Edda Fields-Black

He's looking at them and looking at the fact that these young armed men in uniform don't have to lower their eyes.

They don't have to lower their heads.

They're not cowing to white people, right?

Instead they're here and they're like turning this whole world on fire.

Right.

He likely saw them as destroying the institution of slavery.

They're burning it down.

And in burning it down, they are setting us free.

We know that Tubman got out on a rowboat and went to a plantation and she went to the slave cabins.

And I've said that there were enslaved people working in the rice fields.

The able-bodied people, including 88-year-old Minus Hamilton and his wife, were working in the fields that early in the morning.

So the people who were left in the cabins were extremely, even more elderly, but infirm, disabled children who were too young to work, women who had recently given birth or had very young nursing infants.

Those are the people who would have been left in the slave cabins.

Tubman went to the cabins to get these most vulnerable people.

And she remembers this wonderful image of running with the freedom seekers, running with them back to the boats.

So she's helping women carry their children and she's helping carry these two pigs, which they named after Confederate officers and which were going to be given to the Union commanders, the Union generals back in Buford.

And she talks about one woman who's running.

She's got, you know, children in her arms and children holding on to her skirt and one child on her shoulders.

And she's got a rice pot on her head and the pot is smoking.

They just pulled it off the fire.