Besides numerous children’s books, over a dozen biographies have been penned about Harriet Tubman, the intrepid slave fugitive who went back numerous times to Maryland’s eastern shore to free at least 70 fellow slaves. She is the American hero who will grace our US $20 bill with her image in 2030. My interest here is to probe Tubman’s spiritual life and worldview, thanks to a 2024 book by Tiya Miles, a Harvard history professor and author of four prize-winning books on slavery (Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, Pengin Books).
I come to Miles’ book with my own questions, and particularly those coming out of my research for a recent manuscript now under review by a second academic publisher (The City Where All May Flourish: The Holy Spirit in Mission and in Global Governance). These questions relate to the Holy Spirit and the branch of theology called pneumatology. I learned from Finnish theologian Veli-Matti Kärkäinen that Christians mostly understood the role of the Holy Spirit to be limited to working in the lives of individuals and the church, but that, “beginning from the mid-twentieth century, a more comprehensive and holistic way of doing pneumatology has also emerged.”
Good examples of this can be found in the edited book, The Spirit over the Earth: Pneumatology in the Majority World. The first chapter by Asian American theologian Amos Yong (“I Believe in the Holy Spirit: From the Ends of the Earth to the Ends of Time”) states that Global South (“Majority World”) theologians believe that the Holy Spirit appears in the very beginning of the Bible: “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” (Gen. 1:2, NIV). This brings to mind the Nicene creed, he notes: “The Lord, the Giver of Life.” The Hebrew word for spirit is ruach, meaning also breath and wind (think of Pentecost). Yong writes that these theologians believe that this “divine wind is the Spirit of Life” which brings forth and sustains “animal and creaturely breath.”
Then also, for the sake of better locating Tubman’s own spirituality, I have to mention the worldview of the indigenous peoples, who, all over the earth, hold a very holistic view of spirit (see my two-part post on “Theological Reflections on the Fourth World”). These people celebrate the organic unity of all beings, sentient and non-sentient—“animals (four-leggeds), birds, and all the living, moving things (including rocks, hills, trees, rivers, and so on), along with all the other sorts of two-leggeds (e.g., bears, humans of different colors) in the world” (from George E. Tinker, American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty”). Harriet Tubman’s worldview, as an unfree Black American, drew in part from the West African indigenous beliefs and practices of her people.
Tubman, a 19th-century Black Christian woman
Slaves in the United States were not allowed to learn how to read and write, and even after she had escaped to freedom, she was too busy to learn—guiding other slaves to freedom or raising funds to do so by telling her stories to numerous groups in the North, leading an extensive spy ring in the Civil War, and finally founding a community in upstate New York. As a result, we only hear her stories and her thoughts second- and third-hand. And most of those who passed down this information were white women who often struggled to understand her dialect or cultural background. For this reason, Tiya Miles turned to four spiritual memoirs either written by or dictated by Black women evangelists in that century.
Against that backdrop, we better understand her spiritual pilgrimage and how she thought of it herself. Raised by enslaved parents who much of that time belonged to two different owners, her childhood was characterized by her parents’ forced neglect and the wanton abuse at the hand of various slaveowners she was loaned out to from the age of six. Once, at age seven, after one of several beatings by her mistress, she ran away and for three days found refuge in a pig pen with a sow and eight or so piglets. She spent 3 full days trying to survive on “the potato peelings and other scrap” that were thrown into the pen; but starved and exhausted, “she returned to the abusive household of her temporary owners and was promptly beaten by Susan’s husband” (47).
The most agonizing experience of her young experience, however, was the sale of two of her sisters to slaveowners in the south. One of her contemporary biographers remarked, “She never closed her eyes that she did not imagine she saw horsemen coming, and heard the screams of women and children, as they were being dragged away to far worse slavery than that they were enduring there” (63). It was all the more painful because, despite their circumstances, their family managed to stay close to one another. Fortunately, her parents were practicing Christians and her father would sometimes take his children with him to worship at a nearby Methodist Episcopal church. Her mother was required to attend a Methodist church, which Harriet would have attended when she visited her mother.
