The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
– Gustav Flaubert
This Succeed and Soar series invites writers to answer questions about their artforms and special inspirations.
Welcome Edda Fields-Black
Photo Credit: Sandra Gould Ford
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Edda, what phrase inspires your writing and life?
Edda, how have Adichie’s words helped your writing, your life?
Answer: I write to restore the humanity of my enslaved ancestors, which has been denied by enslavers and plantation records.
How these words inspired Edda Field-Black’s COMBEE.
The story in this book has taken us from the forested wetlands of Maryland’s Eastern Shore to forested wetlands of the lower Combahee River, from tobacco farms to tidal rice fields, and from the “prison-house of bondage” to the delirium of freedom. A story of triumph, it is also one of broken promises and fractured pasts, one I have tried to tell not just in terms of its greater events, as part of the momentous upheaval of the Civil War, but also in the details of human life— in the slave transactions through which enslavers bought, sold, bequeathed, and gifted their property, separating husbands from wives and parents from children, and in the land transactions through which after the war freed people in coastal South Carolina bought land, tried to hold on to it and pass it down, and often lost it.
In the end it is a story about transformation: African Americans who had been held in bondage on lower Combahee rice plantations identified themselves in freedom as “Combee” through the end of the nineteenth century. Over time, they became part of a broader community and forged common institutions, which flowered and caught the attention of outsiders who called it Gullah in popular media in the 1920s and 1930s. Lastly, this story ties in with and chronicles the least-known chapter of the life of one of America’s best- known patriots, Harriet Tubman, while simultaneously featuring the stories of heretofore nameless and faceless enslaved people who joined her in fighting for freedom.
STARRED REVIEW in Booklist, COMBEE named one of the “Top 10 History Books: 2024”!
Purchase COMBEE at Bookshop.org.
About Edda Fields-Black
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black is a direct descendant of a formerly enslaved man who liberated himself after the Battle of Port Royal, joined the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers (34th Regiment USCT), and fought in the Combahee River Raid in Colleton County, SC. Since an early age, she has been curious about her grandparents “peculiar” speech patterns. Her mother’s historical and genealogical research was her first inkling of Gullah as both a rich language and culture.
Fields-Black is a specialist in the transnational history of West Africa rice, peasant farmers in the pre-colonial Upper Guinea coast and enslaved laborers on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations. She is author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and executive producer of “Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice.”
Fields-Black has worked as a consultant at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum, and the Senator John Heinz History Center.
Web Site: https://eddafieldsblack.com
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Succeed and Soar!
Sandra Gould Ford
Presenting arts experiences to encourage, refresh, enrich creative thinking and inspire.
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