as slave narratives because oftentimes, they had been enslaved or they had worked as servants.

One of these women only goes by a first name that we know of, and her name was Elizabeth, she was published under the [unintelligible 00:10:34] name, we could say a pen name because she didn't write this narrative herself of old Elizabeth. She was someone who was very much like Harriet Tubman. Tubman, she was enslaved in Maryland, and Elizabeth was born in the mid-1700s. She lived into the mid-1800s.

She was someone who felt a call from God, as she tells in her narrative, to spread God's word. Once she obtained her freedom, she became a preacher. She traveled and she taught the gospel as she believed it and as she knew it. That path for her was, of course, laden and burdened with pain and trauma because she had grown up an enslaved girl like Harriet Tubman around the same time as Tubman, in the same state as Tubman.

Like Tubman, Elizabeth [unintelligible 00:11:34] separated from her mother and had been desperately lonesome. So much so that she tried to return to her mother and was sent back where she was terribly abused. Looking at these other women's stories I found, told me something more about Tubman that we can't access so easily some existing records regarding Tubman.

Brian Lehrer: That's wonderful. My guest is Harvard historian Tiya Miles. Her new book Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. 212-433-WNYC. Anne on Cape Cod, you're on WNYC with Tiya Miles. Hello, Anne.

Anne: Hi. I just wanted to say that in 1986, I gave birth to a daughter very, very prematurely. I was told by her physicians and mine that she would have some disabilities and challenges in life and that it's true. She's also a social worker now for the USO in Iraq. At the time, the TV show, A Woman Called Moses was being broadcast.

I thought my daughter, and we are Caucasian, needed a strong namesake of a human being who with brain injury and all the challenges that came with being an enslaved woman overcame a lot with a lot of courage as a deeply human person and not as a mythologized person. I named my daughter after Harriet Tubman. I think it's been a beacon for her.

I have collected Jacob Lawrence prints of Harriet Tubman and any book that comes out, a girl called Minty. That has become our family beacon for my daughter as she continues to overcome some of the struggles that come with ableism and to make her, I think, a really powerful young woman.

Brian Lehrer: You think she's taken explicit inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman after being named after her?

Anne: Well, I'd like to think so. I think it certainly has helped us help her negotiate a pretty complicated life that I'd like to say again, she has overcome quite a few things, and despite having a brain injury, has become a social worker, and as I said, is now working for the USO on a base in Iraq.

Brian Lehrer: Anne, thank you.

Anne: Thank you. I can't wait to read the book.

Tiya Miles: Thank you. Thank you for sharing that story, Anne. I really appreciate hearing that. What you have just described is an important element of Harriet Tubman's life that we don't think about enough, and that is that Harriet Tubman did suffer from a terrible injury as an adolescent when an overseer threw a heavy weight toward another young enslaved person who was trying to run, and Harriet Tubman put her own body in between the overseer and that boy who was attempting to escape.

She then was hit in the head. She fell to the ground and she was never the same after that because she suffered from what many scholars now believe was a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. She had numerous seizures. She had a terrible, painful, debilitating headaches. She would lose consciousness. She experienced this throughout her young life and also her adult life.

I think that you will want to keep an eye out for a biography that will be coming out, hopefully, within the next couple of years by the medical historian of slavery, Deirdre Cooper, who will look specifically at disability in Harriet Tubman's life. Deirdre Cooper has made the point that we really need to add having a disability to our understanding of who Harriet Tubman was and actually of what she had to contend with.

I think for me, it's impossible to imagine what it would be like to try to escape, not only on my own but also with many other people, and to not know if I was going to have a seizure and lose consciousness while deep in the woods with many vulnerable people who were being hunted. What would that be like? Yet, Harriet Tubman experienced that, she withstood that.

In many ways, though I don't want to romanticize this, so we have to be very careful, in many ways, she may have felt that some of the visions that she experienced that were probably connected to her seizures were sources of information from God.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, you're right about how her experience of those seizures was that they gave her visions, right?

