Edda Fields-Black

So they were in the camps.

cooking everything, washing everything, fixing everything, building everything.

And Tubman was there to debrief them, as one of the CIA commanders says.

And then she passed this intelligence back to the U.S.

Army commanders.

When Americans, if Americans, think about slavery, we think about cotton.

So the rice plantations are, and I should say the tidal rice plantations, they are located in the coastal wetlands.

Mosquitoes breed in water, right?

And so it creates this awful, deadly disease environment.

What happens is that malaria shatters the immune system.

And so having chronic malaria means that the immune system is then not able to fight off other things, right?

Something as simple as upper respiratory ailments killed otherwise healthy people.

It means that women gave birth to babies who did not thrive.

So children, infants...

are very vulnerable.

Elderly people and people with compromised immune systems, very vulnerable.

And so the death rates on these rice plantations are second only to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, right, where the life expectancy was seven years.

Rice plantations are second to that.

June is the sickly season.

So this is when rice is growing in the rice fields in standing water.