Combee

Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War

By: Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black

Narrated by: Machelle Williams

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants

Edda L. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people.

Using previously unexamined documents, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.

©2024 Edda L. Fields-Black (P)2024 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

extensive research

Remarkable computation of sources. Reading the appendices along shows the extent of historical value of this work.

As an American of African descent, I want to know my ancestors and where I came from.

I love this book and the awesome hard work that goes into being able to Say Their Names.

Bringing the forgotten to life

This book is a beautifully told and compelling account of the lives of those who liberated themselves after the Combee raid of June 1863. Dr Fields-Black makes us understand the people, their family connections, their faith, their sorrows, their languages, and the epic way they transformed themselves after they liberated themselves with the help, of course, of the heroic Harriet Tubman. The audible recording is simply exquisite. Thank you especially for pronouncing Beaufort correctly!

Magnificent!

Combee is a treasure! The scope and depth of Dr. Fields-Black research and storytelling is both impressive and engaging. There is no other work on Harriet Tubman that brings us so closely to Harriet and her character and life, and to the experience of slavery and emancipation in South Carolina, Maryland, and in the U.S. particularly just prior to and during the civil war.

I thought I knew...yet had absolutely no idea!!!! This book was EVERYTHING! A must read.

Listening to Combee it felt like a divine ancestral remembering…a homecoming of sorts. Dr. Edda Fields Black restored a sacred memory. With meticulous research and deep cultural reverence
She brings Harriet Tubman's leadership in the Combahee River raid to life, in a way that honors our ancestors and highlights the collective power of freedom making.

Knowing that she is a daughter of the
Historic Overtown, Brownsville, Bahamian and Gullah Geechee legacies, it made the story even more significant to me. I felt the rivers– I heard the sounds. I felt the sensations that she described.
Dr. Fields Black gave voice to what many of us have always known in our souls– Our ancestors were not just survivors. They were strategists, engineers, liberators–brilliance personified.
Her Pulitzer prize win is not just well deserved, it's a victory for all who believe in authentic freedom. Combee is history, spirit and justice woven together. It has given me the space and grace to dream, hope, and believe again. A must read!!!!