← The Preamble
The Preamble
Night Flyer with Tiya Miles
00:51:44
Harvard historian and NYT best-selling author Tiya Miles shows how Harriet Tubman’s unwavering courage, faith, and unbreakable hope in the face of fear inspires us to create change today.
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- [00:00]
Sharon McMahon
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- [01:00]
Tiya Miles
The holidays are all about sharing with.
- [01:02]
Sharon McMahon
Family meals, couches, stories, Grandma's secret pecan pie recipe, and now you can also share a cart.
- [01:08]
Tiya Miles
With Instacart's family carts, everyone can add.
- [01:10]
Sharon McMahon
What they want to one group cart from wherever they are.
- [01:13]
Tiya Miles
So you don't have to go from.
- [01:14]
Sharon McMahon
Room to room to find out who wants cranberry sauce or who should get mini marshmallows for the yams or collecting votes for sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart and then share the meals and the moments. Download the Instacart app and get delivery.
- [01:26]
Tiya Miles
In as fast as 30 minutes.
- [01:28]
Sharon McMahon
Plus enjoy free delivery on your first three orders.
- [01:30]
Tiya Miles
Service fees and terms apply.
- [01:37]
Sharon McMahon
Hello friends. Welcome. My guest today is somebody who, like, I think I cried three or four times during this conversation. I just love her so much. Her name is Tiya Miles and she has written a book called Night Flyer, which is about Harriet Tubman. And I just love this book so much. I love Tya Miles so much. She's just like the kindest, warmest, smartest person and I cannot wait for you to listen to this. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting. I am truly like so stoked to have Tya Miles with me today. I was literally getting teary before we even pressed record. You have no idea how excited I am to talk to you. Thank you so much for being here, Sharon.
- [02:20]
Tiya Miles
Thanks so much for having me, Sharon. It's a delight to be here.
- [02:23]
Sharon McMahon
Any book that Tya Miles writes is an immediate add to cart. And then your new book, Night Flyer, which is about Harriet Tubman. I Think I was crying by page three. First of all, your writing is just so, like, you are a gifted writer. You truly are.
- [02:38]
Tiya Miles
Thank you.
- [02:39]
Sharon McMahon
And then the amount of work that goes into writing a book like Night Flyer. I just released my own history book.
- [02:47]
Tiya Miles
Yes. Congratulations.
- [02:48]
Sharon McMahon
Thank you. And it took me three years to write. I'm well aware of how much work you put into everything that you do. I have, like, a unique appreciation for it. After having written this book. It goes beyond just like, oh, yeah, it's a lot of research and it's a lot of work. Like, it's beyond that. Like, my respect for your work has just only increased. I want to start by talking a little bit about why Harriet Tubman. She's obviously a beloved American figure. She's beloved. But I want to know your why. I want to know why Harriet Tubman and why now?
- [03:25]
Tiya Miles
I think I'm going to respond to that question by telling you a secret, which I feel a bit uncomfortable about. But I'm going to do it because you asked me the question and with such generosity of spirit. I don't think it is typical or maybe even accepted widely in the academy for a scholar to choose a topic, especially a historical topic, because of concerns in the present day. But that is actually something that I do. I choose my topics because I want to try to help with our current problems and challenges and, you know, our fears and anxieties. And Harriet Tubman seemed to me to be just the right kind of figure who can help us along. Right now, we are facing so many threats. We carry the weight of so much concern about the present moment, about the future for our children and our descendants. And I know that it helps me personally to be able to think back to figures in the past who also carried heavy weights with them, who also were very concerned about their present and desperately afraid sometimes about the future. And to see that even beneath these cloudy skies, those figures were able to act. They were able to maintain their sense that something could change, and they enacted change. To me, that is very encouraging. I take heart through that, and I wanted to share some of that heart with other people by retelling the story of Harriet Tubman in a way that I thought could address some of our current issues on a level that is intellectual, yes, but also spiritual and psychological and emotional.
- [05:15]
Sharon McMahon
I love that so much. I find that figures like Harriet Tubman and many others, they bring me hope in a moment of extreme political stress, in a moment where studying history itself has become politicized, in a moment where voting rights are under attack. People like Harriet Tubman and many others like her, but particularly her, I take heart in seeing how she did not grow weary, in doing good. And that to me is like, it's so easy to grow weary.
- [05:49]
Tiya Miles
I love the way you put that.
- [05:50]
Sharon McMahon
I'm just going to spend this whole interview just like tearing up, just thinking about her. First of all, what she did.
- [05:57]
Tiya Miles
Yes.