The dramatic event that likely catalyzed a deeper religious experience for Tubman was a traumatic brain injury at age twelve or thirteen in a dry goods store into which a runaway slave boy ran with his master in pursuit. The later “grabbed a two-pound weight . . . and hurled it at his target.” Apparently, Tubman lunged forward to protect the boy and was hit in the head with the weight. She never fully recovered from this injury. Twenty-first-century-commentators esteem that her symptoms likely point to a brain injury causing “a form of temporal lobe epilepsy” (72). Her owner tried in vain to sell her disabled slave, but this led to a long period of partial recovery at her mother’s breezy cabin. Miles follows other biographers in seeing this experience as critical to her spiritual maturation: “she may have passed into a new state of spiritual existence that Black women of her faith culture referred to as “conversion.” (73).
Meanwhile, the next year her owner hired out to an entrepreneur who owned several businesses. On the one hand, she grew physically stronger by working with horses and oxen, lifting barrels, flour and other weights, and she was exposed to a whole new other world as various jobs took her to new places in Maryland, including the very cosmopolitan city of Baltimore. On the other hand, she suffered from intense headaches, frequent loss of consciousness, and these “bouts of semiconsciousness could be as close as fifteen or thirty minutes apart, which would have prolonged her exhausting days as she put in more time to complete her jobs” (86).
Then, providentially, she was assigned to lumberjacking at the time when her father, freed from slavery by a provision in his owner’s will, was hired as a foreman for this same job. As she worked with her father for several years, she also absorbed his vast knowledge of the flora and fauna of the woods and wetlands of the Chesapeake. Among other things, he taught her to survive in these woods. She also took the opportunity of earning some money and putting it aside. At one point, she purchased a pair of oxen and managed to make more money for herself. She later commented on this period, “I was getting fitted for the work the Lord was getting me ready for” (95).
Tubman’s Spirit-filled worldview
The first thing to note here is God’s powerful, loving and protective presence with both individuals and “the broader community of Black enslaved people” (xxii). These people shared a view of a god who, in Old Testament times, witnessed the cries of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt and thereby intervened to liberate them from this bondage. In her words,
“Black women in particular saw this god (gendered masculine in their time) as a caretaker as well as a liberator—fully present during their struggles, wholly invested in their survival, desiring their good quality of life, and inspiring hope for their future. This Black women’s God of freedom and care was fiery and feeling, full of Old Testament Jehovah-style justice and New Testament Jesus-filled grace. He welcomed the rituals of Protestant and Catholics and recognized the echoes of West African faith practices” (xxii-xxiii).
Along with those shared convictions and hopes, each individual would approach God through the filter of their own personality and sensitivity as framed by their formative experiences. Early on, Tubman had a strong sense of her own dignity and was keenly aware that the way she was treated by her white overlords was wrong. She remembers refusing food in their homes to make her point. An acquaintance from those early years interviewed her as an adult and recorded those recollections in a book. She wrote in particular about one “pious mistress” who routinely beat her for “every slight or fancied faulty.” Then this anecdote which opens up a window for us into her relationship with God as a child of seven or eight: “When invited into family prayers, she preferred to stay on the landing, and pray for herself.” Then she quotes Tubman:
“And I prayed to God . . . to make me strong and able to fight, and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since” (48).
So far, we see Tubman growing up as a child who talks to God in prayer and expects him to answer, at least in the sense of bolstering her resolve to do what is right, and in her case, it included resisting the evil “demon of Slavery” and fighting back in any way possible. But after her brain injury, she often saw visions, either before or during her short seizures, which in her case were likely affected by her religiosity. Scientists know these phenomena: “People living with temporal lobe epilepsy can experience daytime seizures that propel them into a ‘dreamy state,’ during which images from nighttime dreams can sometimes reappear” (16).
