Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War

Written 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781696611213

Reviews for Combee

[spoko_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book suffers from an identity crisis. It’s trying to be both the dense, detail-packed result of extense historical research and a readable, gripping narrative of some of the most heroic acts in our nation’s history. It fails at both. If it’s a document of historical reference, why does the author devote so much space and time to her own ancestors, who are otherwise entirely unremarkable? And if it’s a historical narrative—which is what I had hoped for, and I suspect most other readers had as well—then why on earth does it contain so many minute details from so many documents, illuminating precisely nothing about the narrative and characters we’re trying to care about? Why do we need to know every single name entered by every single slaveholder who filled out a form seeking some kind of compensation—even when those names refer to people about whom we (and the author) otherwise know exactly nothing? Numerous other such details are also included, in tedious, mind-numbing detail. (One of my favorite moments, for its sheer representativeness, is a point in Chapter 17 where she’s listing the various calamities suffered by military personnel we’ve never heard of, and she says “the list could go on.” After which, she goes on. And on. And on.)

There could be a compelling narrative here—probably more than one. But you have to try to unweave them from the tapestry of mixed intentions, and it’s more work than I was willing to do. I ended up hearing a few interesting anecdotes—a few of which might surely have connected together well if they hadn’t been so thoroughly separated by dense patches of meaningless names & details that have no connection to anything else in the narrative.

It’s not worth the time it takes to read, really. If there were an abridged version, that might be, but it would have to be pretty heavily abridged.