Fields-Black: One of the first sources that I found as I was writing ‘Combee’ was the life story of Minus Hamilton, the 88-year-old man who tells his story a few weeks after the Combee River Raid. And from Minus Hamilton’s story, I wanted to tell not only Harriet Tubman’s story but the stories of the people she freed. And my goal was to tell the story of the Combee River Raid through their voices, through their eyes, through their perspectives. I ended up using the U.S. Civil War pension files. Here, the goal was to use them to reconstruct the community on the Combee before, during, and after the raid.
Hobson: What is fascinating about this story is how it expands Tubman’s work beyond the antebellum period of the Underground Railroad and really focuses on how she transferred her skills from that period to the war effort as a spy, scout and all-around soldier. Tubman is always larger-than-life in our national memory, but it seemed from the history that the enslaved community in South Carolina didn’t quite know who she was in terms of her heroic status.
Fields-Black: I must speculate here, and what I speculate is that the Union told the enslaved people who she was. And her presence facilitated the enslaved people in trusting the Union. We know, from some of the sources I’ve brought together in ‘Combee,’ that Harriet Tubman was on the ground in the raid, that she participated in the burning of buildings, and that she went to the slave cabins and coaxed the people there to come onto the boats and come to freedom. So how she convinced them to do that, we don’t know, but they did trust her, even if they didn’t know her entire backstory.
Hobson: I think with the recent recognition Tubman’s been receiving from the CIA, the U.S. Army and other military honors—even giving her the title of Brigadier General posthumously—we’re just now getting to know her Civil War story. And thanks to your book, we’re getting a fuller picture of that story.
Fields-Black: I was inspired by literature, like Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, where Tubman is a character. She comes in almost as a deus ex machina, and then she’s out, and then she’s in again. Originally, that’s how I thought ‘Combee’ would be. But certainly, there are other main historical actors. Many of them are freedom seekers, some of them are northern abolitionists. So, this is more of an ensemble cast.