- [05:58]
Sharon McMahon
How Tiya, like, she's just out there, like, navigating in the dark, knowing that her life is in peril. I need a computer to tell me to turn right.
- [06:08]
Tiya Miles
Same here.
- [06:09]
Sharon McMahon
Okay. I need a satellite to track my location so I know if I take the third exit at the roundabout, you know what I mean? Like, even just the logistics of what she did is mind boggling to me. I don't know how I don't get it, but okay, I accept it. She suffered a head injury when she was young.
- [06:33]
Tiya Miles
Yes.
- [06:34]
Sharon McMahon
Do you attribute any of her gifts to her visions, to her head injury? You know, like, some people have hypothesized that her head injury created this sort of like, uncanny ability to navigate in the wilderness, to see in the dark woods of winter. Is that just a sort of like legendary imagining in your mind, or do you think that's real?
- [07:00]
Tiya Miles
I just want to back up a second and affirm your feeling that you need a GPS to get anywhere. I need my electronic systems and also my printed map.
- [07:13]
Sharon McMahon
I mean the map quest, just in.
- [07:15]
Tiya Miles
Case, when I get to the roundabout, it might say, take it to an exit. I have no idea what that even means. So I agree with you about Hal being the big question with Harriet Tubman. Why is also a big question. Not only how did she manage to do all that she did, which hopefully we'll talk about in more depth as we continue, but why? What motivated her to take these grave risks to her person, to her spirit, you know, to her life? Again and again and again. The how and the why are so important. So you raise the question of her head injury, which occurred at a really critical moment in her life. She was around the age of, you know, pre adolescent, 11, 12, 13 ish. Let me bracket a comment, which is that we don't know exactly when Harriet Tubman was born. Scholars have basically reached a consensus to say around 1822, but we don't have precise documentation of that. So she was in her early adolescence when this terrible injury occurred. And she had been leased out by the man who owned her and her mother and her siblings. This was a common occurrence in her childhood, going back to when she was a very Very young girl, probably around the age of five. So she'd released out yet again on the cusp of becoming a teenager. And she was working on the farm of a man. Who she later described as the worst man in the neighborhood. So not a good guy. While working there, she was sent on an errand with the cook. They went to the local general store. And Tubman. And this is really interesting. I think she was concerned about her appearance. She felt ashamed of the way she looked. Because of how white people around her. Would peer at her and stare at her. And she felt, judge her. So in this particular moment, she actually had a scarf over her head. Because she was wanting to sort of improve her appearance. To go out into this public space, the general store, to run this errand. So here she is in the store with a scarf over her head. And out from the fields runs this young enslaved boy or teenage. He's being chased by an overseer. Perhaps the young man has run away, attempting to escape for good. Perhaps he was just trying to run away from this kind of punishment. We really do not know the full story. But he was running. An overseer was chasing him. And the different accounts that we have of this moment. Indicate that Tubman, who was then not even known by the name Tubman. She was still going by her childhood name of Araminta Ross. So Minty was her nickname. In this moment. We have accounts that say that Minty put herself in between that overseer. And that young boy or young teenage boy. Who was running away at that time. The overseer picked up a heavy weight from the general store counter. Attempting to stop the boy. He threw it. Because Tubman had placed her body in between these two. The weight hit her. It knocked her down to the ground. It actually damaged her skull. And she was terribly, terribly injured. Such that the next day. When this worst man in the neighborhood. Put her back into the fields. She was in terrible pain, having an awful headache. And the blood was just streaming down her face. This is an incident that Tubman describes in later reminiscences. So this is one of the moments when Aramon Taras was turning into the Harriet Tubman we know. Turning into that heroic figure. Who would risk her own safety for someone else's. But it's also a time when she was changed physiologically, psychologically. She ended up having what we would view now as a cognitive disability. She had a chronic illness. She had what scholars now think Was a form of temporal lobe epilepsy. As a result of a traumatic brain injury. So this is a time in her life when, just as you were saying, everything intensified inside her mind. She'd always been a dreamer, but now her dreams intensified. She started having visions during the day. She started having seizures, which are described in the early sources as blackouts, you know, quote, napping, kind of narcolepsy. But these were seizures. And she started to have a much more intensely alive, psychological, spiritual sensibility. She felt that this sensibility was being formed around and through her relationship with God. Because she was a devout Christian. She had been since childhood. Her parents had been as well. This intensification of her relationship with God is something that she would carry with her from that moment of adolescence into her young adulthood into her entire life. And she felt that God was giving her messages. She felt that God was showing her things and saying things to her. She followed those messages when she had hard decisions to make. Researchers today really still don't exactly know what happens when a person suffers a traumatic brain injury and when they are experiencing temporal epilepsy, when they are having a seizure. For a long time, it was the thinking that this condition intensified religious experience. It was almost like you stick a plug into a socket and bam. That person experiences greater religiosity. This seemed to be the pattern historically. However, apparently there is not really some kind of one to one correlation between those two things. So I think it is hard for us to say exactly how these different pieces fit together in her life. But something certainly happened with that injury. Tubman was changed in that moment at the same time that I think that she had actually been going through a transformation of who she was into who she would become over the course of her childhood. So this was not a singular moment.
