Introduction
Geri Lipschultz interviewed Edda Fields-Black for Southern Literary Review. Dr. Fields-Black is the author of Combee:, which Booklist named as one of the Top Ten History Books of 2024. The book tells the story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman’s most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents. Dr. Fields-Black is a descendant of one of the participants in the raid.
Interview
Geri Lipschultz: I’m so taken by what I’m seeing as “defamiliarizing”—the way you’ve used language to shift the historical voice to privilege those who were held-in-bondage-against-their-will; theirs become the voices to tell this story, rather than those whose freedom and livelihoods would not exist without enslaving others. Can you speak about this—the function of language, both in the world you are excavating and your language choices?
Edda Fields-Black: Language in Combee was very important to me. I wanted to tell the story of the Combahee River Raid through the voices of the enslaved people who liberated themselves as a result of it. In order to do so, I adopted the freedom seekers’ perspectives whenever possible. Their “languaging” gave me a window into their world. The concepts of “Old Heads” and “titles” came directly from the Combahee veterans, widows, and neighbors’ testimony in the US Civil War pension files. The Combahee freedom seekers used “Old Heads” when talking about the elderly people in their community whom they revered and who had brought them up. Interestingly enough, Harriet Tubman speaks of “Old Heads” also in her autobiographical interviews to denote the same group of people. Hierarchy based upon age transcended the linguistic and cultural differences otherwise evident among Tubman and the Combahee freedom seekers, which prevented Tubman from understanding them and the freedom seekers from understanding her.
Combahee freedom seekers used “titles” to refer to the surnames they claimed for themselves, which were not recognized by slave holders before freedom or recorded by the federal government before a veteran’s military enlistment or the 1870 census. Combee shows enslaved people used their “titles” within the enslaved communities, often choosing surnames different than the name of the family, which held them in bondage.
In addition, I adopted terminology from historians of slavery, which depicts enslaved people in the process of liberating themselves in ways that capture their desire for self-liberation and not their legal status as property. It refuses to call them “fugitive slaves” or “runaway slaves” and the enslaved people who arrived safely in Beaufort behind Union lines “contrabands.” They were “freedom seekers” as soon as they left the plantations where they were in bondage. Revealing the social order by juxtaposing the condition of lower Combahee rice planters vis-à-vis the people they held in bondage and turning it over on its head was my ultimate goal.
Geri Lipschutlz
GL: What was it like threading this story? Why did you desire to have a bodily experience in order to “feel” what it was like for those whose stories you are intuiting? What were your original anticipations of the book/study–and how different from the idea is the reality?
EF-B: Minus Hamilton’s life story was one of the first documents I found years before I had even imagined I would write a book about the Combahee River Raid. Reading this elderly, formerly enslaved man’s account of self-liberation during the Combahee River Raid was what emboldened me to want to write the story from the freedom seekers’ perspectives. I had a visceral reaction reading it, because it is practically unheard of to find a historical primary source in which an enslaved person talks about their own experiences and even more rare their feelings. I had hoped to find about nine more accounts like Minus Hamilton’s and build a narrative around them!
Of course, this didn’t happen. But, I was really moved (probably because I know the Lowcountry region and the rice fields so well) that, according to Hamilton, he and the other enslaved people were in the rice fields hoeing rice at 4 a.m. when they first detected the gunboats. I wanted to put the readers in their position, having walked a mile in the dark avoiding snakes when they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces, standing in pluff mud up to their ankles with their children in an adjacent field where the enslaved parents were unable to protect them from alligators, bending their lower backs at unnatural angles for hours on end to hoe rice which would benefit the people who held them in bondage, and praying it was the Union, not the Confederacy, when they first smelled, heard, and felt the vibrations of the gunboats coming up the Combahee River. Hopefully, by describing the scene on the morning of the Raid in a way which engages all of readers’ senses, I humanized the enslaved people and brought them to life.
GL: Harriet Tubman is one of America’s best known and most beloved heroes. What new is there to learn about her legendary life in Combee and how did you uncover it?
Edda Fields-Black
EF-B: Harriet Tubman, of course, is central to the story. Tubman is best known for her extraordinary work as the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. She made approximately thirteen rescue missions, liberating approximately seventy enslaved people and gave specific instructions to approximately seventy more people, which they used to find their way safely to freedom. So, in the Combahee River Raid, she and the US Army rescued 756 enslaved people, ten times more enslaved people in six hours than Tubman rescued in over a decade on the Underground Railroad.
The Civil War was the least known chapter of Harriet Tubman’s legendary life. Her biographers knew of Tubman’s Civil War service, but the details were missing. This was in large part, because Tubman’s Civil War service was not mentioned at all in the official military record, despite the fact that the Union relied on the intelligence from freedom seekers who came to US-occupied territory from behind enemy lines. Confederate General Robert E. Lee had to admit less than a month before the raid: “the chief source of information to the enemy is through our Negroes.”
