Edda Fields-Black wanted to make her historical account of a Union Army raid led by Harriet Tubman on southern plantations and rice fields as authentic as possible.
So she re-enacted parts of the raid that occurred in June 1863 along the Combahee River in Beaufort, South Carolina, which freed 756 enslaved people. She rode on a boat up the dark river, illuminated only by a full moon. In another re-enactment, she walked barefoot across a rice field, learning very quickly after spotting an alligator that it’s impossible to run through the field because of its design.
“I wanted to put the reader in the rice fields with freedom seekers,” she told a Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures audience in March 2024…