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.