But there is a wider cultural reference point here as well. Drawing from the memoirs of holy Black women of the time, Miles notes that they “also heard voices, saw visions, had fainting spells or backouts, communed with spirits they took to be God, Jesus, or angels, and acted on these experiences in ways that sometimes shocked their contemporaries” (17). Old Elizabeth, a Black woman who spent years as an itinerant preacher (who, like others also, was never accepted by the male clergy, whatever the denomination) at age 97 dictated her story to a woman who in 1863 had this memoir published.
Old Elizabeth’s family was enslaved, but unlike in Tubman’s case, they all lived together in her early childhood and her father was literate and read the Bible aloud to his family each Sunday. She narrated, “When I was but five years old, I often felt the overshadowing of the Lord’s Spirit, and these incomes and influences continued to attend me until I was eleven years old.” (54). The women in the other memoirs, like Tubman, though not born into slavery, faced great hardships and found much comfort as they cried out to the Lord.
But whereas these other Black women preachers touched thousands of lives with “spiritual liberation,” while tapping into the power of the Holy Spirit during the Second Great Awakening (59), Tubman knew God had called her to a vision of “holistic freedom . . . one that she had negotiated, or co-created through communion” with the God of Moses and Jesus. This “compact with God” she made since childhood “grew stronger and more refined as she matured” (155). After she had freed herself and made it to Philadelphia in 1849, she felt God impress on her heart to free others, starting with her family. It was a deep conviction with both spiritual and political ramifications:
“Harriet believed God championed freedom. She had seen evidence of it . . . Her mission was not to liberate herself alone, or even to save individual souls or individual bodies from sin like other Black holy women were passionately doing, but instead to release a composite body, those whom she called ‘her people,’ from the evil grasp of the demon Slavery. ‘I have heard their groans and sighs, and seen their tears, and I would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them,’ she said” (156).
The word “compact” that Miles uses seems very appropriate. As she puts it, “[Harriet] would do God’s will in freeing the people, and God would be there to guide and protect her.” She soon was in touch with all the leaders of the late-nineteenth-century Underground Railroad. “She gained renown among her colleagues as a ‘sister of humanity,’ and a ‘shrewd and fearless agent’ who ‘well understood the entire route from that part of the country to Canada. Sarah Bradford, one of her contemporary biographers, “reported about Tubman’s risky missions and near-miss escapes from recapture: ‘But these sudden deliverances never seemed to strike her as at all strange or mysterious; her prayer was the prayer of faith, and she expected an answer” (157-158, emphasis in the text).
Perhaps the most crucial ingredient in these dramatic rescue trips “in the shadow of God’s wing,” as the Scriptures might describe it, was her preaching throughout. She would set an example of faith for those walking with her, but she would do much more as well:
“She also used direct speech to exhort her listeners—freedom seekers—toward a clearer and deeper understanding of her religious message. Her songs (mostly hymns) and sayings (often repeated) functioned as micro sermons or homilies. As she accompanied people fortunate enough to leave their captors, she sang to pass on information, to soothe nerves, and to share her liberation ethos. In one example, when she sought to lift the flagging spirits of a fugitive named Joe who was terrified that he would be caught and returned to bondage, Harriet preached: ‘The Lord had been with them in six troubles, and he would not desert them in the seventh’” (158).
This courageous woman, who nevertheless endured severe headaches and could collapse at any moment and revive a little while later, would also tell her fellow escapees that angels were all around them protecting their escape, and they were beginning to believe her. Perhaps her own physical disabilities appeared in the context of many Bible stories as actual signs of holiness. “After all, God could uplift the weak and imbue them with secret strengths, as he often did in the scriptures” (161). It isn’t surprising that she came to be given the name “Moses” in her community (165).