Northern abolitionists who came to Beaufort, Port Royal, and the South Carolina Sea Islands after the Battle of Port Royal (in November 1861) knew Tubman before the Civil War and wrote home about her activities when they encountered her in Beaufort. Sergeant George Garrison, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s son, wrote a letter to his brother about how Tubman gathered intelligence by interviewing freedom seekers who escaped bondage in Confederate-controlled territory and sought protection by the Union; she made it her business to see all of them and gathered more intelligence from them than anyone. From Harriet Tubman’s US Civil War Pension file, we learn she was the leader of eight or nine men, spies, scouts, and pilots. Harriet Tubman’s nephew, Harkless Bowley, wrote a letter to Earl Conrad, one of Tubman’s biographers, describing how Tubman and her men found the enslaved men who the Confederacy used to mine the Combahee River with torpedoes; they oversaw the torpedoes’ removal thereby opening the Combahee River up to the Union gunboats. Lieutenant Lewis Douglass, Frederick Douglass’ son, wrote a letter to his fiancé stating Tubman’s group of spies, scouts, and pilots piloted Colonel James Montgomery, the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers, and two batteries of the 3rd Rhode Island Heavy Artillery up the Combahee River on the Union’s most successful expedition. And finally, both Harkless Bowley and independently a teacher from Massachusetts wrote letters home describing how Tubman went onto the plantations and coaxed the enslaved people to trust the Union and flee to freedom.
The Combahee River Raid was the largest slave rebellion in US history. And, Tubman gathered the intelligence on which the Raid was based. Combee sheds new light on Tubman as a military leader and a pivotal, transformational, liberatory figure in the transition from slavery to freedom. Harriet Tubman is positioned as both an exemplar and progenitor of a broader social movement engendered by Black people for freedom, liberty and revolution.
GL: Combee is such a communal undertaking, and as ambitious as anything I’ve read. What is the importance of “the role our ancestors have played in shaping American history”? How personal is this book—as a journey of a person, a family, and a people?
EF-B: Combee is very personal for me. My father was the last of his siblings to be born in Green Pond, SC, a few short miles from where the Combahee River Raid took place. In 2013 during a lecture trip to Charleston and Columbia, I decided to pick up the family history research my cousin had started. Years before, he gave me a copy of information he had found in the census, which showed my great great great grandfather, Hector Fields, and his descendants father to son, down to my grandfather. And, from childhood summer visits to my great grandmother, I knew the cemetery where my paternal grandmother’s family was buried in the Pynes community of Green Pond. But I didn’t know where the Fields family ancestors were buried.
Our Fields family patriarch told me the location of our family graves; the cemetery was on a rice plantation. I happened to be researching the slaveholding family which owned the plantation during the antebellum period for my new book (which I thought at the time would be a history of the Gullah Geechee). He also warned me the Fields Family’s graves were unmarked. I had no idea what he meant. When I got access to the cemetery, I found the unmarked graves to be depressions in the ground. And, one of our family’s graves with a tombstone was open, full of water; my ancestor’s skeletal remains floated at the top.
Even after ten years, it is difficult to put into words the shock, horror, and grief I experienced and how I grieved this trauma for many years. I felt like I had let my ancestors down, turned my back on them by focusing exclusively on doing all of the things I was required and expected to do as an academic historian. After our family patriarch died a few months later, I knew he had sent me to the cemetery for a reason. He was passing the torch to me to guard our family history. I am looking back now, ten years later. So, everything seems seamless and linear. It was anything but, because it took time for me to reckon with the grief of this trauma and to figure out what I was supposed to do.
I worked to identify the people buried in the cemetery (and found they are from both sides of my father’s family), find the Fields family (Hector Fields’ parents, siblings, and children (in addition to the direct descendants my cousin found in the census) and locate their graves. I asked for help from my friend, Toni Carrier, who was then Director of the Center for Family History at the International African American Museum. Toni took one look at the census information and identified Hector Fields as a US Colored Troops veteran from Beaufort County. Well, Daddy’s family is from Colleton County as far as we knew, so we had to figure out if it was the same person. In Jonas Fields’ US Civil War Pension File, Phoebe Washington testified about her brothers, Hector and Jonas Fields, and their parents, Anson and Judy Fields, where they were enslaved and by whom, and how they were separated before and during the Civil War. Then, other members of their enslaved community also testified about their experiences during the antebellum period. Phoebe Washington testified the Fields family had been enslaved in Beaufort County. Then, after the end of the Civil War, Hector and Jonas Fields went to Colleton County, settling where Daddy’s family lives today. People assume I wrote Combee to tell my great-great-great-grandfather, Hector Fields’s, story because Hector Fields liberated himself after the Battle of Port Royal, enlisted in the 2nd SC Volunteers, and fought in the Combahee River Raid. Actually, I found Hector Fields while researching the book. An, I found him in the US Civil War Pension Files, not in the cemetery on the rice plantation.
