Edda Fields-Black

But the difference is that the black veterans and the widows were born enslaved.

So they didn't have any paperwork.

Right.

They didn't have birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates.

What the veterans had is they had people, people they grew up with and the men they joined the military with and the women they married.

Right.

Right.

And these people came out and testified for each other.

Yeah.

And it's through their testimony that they verify each other's identity, the sanctity of their marriages, the legitimacy of their children, who held them in bondage and where and how they were bought, mortgaged.

given away and passed down within families.

And then they talk about their lives together, courting.

They go through the veterans and the widows' entire dating history.

Because they have to show that they're actually legally married to this person, right?

And they're not married to those other people.

You see the whole life of people in the enslaved community in ways that we've never seen them before because now they're telling their story.

I realize that I can put the enslaved community back together.

I realize that I can identify the people who were liberated in the raid.

Those people who testified about the raid become the main characters of the story.

When I started looking for the Fields family, I went back to the notes my cousin gave me, and I saw that he had searched through the census and identified our earliest known ancestor in the 1870 census as Hector Fields.