- [13:14]
Sharon McMahon
Totally. I love in the book how you say over the course of her long life, Harriet Tubman continuously professed this fundamental article of personal faith. God would take care. And just as God cared for her, she would spend a lifetime caring for others. Trekking through the dark nights to deliver them from the evil that was slavery and creating sanctuary spaces in the north to receive them after hard journey. By midlife, Tubman behaved much like the evergreen tree that had shielded her from the snowstorm in 1860. A partner of God on the earth who carried out an ethic of care with the aid of human and non human allies. First of all, I love the imagery that she viewed herself as a partner of God on earth. But I wonder if you can tell the listeners a little bit about the human and non human allies that Harriet took Tubman worked with.
- [14:15]
Tiya Miles
Yes. So we know that Tubman accomplished Remarkable feats. We tend to think of these feats as occurring when she's an adult. And when she's operating on the Underground Railroad. Assisting people who are seeking their freedom. And, yes, they did. There are dramatic stories from that time. Stories that, you know, Sharon, I cannot tell you what actually happened. All right? Because it's so mysterious and unexpected. The kinds of things that occurred with Harriet Tubman assisting people on the Underground Railroad. But these stories also were happening in her early childhood. When she was facing extreme situations. A great deal of suffering. A question mark about what would happen next. And if she would be safe. Or if she would be reunited with her parents and her family. And she turned to God for help, for aid, for comfort. From a very young age, Tubman was doing this. She was praying, asking God to assist her in fighting this unjust power that lorded over her life. And that was the power of slavery. What I noticed when going back and looking at many of these stories of Tubman's life. Was that nature was often playing a role in these stories. So when Tubman would pray to God for help, something in nature would sort of change or would appear to her. And that was the form in which help came. This pattern contained continued throughout her life. It continued once she became Harriet tubman in her 20s. And it was a key feature of the way in which she was able to successfully accompany people to freedom on the Underground Railroad. So here's just one example of that. From early on in Minty's life. This was at a time when she had been again, leased out by that owner to another family who was a few miles away. And she was just a small girl, probably around the age of five or six. So, you know, the age of a kindergartner or a first grader in our time. Separated from her family, she was desperately afraid she was living in the home of a white couple who had wanted to. I mean, I'm not gonna sugarcoat a Sharon. They wanted to rent a cheap child who they could have taken care of their own infant to keep the baby quiet. So Minty, a baby herself, right. Was sent away to take care of somebody else's baby. And in this household, she was so terrified of being away from her family and being away from her mother. And being around these strange white people who had authority over her. That she would stay as far away from them as possible. If they told her to come drink milk, she would refuse. Even though she was hungry and thirsty. And milk was a great treat. She would refuse to drink the milk. She would just Go off by herself and pray. Harriet Tubman tells us this story by way of interlocutor of her childhood. So she would go off and she would pray in the same household. After she'd been there for a little while, Minty actually got a bit braver. And she decided to try to sneak a lump of sugar off of the tray. While the couple wasn't paying attention, she did this. They spotted her, and they both tried to chase her out of the house. They tried to capture her as she was running. She ran away. Small young girl. She ran and she ran and she ran. She ran across fields. She ran to neighboring farms. And suddenly she comes across, basically, a pig pen in some rural place far from the location where she had been leased out to. And she jumps in with the mama pig and the baby pigs. And she lives with these pigs for days. So the little Minty who was praying to God in this household to help her to be able to fight against this unjust power. Seems to have found an answer in nature. When she was able to run and run and run. And to take up with the family of pigs for about half a week, she was actually eating the food that was being fed to the piglets. And she only left when she became worried that the mother pig, the old sow, as she says it, might actually start to resent her presence and that she might be at risk. So at that point, little Minty goes back to that place. And upon her return, the people who were leasing her beat her terribly. And again, we're talking about a very, very small girl. They beat her terribly, such that she bore those scars for the rest of her life. But I tell that story not because it ends with this moment of awful abuse, but because it shows the way in which Harriet Tubman found in nature, kind of an answer to her prayers. And this happens again and again, where she goes out and finds help. She looks up to the sky. She sees the stars, and there is help. She looks to the left in a snowstorm and hears an evergreen tree. And she finds help. She can shelter there. These moments, to me, are just so inspiring. They are hopeful because they show us that even someone in the worst of circumstances. Can appeal to her view of a higher power. And can't, in that appeal, find strength, can find reassurance, can find courage, and can act. And when she acts, what does she discover? Oh, here's a tree. Oh, here's an animal. Here's a star. Here's a plant, Here's a waterway who can become helpers in her mission to me, it's just quite beautiful and it's uplifting even within a dark story to know that these possibilities exist for a.