Then there were these moments when, as the group was on the verge of being discovered, Tubman receives what the Apostle Paul calls “a word of knowledge”—a gift of the Holy Spirit, which in her case either gave her a sly way to confuse her pursuers or showed her an unexpected path of escape. Here’s one story:
“Harriet was leading a group when she suddenly changed course after hearing a message from God. The sun had risen while the group trudged onward. In daylight, they were more vulnerable to exposure. Bradford recounted that Harriet ‘stood one moment in the street, and in that moment she had flashed a message quicker than that of the telegraph to her unseen Protector, and the answer came as quickly; in a suggestion to her of an almost forgotten place of refuge.’ Harriet remembered that outside of town lay a swampy island. She led the group there and ‘waded into the swamp, carrying the basket of two well-drugged babies (these were a pair of little twins).’ The party remained hidden for hours, suffering from cold, damp, and hunger. ‘Harriet’s faith never wavered, her silent prayer still ascended, and she confidently expected help,’ Bradford reported. Just after dusk, a Quaker approached the edge of the swamp and whispered the location of his wagon’” (171-172).
Along these lines, Sarah Bradford recounts that Tubman “claimed to ‘always know when there [was] danger near her’ and said this gift of foresight had been ‘inherited’ from her father” (58). In one instance when she was leading “a large party of men,” they were following a deep stream in March. Tubman stopped them suddenly and told them, “Children, we must stop here and cross this river.” She started to wade in the cold water, and when the water came up to her arm pits, she called the men to follow her, but they refused out of fear. They only entered the stream after she had arrived safely reached the other side.
This event was narrated to both Bradford and Thomas Garrett, the Underground Railroad coordinator in Philadelphia, but in Bradford we learn that Tubman had “received one of her sudden intimations that danger was ahead. Tubman told her, “The water never came above my chin; when we thought we were all going under, it became shallower and shallower, and we came out safely on the other side” (173). At another point, when Bradford asked her how she managed to evade capture with so many close calls, Tubman exclaimed, “It wasn’t me, it was the Lord! . . . I was ready to go: I always told him, I’m going to hold steady on to you, and you’ve got to see me through.”
Tiya Miles’ unique portrait of Harriet Tubman
In that same passage, Miles quotes from another contemporary biographer, Emma Telford, who indicated that Tubman “always escaped by her quick wit or as she calls it, ‘warnings from heaven.’” Telford believed that she possessed “the gift of foresight.” Perhaps this was a kind of intuition, or also a keen knowledge of her environment. In the story about the rising stream, for instance, “she would certainly have used her five senses to gauge that waterway, perhaps considering the water level and speed of flow, and only then deciding that wading in was relatively safe. She could have run her analysis while in the midst of praying, as prayer was, as we have touched on previously, a form of thought as well as practice.” She concludes after several other examples, “Harriet may have operated with God’s help, but she also helped God along with the talents she brought to bear” (174).
Tiya Miles, who herself had grown up attending a Black Baptist church, began questioning some of those values, especially what she believed was “insensitive and unjustified male authority.” When in graduate school, she dove into the 19-century narratives of Black holy women. She viewed those stories as both “spiritual accounts of African American women coming to Christian (usually Methodist) faith” and “as trenchant social criticism of the imbalances of power between women and men, the enslaved and the free.” She continues, “My view of the value of these memoirs and of their dual character as spiritual and political accounts has not changed, even as my personal thought about Christianity, agnosticism, atheism, and meditation have traversed peaks, plains and valleys.” Now that she has returned to these stories to help illuminate Harriet Tubman’s spiritual worldview, she realizes how crucial they were for her project.
Far from the cartoon character or mythic status Tubman has come to embody for many Americans, Miles discovered her weak, yet winsome humanity, her astounding achievements and real mistakes along the way. Her worldview was both spiritual (“the belief in God, heaven, and unseen powers”) and grounded in nature (“her belief in the integrity and import of relationships among all natural beings,” xxix). She was both “startingly spiritual and eerily smart.” At the end of her research, which included several weeks in eastern Maryland where Tubman lived, she felt she was “in the presence of guru for her time and ours” (xxx). I certainly concur.