I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

It was 4 a.m. when the enslaved people first sensed that something was happening. At that time on the Cumbie River,

you can't see your hand in front of your face, yet they were in the rice fields hoeing rice.

And there were enslaved people in the still in the slave cabins.

And we know from a letter that Tubman's nephew wrote in the 1930s

that she actually went to the slave cabins.

And this is where the most vulnerable people would have been.

Very elderly people, Young mothers with infants,

she went to the cabins and made sure that those people got out. Everybody running,

you know, everybody running for their lives. That's Edda Fields Black. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Cumbie,

tells the remarkable and little-known story of how in 1863 Harriet Tubman played a critical

role in a daring raid that freed over 700 enslaved people from rice plantations along South Carolina's Cumbie River.

By delving into overlooked sources such as Civil War pension records,

she's woven a vivid account of the raid that freed the plantation workers and their families,

as well as discovering that her own great, great, great grandfather

was with Harriet Tubman in the gunboat that led the raid.

Congratulations on this monumental work and on the Pulitzer Prize it earned. That's just

so great. Thank you. Thank you so much.

You know, I'm among those people who knew Harriet Tubman for her work in the Underground Railway.

But I didn't know the story of the Combe River Raid and her role in it, which was so amazing.

Well, Harriet Tubman was the commander of a group of spies, scouts, and pilots.

So this was eight or nine men who were formerly enslaved.

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