- [19:40]
Sharon McMahon
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- [20:52]
Angela Kinsey
And I'm Angela Kinsey.
- [20:54]
Sharon McMahon
We are best friends and together we have the podcast Office Ladies where we rewatched every single episode of the Office with insane behind the scenes scene stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs.
- [21:06]
Tiya Miles
Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve Carell in the studio.
- [21:14]
Sharon McMahon
Every Wednesday we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the Office and our friendship with brand new Guests and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for Brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus on Mondays we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there.
- [21:41]
Tiya Miles
Follow and listen to Office Ladies on.
- [21:43]
Sharon McMahon
The free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:50]
Angela Kinsey
Where'd you get those shoes?
- [21:52]
Sharon McMahon
Easy.
- [21:53]
Tiya Miles
They're from dsw.
- [21:54]
Angela Kinsey
Because DSW has the exact right shoes.
- [21:57]
Tiya Miles
For whatever you're into right now. You know, like the sneakers that make.
- [22:00]
Sharon McMahon
Office hours feel like happy hour, the boots that turn grocery aisles into runways, and all the styles that show off the many sides of you from daydreamer.
- [22:10]
Tiya Miles
To multitasker and everything in between.
- [22:12]
Sharon McMahon
Because you do it all in really great shoes.
- [22:15]
Tiya Miles
Find a shoe for every you at your DSW store or dsw.com.
- [22:21]
Sharon McMahon
You know, so often people are waiting for a sign. It seems like nothing you do makes a difference. And so that's very disheartening to people. Right, understandably. But I love that her life is such a beautiful illustration of this idea that when she asks for help, you know, in Harriet's case, she's asking for help from God. That help is sent not from, like, a booming voice from the sky, not from a revolutionary change in her condition, not in the form of the right person being elected, not in the form of an army winning the war. That help comes from a tree appearing. And she experiences that as help. In her sort of moment of darkness, she experiences the appearance of a star in the heavens. As help sent to her.
- [23:14]
Tiya Miles
Yes.
- [23:15]
Sharon McMahon
And what a beautiful way to experience life despite her circumstances that she could not change.
- [23:22]
Tiya Miles
Yes. And I so appreciate how you put that. Because Tubman was also looking for signs. But she was creating her own signs as she looked for them. So she was, in many ways, supplying herself with the signs she needed or the encouragement she needed to take an action, to be brave, to be bold, to make a move. And let me tell you, Sharon, when I was working on this book, I came to understand Tubman and see her in such a different way than before I started doing this research.
- [23:50]
Sharon McMahon
Yeah, I would love to hear more about that.
- [23:51]
Tiya Miles
Oh, sure. And before I started reading closely, I came to see her very much as a philosophical person, as an intellectual person, as a thinker, as someone with deep levels of reflection. And before I came to this project, I thought of her as, you know, very much a doer. Somebody who just got out there on those trails in the dark woods and made things happen. And this is true. This is who she was. But that aspect of her character was very much coupled by the thinking, reflective, deep aspect of her character. I did not know that before working on this project. And that realization of how deep she could be and how deep she was only became apparent to me when I thought more about her spiritual life and about her prayer life in particular. When I thought about how when Tubman or Little Minty Ross was praying to God for help and expressing through prayer that she knew her situation was wrong. She was actually theorizing about slavery and theorizing about social relations. So in her prayer talk with God, she's putting this problem before him. You know, she viewed God as a masculine figure. She put her problems before him. And what she heard back was a loud and clear affirmation. Yes, you are right. Yes, this is unjust. Yes, this is wrong. Yes, you should fight. That's what she heard. And with that kind of lens in place, she looks around her environment, and then she sees the possibilities for help, the potential for change. We can look at that in many different ways. Some of us might say, oh, well, yes, God did give her that knowledge. Tubman, I think, would agree. We could also say Tubman was thinking through the problem of slavery. And through that thought process, she supplied herself with the information she needed and with the courage that she needed to take a step forward. So when I say she created her own signs, what I mean is she set up the psychological conditions that enabled her to see signs of hope in places where other people might just look at this and say, oh, this is a pig pen. There's nothing here for me.
