Edda Fields-Black

Some of them may have been sold for trying to escape.

So 756 people get onto the boats and the boats sail all night and arrive early in the morning back in downtown Beaufort, back at the dock.

And on that morning that the Come Be Freedom Seekers arrived back in Beaufort, people came out.

People came out to see them and line the streets.

And many of these people had been free, you know, for a year, years, since November 1861.

They had jobs, they had houses, they had food and clothing and their kids were in school.

They had left slavery behind.

And yet here were 756 people

People who were straight out of the rice fields, right?

In the same dirty gray field clothes, as the newspapers describe them, that they wore to their forced labor at four o'clock in the morning.

And the newspaper accounts talk about just...

just their bodies, right?

Skin and bones, lots of injuries.

People just looked sick and emaciated and broken down and nearly naked, right?

They're in horrible shape, physical shape.

But it also talks about how they're beaming with pride.

As they parade down the main street in Beaufort, they are beaming with pride because they are finally free.

And they are finally able to reunite their families.

It brings tears to my eyes.

It does to me too.