I am (and I am weeping as I write) supremely honored to be the vehicle through which this amazing story is told. I didn’t know it when I first went to the cemetery, but I was being called to tell my ancestors’ story of enslavement on Lowcountry rice plantations to as many people and in as many ways as possible. It took time for me to understand that I had been called and to accept the job that I alone could do. But, once I broke down the artificial barrier that I had constructed and was holding up between my academic and family history research, I was able to craft a new methodology through which I reconstructed the enslaved community that liberated itself in the Combahee River Raid. The same methodology can be used (on a smaller scale) by millions of African Americans to identify our enslaved ancestors. In addition to new interpretations of Tubman’s Civil War service, I wanted to present the history of the nameless, faceless people who also played critical roles in American history, but their names were not part of the historical record and their stories have not been told.
GL: What was your journey as an historian and writer? Did you know you wanted to be a college professor—at what age? How did you come to be interested in rice? Your way seems so organic—not contrived, but flowing…taking the cues…working with what’s given, a certain flexibility, along with a colossal drive for mastery—a pursuit that’s driven by both an intense intellectuality and compassion. What compelled you to take this direction?
EF-B: I was born and raised in Miami, FL, a grandchild of the Great Migration (southward) and the Gullah Geechee Diaspora. My paternal grandparents only spoke Gullah Geechee, which my Dad understood; my mother, sister, and I didn’t. I grew up very curious about my grandparent’s speech patterns and about the language and culture of our family members in Green Pond whom we visited every summer (I couldn’t understand them either).
As a child, I wanted to be an attorney, like my father. But I always loved history (my mother is an historian and archivist); and I was a good writer. I think it was my freshman year at Emory when I started thinking about pursuing history instead of going to law school. The professor of my “Old South” course introduced me to the historical literature on the Gullah. Finally, I could satisfy my curiosity and begin to build knowledge about my heritage, which I knew very little about having grown up in Miami. Some of the studies I was reading identified rice as one example of an African retention in Gullah culture. I wanted to know more and began reading on my own.
Towards the end of college, I started thinking about writing history textbooks. Then, a faculty member told me most textbook authors were actually history professors, which sounded good to me. I started researching and talking to people about applying to graduate school to study the history of the African Diaspora, though I still did not know when/where I wanted this transnational history to start. Another of my Emory history professors encouraged me to apply for a study abroad scholarship to go to West Africa. My project was investigating the African roots of Gullah language and culture; I got the scholarship and spent the summer in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Rice and the Gullah Geechee became the testing ground through which I wanted to study how Africans and people of African descent formed new cultures in the New World from a multitude of sources, particularly dynamic West African cultures.
Of course, studying the transnational history of rice, rice farmers, and the Gullah Geechee brought me closer to my paternal family’s history and heritage. From my independent reading and coursework, I know there were nothing but rice plantations in Green Pond where my father was born. But it would take years for me to understand what this meant, to untangle my family history, and be comfortable with how my family’s heritage (and my desire to know more about it) influenced my historical research and writing.
GL: What are your future creative plans? Do you anticipate more writing? Please speak of the libretto—your readers should have a sense of the scope of your work.
EF-B: I currently have two creative projects. First, an art exhibit, “Picturing Freedom: Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid” based on Combee and featuring the aerial photographs of J Henry Fair (whose aerial photographs of the rice plantations, which were destroyed in the raid are published in Combee) will open at the Gibbes Museum of Art (in Charleston, SC) in May 2025 and travel to other museums for a few years after its run at the Gibbes.
Several years ago I collaborated with three-time Emmy ® Award-winner classical music composer, John Wineglass, to write a contemporary symphonic work, “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice,” about rice, slavery, the sacrifices, sufferings, and contributions of enslaved Africans to build the Lowcountry’s rice fields and commercial rice industry. I wrote the libretto on which the original score is based using primary sources which I interpreted with an artistic voice. The first three movements have been performed eight times by orchestras around the country since 2019. The latest performance took place in March 2023 at Lincoln Center (in NYC). During the COVID pandemic, John completed the final three movements. We are working now on debuting of the entire six-movement work.
Last but not least, I am enjoying introducing Combee to readers on my book tour and look forward to lots of creative opportunities to bring Combee’s dramatic narrative and characters to life through future artistic collaborations and projects!
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