- [26:02]
Sharon McMahon
Yeah. I also love. This is just a slight aside. But speaking to her intellectual prowess, she was also known to be funny. She was known to, like, tell jokes about her situation, tell jokes about her husband who decided, like, I got a different woman.
- [26:18]
Tiya Miles
Yes.
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Sharon McMahon
And, you know, they say that the funniest people are often some of the smartest people because they can figure out how to find the humor in any situation. And I also. I love a person that can laugh at themselves. The people who cannot laugh at themselves are a little bit insufferable. We all know somebody like that who are just like, oh, no, not him. You know what I mean? Like, all know somebody like that. I appreciate that about her, too, that despite everything she had been through, her condition of enslavement, the situations with her relatives, her husband, and far more. That's not an exhaustive list by any means. She could still reach for humor as a tool to relate to other people. That relational tool of humor, I think, is something that is just like. No one talks about that when we're talking about somebody like Harriet Tubman. No one discusses her intellectual gifts and. And her ability to make light of what was funny in the moment.
- [27:17]
Tiya Miles
That was an incredible discovery for me in reading these materials about Tubman, both the earlier ones and also later ones, which are oral history interviews with some of her descendants. Descendants of her siblings, really, not directly from her. She was a real person, and she was multifaceted. And there were all kinds of conflicting aspects to her personality. I think it's hard for us to imagine a Harriet Tubman, the woman we see on the poster, who we've made into kind of the superhero, just cracking a joke with somebody or playing a prank on somebody, but she did. I mean, one of the most striking moments that I saw in the oral history interviews with some of Tubman's familial descendants was that later in her life, when she lived in Auburn, New York, she was still suffering from the repercussions of this terrible injury that we've already been talking about. So through her whole life, she had horrible headaches and she would have seizures. She would lose consciousness. People saw it as falling asleep. Her family says that later in her life, Tubman would be over in her favorite chair in her cozy brick house in Auburn, New York, and she would be just dozing. She'd just be snoozing over there because everybody knows that she falls asleep all the time and she can't control it. But then afterwards, she'd come, like, you know, pop an eye open and just make a comment which would indicate, I've been listening the whole time. And here's my wry remark about what you all have just said. So when I read that, I thought, this is hilarious that Tubman would sort of almost pretend to be sleeping only to pop up and make a joke or make a comment to the delight of her family members. We just don't see her in that way. But she. But Alcohols was that way. She managed to be a person who could live through horrible things, who could fight for decades against the injustices that she saw, and who could still tease her relatives in the parlor.
- [29:14]
Sharon McMahon
I really love how your book really brings sort of the fullness of her humanity to bear that you're right that she has become very mythologized in American history. And in many ways her accolades are very deserved. But we see her as sort of a one dimension dimensional figure because of the sort of the mythologizing that's been done about her. And I say that with no malice, of course, but we only see one thing about her. And I love that through your portrait, we get to see all the things about her, including, you know, an emphasis on her faith, how she related to other people through her faith, and how she really was like, yeah, maybe she had a little narcolepsy, maybe she was suffering a little seizure. But then you knew, like, she's been listening this entire time. That's funny.
- [30:02]
Tiya Miles
That's right.
- [30:02]
Sharon McMahon
That's funny.
- [30:03]
Tiya Miles
It is. Yes, it is.
- [30:04]
Sharon McMahon
I love that.
- [30:05]
Tiya Miles
Yes. Reading books to make light of yourself and to make light of the expectations that people have of you is a quality that I think many of us wish.
- [30:12]
Sharon McMahon
Yeah, we can totally. I want to talk a little bit more about exactly what Harriet Tubman did because, you know, so often people know the name they associate. Harriet Tubman, Underground Railroad. They know that she helped people escape enslavement. And that's about the extent of what a lot of people know. They might recognize her face because we've seen her on the merch. You know what I mean? But I feel like many Americans probably couldn't even tell you what state she lived in. You know, like, there's not a lot of details that many people would be able to fill in. Can you help us understand maybe just with one or two examples of exactly what Harriet Tubman did?
- [30:53]
Tiya Miles
Well, I will certainly try, and they.
- [30:56]
Sharon McMahon
Can read your book to get all the details. But, like, just like one little example.