Tiya Miles: Yes. There was a double-sidedness or a multi-sidedness to Harriet Tubman's experience of disability. Certainly, she was more vulnerable on top of all the many existing vulnerabilities that she already had as an enslaved Black girl and a young woman in the US South in the 1800s.

On top of all of that, she also did not know if she would remain conscious in any given moment, or if she would have a seizure and lose her ability to see what was happening, to see that danger was coming, and yet, she kept on going.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes this question in a text message. Listener writes, "I heard that she carried a gun for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. Is it known if she ever had to use it?"

Tiya Miles: I have not seen in any of the primary sources that we have about Harriet Tubman that she actually used her gun. These sources say that she proclaimed herself to be ready and willing to use her gun because she was not willing to have any party that she was guiding to help them to achieve their goal of freedom to be exposed because someone might become afraid and decide to turn back.

This is an aspect of Harriet Tubman's personality and the way she ran her freedom organization and her freedom missions that might make some people uncomfortable. She was armed.

Brian Lehrer: She was personally freeing enslaved people. As a closing question, one of the prizes that your book, All That She Carried, won in addition to the National Book Award was the Harriet Tubman Prize awarded by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library for the best nonfiction book of the year about slavery and anti-slavery. You've won a Tubman Prize and now written a Tubman book. I wonder if you might say how the two books relate to each other.

One way that I'm thinking of that maybe is a reach is, of course, all that she carried is about this sack and how it was handed down from mother to daughter. In the new book, you write about her cradle, Harriet Tubman's cradle built from gum tree by her father, Ben Ross. I don't know, I'm just thinking of a connection between the importance of a physical thing and the importance of a physical thing, but what connection would you make between the two books?

Tiya Miles: That is one of the connections I would make, the one that you offered right there, Brian. There are a number of links and parallels between these two projects to my mind. These projects are both centering the history of innovative, creative, courageous black women during the period of enslavement. In the case of All That She Carried, the women were not famous, and I attempted to bring their story to life so they could become better known.

In the case of Harriet Tubman, she is incredibly famous but perhaps to a fault such that we have lost a sense of the depth of her humanity and the truth of her vulnerability. Both these books are about survival, they're about resilience. Both these books are about families. All That She Carried is about a family of black women over the generations, and Night Flyer is about a woman who was absolutely devoted to a family.

I think we often forget that when Harriet Tubman determined that she was going to go back into the South to rescue people, she first had in mind her family. Then she expanded that definition of family to include all of her cultural kin we could say, to include all of her people who were in bondage. As you pointed out, both these books used material culture as a way to help us come closer to understanding the experiences of people who came before us, all that she carried focuses on a sack.

In Night Flyer, I look at things like the cradle that Harriet Tubman was rocked in as a baby which was one of her most powerful lasting memories into adulthood. I also look at the clothing that Harriet Tubman wore and a quilt that she made that she was quite proud of that she traded in order to get information and help when she made her own escape in 1849.

Brian Lehrer: By the way let me tack this on. Texas was not her stomping grounds, but do you know where Harriet Tubman was on Juneteenth or did she ever talk about the importance of that day as far as you know?

Tiya Miles: I don't know where Harriet Tubman was on Juneteenth. I will say that in our present moment right now, we recognize Juneteenth and celebrate it as a national holiday, as we should, but Juneteenth wasn't the only holiday that black people in Harriet Tubman's time recognized. On the East Coast and some eastern cities, Emancipation Day was more of a familiar name to put to that holiday. While I can't say that Harriet Tubman celebrated Juneteenth per say, she certainly celebrated and embraced freedom.

She spent a bulk of her many decades in life living in Auburn, New York and very planfully creating a free community in which she could care for black people who were in need including single mothers, people with disabilities, and older people. She devoted her life to caretaking

Brian Lehrer: Tiya Miles' new book is Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and The Faith Dreams of a Free People. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Tiya Miles: Oh, I was so happy to do it. Thank you, Brian.

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