This moment was a “crucible” for the formation of a unique American coastal culture, says Fields-Black.

The Gullah Geechee people descended from Africans who were enslaved on plantations along the southern Atlantic coast, including those freed by the raid. Many of their descendants make their homes in the low country of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida.

Fields-Black’s passion for her subject springs largely from her own Gullah Geechee heritage — a heritage she knew nothing about before coming to Emory.

Growing up in Miami, Florida, the daughter of migrants, she recalls being baffled by certain dynamics in her family.

“My grandparents spoke a dialect that my dad understood, but we never saw him speak it,” she says. “My mother, my sister and I, we didn’t know what was going on.”

At Emory, the very first class she took was “The Old South,” taught by James Roark, now Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emeritus of American History.

Ever the eager student, she went to many of her instructors’ office hours. “I would introduce myself and say, ‘This is what I’m interested in,’” she says.

Soon, Roark learned about her family.

“In addition to my readings for class, he gave me another syllabus and another set of readings about the Gullah Geechee,” she says. “He would just say, ‘Here, take this, take this,” and then I would come back and talk about it. I was a freshman. This was my first semester, and I just ate it up.”

This guidance is how she learned to identify the language she’d heard her grandparents speak.

It also launched her on the path of scholarship that eventually led to “Combee.” She double majored in history and English, and went on to earn a master's degree in history from the University of Florida and a PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania.

“Emory,” she says, “was foundational to who I am today.”

The Emory connection rekindled when she asked one of her former professors for help with the book.

Peter Bing, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emeritus of the Department of Classics, taught some of Fields-Black’s favorite courses. (“He almost turned me into a classics minor,” she jokes.)

Years later, Bing — now a friend — translated Latin phrases used in a letter written by a South Carolina farmer, who compared watching Union soldiers destroy his plantation during the raid to Aeneas’ experience watching Troy burn.

Fields-Black found accounts like Hamilton’s, describing the raid from lead-up to aftermath, through intensive research of more than 175 pension claim files housed at the National Archives. Many of those liberated by the raid would later enlist in the U.S. Colored Troops, joining thousands of formerly enslaved men who fought with the Union Army.

“Much like today,” explains Fields-Black, “Civil War veterans would apply for pensions for their military service.” Or, if the veteran had died, his widow or children would apply.

But to claim the monthly pay entitled to many veterans, the U.S. military required families to submit documentation — like birth, marriage and death certificates — which people born into bondage did not have.

“You know, Black people in this area of South Carolina didn’t have death certificates before the 1950s,” she notes.

What they did have were their accounts of the people who grew up with them in bondage.

“So, they would turn out for each other,” Fields-Black says, to verify veterans’ identities.

But they would attest to more than that. And accounts of what they had to say ended up in the pension applications.

“They would testify about who stood with them at their weddings,” she says, “what their wedding ceremony was like and who conducted it. They would testify about childbirth and who attended them, and who visited a woman and her newborn shortly after the birth — some really intimate details of a community.”

The records also give a sense of religious life and the age-based social hierarchy among enslaved people.

“They would say, ‘I was raised under his hand,’ because ‘he was older than me and I listened to him,’ right?”

And, like any other community, people gossiped. In the pension applications, “[t]hey spilled all the ‘tea’ of the slave community,” says Fields-Black. “Who was not married although they were living together. Children not born in wedlock, who cheated; just all kinds of ‘juicy drama,’ as my daughter would say.”

That such a detailed record of enslaved life emerged from pension applications is remarkable — government paperwork meant to secure monthly stipends has, more than a century later, become an unintentional archive of personal histories. For Fields-Black, these files are rare windows into communities long left faceless in official records, allowing the formerly enslaved to speak for themselves in vivid, everyday detail.

Those personal details have also painted a clearer picture of the raid and its participants — like the story of Friday Barrington.

“He liberated himself before the raid,” she says. “He then comes back in the raid as part of the Second South Carolina Volunteers, to the plantation where he was born and raised in bondage. He frees his parents, his sister and his brother-in-law.”

Fields-Black’s research also revealed a personal connection. Her own great-great-great grandfather, Hector Fields, was a Union volunteer who joined Barrington on that boat.

Equally important, the pension files make discoveries like these accessible to others, too.

Fields was one of about 200,000 Black soldiers who fought in the war.

Of those, roughly 90,000 received pensions. “And thousands more applied who didn’t get them,” she says. Regardless, their information lives on in the pension files via their applications.

Today, Fields-Black notes, those veterans have millions of descendants.

“This means millions of African Americans potentially can identify their enslaved ancestors if their ancestor served in the U.S. Colored Troops and has a pension file,” she says, calling the significance of this discovery nothing less than “tremendous.”

“The first time that African Americans are recorded with last names is in the 1870 census,” she notes. “And it’s been impossible to connect those folks in the 1870 census to the plantations where they were held in bondage. With the pension files, it’s now possible.”

Fields-Black’s book also brings to light new details about Harriet Tubman’s role in the raid, recruiting, training and leading a ring of spies, scouts and boat pilots.

Best known for liberating enslaved people with the Underground Railroad, Tubman’s military service may be “the least known chapter of her legendary life,” says Fields-Black.

She adds that her work liberating enslaved people primed her for that service.

“In the Underground Railroad, she operated undercover,” Fields-Black says. “She gathered espionage, and she read the environment to shepherd desperate freedom seekers during the frozen winters. So, she had already operated very successfully behind enemy lines and infiltrated enemy territory.”

Fields-Black’s reconstruction of this overlooked chapter in Tubman’s career — and in the story of the Gullah Geechee — is the product of years of meticulous scholarship. Sifting through hundreds of files, she pieced together a tapestry of testimony, military records and family memories that repositions the Combahee River Raid as not just a daring military operation, but a pivotal moment in the transformation of an entire culture.

What thrills Fields-Black about winning the Pulitzer is the acknowledgement it represents beyond the academic world. “Historians, and, I think, humanities scholars in general, are used to working in the dark, with very little support and very little recognition,” she says. “A lot of people don’t understand what we do and may not see its value, but these are labors of love. So, to get recognized for doing the work that I love is just an indescribable feeling.”

Images courtesy of Oxford University Press, the Library of Congress and Edda Fields-Black.