- [31:00]
Tiya Miles
Yes. And there are other books I'd love to recommend, too. One of the first things she did was to recognize that slavery was wrong and to use all of her kind of mental and physical abilities to attempt to change that condition, first for herself and simultaneously for her family and then for everyone who was enslaved. So she came to think of this phrase, my people, as not just being her family, but being anyone who was enslaved. From the time of her adolescence, Sharon Kate Tubman, who was then still Araminta Ross, was thinking proactively about how she could change her condition. She managed to negotiate with her owner to allow her to hire out her own time so that she could keep a little bit of those proceeds. And in doing this, she actually had to get a white person of standing in her neighborhood to vouch for her, which shows her another way that she accomplished her goals, which was she was willing to talk with and to enlist and negotiate with whoever it would take to get the job done. So she was able to hire her own timeout as an older teenager and young woman, which meant that she was able to keep a little bit of money. One of the first things she did with that money was to purchase a pair of oxen for herself so that she could increase the amount of labor that she could do to earn more money. In addition to that, she used her money to hire an attorney. Sharon, to investigate her family, because she thought she had a feeling. There were whispers that her owner had actually not given her mother freedom when legally she was entitled to it. Now, Tevin was right about that, it turns out. And if her mother had been freed when she was supposed to have been freed upon the death of the owner's father, Things would have been very different for that entire family. So my response to your question is, first of all, what did Tubman do? Tubman was a smart negotiator. Tubman knew how to multiply her resources. Tubman knew that she should hire an attorney to get legal assistance for her family. This is all Tubman, the young woman. And then Tubman set off with her brothers in 1849 in an attempted escape. They had heard that their owners were probably going to try to sell them, so they started off trying to run away. Her brothers changed their mind along the way. We can speculate as to why, and I try to do that in Nightflyer. We don't fully know the answer to the question why her brothers change their mind. Tubman comes back with them, but she decides to go off again. So as a woman alone, a younger woman alone, she managed to leave from Caroline County, Maryland, to make her way up north and eastward. She went through Delaware, we think, and she took herself to Philadelphia. She made her own escape alone. And this is relatively unusual for a woman to escape alone. Tubman did this. And once she got to Philadelphia, she didn't say, okay, now I'm here, I'm free. Time to live the free life. No, what she did was to get down on her knees and pray because she knew it would be wrong for her to be free. And everybody else left back in servitude.
- [34:15]
Angela Kinsey
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- [35:16]
Tiya Miles
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- [36:58]
Tiya Miles
Giving she prayed for God's help and this is why I call her God's partner. Because in that moment I talk about it as her sort of enlisting God in her mission. The way she thought of it was that this was God's mission, right? But I see her as enlisting God in her mission because she said in that prayer she recalled later, which is how we have a sense of this, I am going back for my people and will you help me? So Tubman's sort of telling God, look, this is how it's gonna be. Are you gonna step up? So God perhaps does step up. Hubbin certainly sees it this way. And she goes back and she starts rescuing her relatives before she was even known by anyone on what we now think of as a loosely organized underground railroad. She was not a member of that network yet. She was somebody who just freed herself. Sharon she freed herself. She was desperately sad about her family still back in slavery, and she went to work doing domestic work in the north to earn money to fund her own rescue missions. So I could just go on. No, no, no. Fast forward. For almost a decade of her life, she was a person on the ground who was masterminding these escapes. She was helping People who were already seeking their freedom to actually make it happen. She was going back and guiding them. She was sharing information with others. She was telling people about the secret roots. And so even though in the past there may have been unintended exaggerations of the people that she aided directly through these rescue missions, she helped a lot of people. She helped probably around 70 to 80 people directly. By that, I mean going back to Maryland about 12, 13 times, helping people to escape. But indirectly, we can multiply that probably by two or three times to the hundreds. And that doesn't even include this big Civil War mission, this campaign that she helped to plan and execute on the Combi river, in which over 700 enslaved people were able to flee from these ricing plantations onto the Union gunboats and to then seize their freedom. This is an incredible chapter of Tubman's life, which is detailed in one of those books that I wanted to mention. There's a new book called Cumby, written by the historian Etta Fields Black, which really focuses in on Harriet Tubman's Civil War service. So we hear sometimes that she was a spy. I remember watching the episode of Black Ish with my son talking about, Harriet Tubman was a spy. No, she was. She was. Okay, yes, she was a spy. We hear that sometimes. But do we see Harriet Tubman, the businesswoman on the ground in South Carolina who was again earning her own money? Sharon. She was baking and selling baked goods to earn her own money to support her life. While also teaching these formerly enslaved women who had fled slavery how they could provide services for pay. Tubman opened sort of like a teaching laundry to show black women who had been enslaved how they could do this labor for pay. So this is only Harriet Tubman's life until around her 50s. This is a young woman, Harriet Tubman.
