"Combee" This Saturday

As most of you know, the BDC offers programs throughout the Library system. We are very pleased to be able to offer our community an extra special lecture about the Combahee River Raid and what that meant to the enslaved people freed by Harriet Tubman and the Union forces in June of 1863. 

About five years ago now, Dr. Edda Fields-Black came to my office to ask about research that had been done about the raid. She was thinking about looking at the Raid from the perspective of those who were freed rather than the losses incurred by the planters and the Confederacy as a result of the military action - an intriguing proposal upon which she has spent considerable time and energy ever since. She is researching and writing a second book, tentatively titled ‘Combee’: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and the Civil War Transformations among the Gullah Geechee based on what she has discovered through primary sources to reveal Harriet Tubman’s Civil War activities, reconstruct the communities which were freed from enslavement on Lowcountry rice plantations in the June 1863 Combahee River Raid, and show the Civil War transformations among freed Blacks in the Lowcountry whose descendants are known today as the Gullah Geechee. For her work on the Gullah/Geechee and Creolization, Fields-Black has been awarded a Smithsonian Senior Fellow at the National Museum of American History (Spring semester 2013), an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship (2014-2015), and a Senior Ford Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences (2017-2018).

She's the first historian who I have met who has written a libretto for a new piece of contemporary classical music, Casop: A Requiem for Rice, a modern and African-American inspired take on a classic requiem in the spirit of Verdi, Mozart, Faure, and Britten. It mourns the souls of the enslaved who died on Lowcountry rice plantations, their bodies unburied, their suffering unmourned, and their sacrifices unmarked for future generations. The Orchestral Debut of "Casop: A Requiem for Rice" on February 1, 2019 will feature libretto which recovers the voices of the enslaved by acclaimed historian and executive producer, Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black, and original score by composer, three-time Emmy Award-winner John Wineglass.

 
When she's not working on her manuscript or performing the duties of an executive producer and writer of classical music librettos, she's consulting on permanent exhibits such as "The Power of Place: The Rice Fields of the Lowcountry" at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the International African American Museum in Charleston, and the "From Slavery to Freedom" for the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. 

In other words, Dr. Edda Fields-Black is one impressive scholar and has a lot of knowledge and talent to share with those who attend her lecture this Saturday. The lecture is free; Everyone is welcome to attend.