- [40:12]
Sharon McMahon
Yes. Yes. This is just scratching the surface. I once did just sort of like a rough calculation of if you think about the 70 or 80 people that she helped free from enslavement, there's almost no chance that those 70 or 80 people didn't go on to help other people in some way, directly or indirectly, sending them money, showing them how to go back for them, there's no chance that those 70 already people were like, see ya. They absolutely wanted to free their own who were left behind.
- [40:39]
Tiya Miles
Yes.
- [40:40]
Sharon McMahon
So when you multiply this out by the generations, you know, since the time she was working, there are probably tens of thousands of people alive in the United States today whose ancestors were directly impacted by the actions of Harriet Tubman.
- [40:59]
Tiya Miles
Most Certainly. I mean, one of the points that Eddie Fields Black makes in her book is that Harriet Tubman's contributions to the Union effort in the Civil War are really kind of unsung.
- [41:09]
Sharon McMahon
Yes.
- [41:10]
Tiya Miles
And yet they were mammoth.
- [41:12]
Sharon McMahon
Yes. Just the 700 people that you just mentioned. The descendants of those 700 people number in the potentially six figures.
- [41:21]
Tiya Miles
That's right. And that campaign was really important for really kind of bucking up the Union and showing, yes, we can execute this war. We can hit the Confederacy in a way that hurts, basically attacking these rice plantations, which were an important source of economic strength of the Confederacy. So that action really helped to support what would happen later in the Civil War that helped to increase Union morale. And I think there's really no end to the people Tubman influenced.
- [41:57]
Sharon McMahon
No. I even write about this in my book when I'm talking about Claudette Colvin, who says in a moment that she is on a bus in Montgomery and is trying to be forced off of the bus. She says she felt the hand of Sojourner Truth on one shoulder and the hand of Harriet Tubman on the other. And it was a little bit like that line from Hamilton. She felt like, history has its eyes on me. And so even though Claudette Colvin has no known direct connection to Harriet Tubman, the influence of Harriet Tubman on the rest of the United States, it's truly an incalculable impact.
- [42:37]
Tiya Miles
Yes. I mean, I like to think of this as a cultural heritage that we all share.
- [42:41]
Sharon McMahon
Yes, yes, yes.
- [42:43]
Tiya Miles
Any of these historical figures whose lives we can look at and examine and think about, who can inspire us and offer us cautionary tales, too. They belong to all of us.
- [42:54]
Sharon McMahon
All of us.
- [42:55]
Tiya Miles
They have helped to make us who we are, and they can help to make us better in the future.
- [42:59]
Sharon McMahon
That's right. That's right. I like to think of them as our community of ancestors.
- [43:04]
Tiya Miles
Yes.
- [43:05]
Sharon McMahon
Harriet Tubman would want to have inspired all kinds of people, right?
- [43:10]
Tiya Miles
Oh, absolutely.
- [43:11]
Sharon McMahon
And she knew better than anyone else that she could not go it alone, that she needed the help of the entire community to make the kind of change that she wanted. And she also would tell Americans, especially some governors in some places, that black history is American history.
- [43:30]
Tiya Miles
Oh, yes.
- [43:31]
Sharon McMahon
That her contributions on an order of magnitude are in many cases far greater than the bold faced names we see in the textbook. I mean, I could just keep going on here. You know exactly what I'm saying.
- [43:45]
Tiya Miles
I do, absolutely. Black history is also, of course, American history. How could it not be?
- [43:51]
Sharon McMahon
Right.
- [43:51]
Tiya Miles
I can't begin to understand Arguments to the contrary.
- [43:54]
Sharon McMahon
Yes, yes, yes.
- [43:55]
Tiya Miles
But also, Sharon, black history is always also interconnected with Euro American history, white history, indigenous history. You cannot disentangle these. No, you cannot.
- [44:06]
Sharon McMahon
No.
- [44:07]
Tiya Miles
Harriet Tubman's life begins in a multiracial context. We cannot separate these things out.
- [44:13]
Sharon McMahon
That's right. I would also love your take on this, that the history of enslavement in the United States is really, in many ways, white people's history. It is certainly this idea that, like, studying enslavement is something that is, quote, unquote, black history. No, no, no, no, no.
- [44:32]
Tiya Miles
You know, we're one country.
- [44:34]
Sharon McMahon
Yes.
- [44:35]
Tiya Miles
Maybe we all. Most weren't. Right.
- [44:37]
Sharon McMahon
That's right.
- [44:38]
Tiya Miles
Maybe something else could have happened back there in the 1860s. But we are one country, which means that we trace our lineage back to these early and very important, very kind of fundamental configurations of colonial and American society. I mean, look, slavery was one of those. We cannot deny it. It's all over our original documents for the founding of this country. We cannot deny it. And why should we want to? This is a part of our history. This is a part of who we are. And we are one country. And so, of course, history of slavery is also the history of white Americans and many other groups of people who live on these lands now. And in addition to that, this is something that Harriet Tubman speaks to. Harriet Jacobs, another formerly enslaved woman who wrote a very important narrative about her life, speaks to, and I spoke to it a moment ago, less eloquently than they have. Black and white lives were and are intertwined. Slavery could not have functioned without enslavers. That's just the reality of the thing. And, of course, while enslavers were the minority of the white population at the time, they were a minority with quite a lot of political power, economic power, cultural influence, and their needs. The needs of, at first, slaveholders across the colonies, but then after Revolutionary War, we're talking more about slaveholders in the South. Their needs were being supplied by northern manufacturers, Northern businessmen, white men and women who were laborers in shoe factories, who were making shoes for enslaved people and so on. So you just cannot disentangle it. And I think it is just much wiser to accept that and to look as clearly as we can at the history and to see what can it teach us about our interconnections and about how we can do things better with the opportunities that we have in front of us.
- [46:40]
Sharon McMahon
I love that. I want to mention one other thing that you say in the book. You say a flesh and blood Woman of her antebellum age, Harriet Tubman lived a perilous life with profound lessons for ours. Tubman was no nihilist. She believed in the possibility of brighter futures. And she acted on those visions. She put her faith in God, had faith in nature, and kept faith with all sorts of people. First of all, I love this notion that Tubman was no nihilist, that she believed in the possibility of brighter futures. Because what hope do we have if we have no hope? Right, there's none. If we don't believe change is possible, nothing will change. And I love that despite Tubman's circumstances, despite the adversity she faced, she refused to be a nihilist. But I would love to hear your take on what route would Harriet Tubman advise us to take through this wilderness in this very fractious moment in American history?
- [47:43]
Tiya Miles
I think she would have so many lessons for us.
- [47:45]
Sharon McMahon
It's almost like you could write a whole book about it. Tiya.
- [47:48]
Tiya Miles
Well, she's.
- [47:49]
Sharon McMahon
Yeah.
- [47:50]
Tiya Miles
Interesting. There's an idea there, Sharon. One of the ideas that she would have for us, which is uppermost on my mind lately, is that her faith, which was the Christian faith, is one that should bring us together, that should orient us toward freedom and equality for all, and not one that should divide us and lead us to feel that some of us are better or more entitled to living a good, healthy, peaceful, fulfilled lives than others. Tubman's brand of Christianity was one that she shared with other enslaved people. And it fiercely uplifted this notion of freedom, of emancipation and of God's care for everyone. This idea that God cares for everyone. That's the quote you read earlier, that God is the caretaker and therefore we should care for others. I think Tedlin would look at us and say, you have really lost direction if you are not appealing to God to help you care for others. And when I look around, I do not see us doing that. We read a lot and hear a lot about Christian nationalism, or particularly white Christian nationalism. Now. I think Tubman espoused a kind of Christian nationalism. I don't mean it in the negative way that we use it now, but I mean that she was a staunch Christian. She believed that Christianity was true, and she felt that God was going to help to save not only her people, but also her country. I think that we would do well to consider how Christianity is being used right now in our society, in our politics, and how it might be better directed for those who believe in that faith. I also think that Tubman would remind us that you have to work with other people in order to fulfill your mission. She was never alone in this work.
- [49:48]
Sharon McMahon
Oh, my gosh. I just. I want to keep talking, but I have to end this episode. I want to hear so many more things. But I know your time is very valuable and we only have so much time in this episode, so I will end it here, even though I have so many more questions. But I just really want to encourage everybody to read Nightfire. And then when you're done with that, read all of the rest of Ty Miles books and you will close each one feeling not just better educated, but feeling like a better human being for having done so. Thank you so much for giving me your time today. Thank you so much for your work, for the effort you put into your work. Not just your scholarly research, but also just like the talent that you bring to the world with your really beautiful writing and also just your warm and generous spirit. And I'm just, just. I'm glad to live in a world where you exist.
- [50:35]
Tiya Miles
Oh, Sharon. Oh, my. I'm so touched by that. Thank you for having me. And thank you for a really wonderful conversation. I enjoyed it so much.
- [50:44]
Sharon McMahon
Thank you so much. Listen, I think you should buy Night Flyer by Tia Miles. It is just so good. It's so good. And if you want to support your local bookshop, you can head there, or you can go to bookshop.org and you can order Night Flyer on their website. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to. Here's where it gets interesting. If you enjoyed today's episode, would you consider sharing or subscribing to this show that helps podcasters out so much? I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck Parks, and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. We'll see you soon.