1.
INTERVIEW
RIPPING OFF
THE SCAB
Edda Fields-Black on becoming an Artist
Interview by Henry Jacob Transcribed by Margaret HedemanJuly 24, 2020
I will start with a simple request: please describe
yourself in two sentences, one personal, one profes-
sional. I am a historian of transnational African his-
tory, specializing in the transnational history of West
African rice farmers, West African peasants in the
pre-colonial period, Upper Guinea Coast, and Blacks
who were enslaved on rice plantations in coastal South
Carolina and Georgia. Personally, I am a wife and mo-
ther and cancer survivor and dragon boater and salsa
dancer.
I’ll start with the professional and move to the per-
sonal. Transnational is a key word for you. Please
expand upon your path to becoming a transnational
historian. From the start of graduate school I was inte-
rested in the Atlantic world and the African Diaspora.
In particular, I studied pre-colonial West Africa and
the cultures that developed in the New World among
people of African descent. In particular, I study the
relationship between the Upper Guinea Coast of West
African and the coast of South Carolina and Georgia
during the antebellum period. I use rice as a prism to
connect these areas.
In Deep Roots, your first book, you employ rice as a
prism with great success to link West Africa and the
American South. In it, you put in conversation the
ingenious technologies that pre-colonial societies
on the Rice Coast developed and the techniques that
enslaved Africans used on 18th century plantations.
Notably, you focus on rice as an artist and as an
academic. How have you married your passions for
scholarship and music? I ran out of space because I
should have described myself professionally also as an
r. Edda Fields-Black, a specialist on the trans-national
history of West African rice farmers and a History professor
at Carnegie Mellon,sat down with Henry Jacob this summer
to discuss her studies,her art,and their intersection.Her latest works
include the forthcoming book 'Combee', as well as the symphony
Unburied,Unmourned,Unmarked:RequiemforRice,whichsheproduced
and composed with Emmy-Award winning composer John Wineglass.
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1701 Project

2.
Edda Fields-Black is an Associate Professor
in Carnegie Mellon University's Department
of History.
Photo courtesy of the Carnegie Mellon University
Department of History
artist! My project Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked:
Requiem for Rice is the first symphonic work about
slavery. For a couple of years, I've collaborated with
John Wineglass, a three-time Emmy award-winner.
This project gives me an opportunity to sit at the feet
of some amazing artists like John. I wrote the libretto
based on primary sources I have already explored as
a scholar. Here, I interpret them through an artistic
perspective and try to bring voice to the experiences
and lives of enslaved people on rice plantations. This
project has changed the way I look at history. It’s
changed my audience. It's changed my approach. Now
I place much more emphasis on storytelling. I did not
learn this in graduate school!
You mentioned that you did not learn this as a doc-
toral candidate. How did you transition to see pri-
mary sources as an artist? I had to go back to school.
And I don't mean school school. I got a little pot of
funding from Carnegie Mellon and local Pittsburgh
foundations. Because Carnegie Mellon has a very
prestigious college of fine arts, I found many instiga-
tors in the heads of the school of music and the school
of drama to help me with my little crazy idea. Through
the CMU Center for Arts in Society I took the next
step to making a production.
After that, I went to the Creative Nonfiction Confe-
rence in Pittsburgh and the Hurston Wright Foun-
dation at Howard University. I attended a couple of
conferences on creative writing. Journalists, poets,
and others who write for a living gave me great critical
feedback. This helped me understand that it's okay to
write from the I perspective, from the first person as
opposed to third person.
You nurtured your creative talent by interacting
with other artists. But you seem to have already re-
cognized the importance of storytelling itself. Do
any experiences — perhaps from your childhood —
linger in your head? I really don't know that I did. My
dissertation centered around my methodology and
the sources I collected. My dissertation had no narra-
tive flow. From the bones of that skeleton I wrote Deep
Roots.
This is the reality for Africanists. It's almost like being a
hunter versus being what we are today. We go to Whole
Foods and we buy stuff and it's already cooked and
packaged. You don’t have to go out and kill it. When
you're an Africanist, particularly for the pre-colonial
period, you literally have to go out and kill it. I had to
find dying, non-written languages, “kill” the data be-
fore I could analyze and interpret it. The emphasis lies
on the original source material, not on telling a story.
After publishing Deep Roots, I really wanted to write a
story. At that point, I didn't know how to get where I
wanted to be.
We discussed the value of the writing workshops.
I know you have also collaborated with colleagues
in museums in recent years. What have you learned
from these curators? How have they helped you
reshape your craft to a wider audience? In 2014, I
had a fellowship at the Smithsonian, which marked
the beginning of long-standing relationship with Dr.
Paul Gardullo, the Director of the Smithsonian Natio-
nal African-American Museum’s Center for the Study
of Global Slavery. Paul asked me to be the advisor for
NMAAHC’s permanent rice exhibit, which allowed
me to see how he tells a story to millions of people
who walk through the museum in a year. As a cura-
tor you have a limited amount of space to tell a story,
“This is the
reality for
Africanists.It's
almost like being
a hunter versus
being what we are
today.”
ON THE NEXT PAGE
2 EDDA FIELDS-BLACK

3.
evoke emotion, and teach history to viewers. On the
whole, this was a great opportunity to sit at Paul’s feet
and learn.
When it came to the Requiem for Rice, I actually
wanted to be the artist and tell the story. Working with
the Smithsonian and other museums served as a pre-
cursor to the Requiem for Rice and got me thinking
about storytelling in a different way.
You have used the phrase “sit at someone’s feet” a
few times when discussing your evolution as a crea-
tor. How does it feel now to be the creator and to
execute your vision from start to finish? It’s a good
feeling, but sometimes quite scary and a little exhaus-
ting. I have never, ever done anything like this before.
We all stay in our lanes. I wrote the libretto and eve-
rything is based on the libretto. I raised the money, I
wrote up the grant proposals, and I'm the spokesper-
son for the work. The composer’s area is the musical,
the film maker’s area is the visual. I don't try to tell
others how to compose or film. That being said, it is
interesting to see things through each other's eyes.
As a historian, the emphasis remains on the sources.
You're in the archives, you’re interviewing people, rea-
ding newspapers, finding the different kinds of prima-
ry sources we use. With artists, the emphasis is about
the experiential. I developed a scab so that I can stand
in front of my students and teach this material about
slavery every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and
Thursday for an entire semester, two semesters a year,
for many years. I snatched that scab off by becoming
an artist. I had to experience those emotions again and
then translate them into words. For me, the creative
process is about being willing to be vulnerable and to
go to places emotionally. in order to take the audience
to certain places, I had to go to those places. It’s not
always fun and not always safe, but it’s important. I'm
principal investigator for a team of scientists and so
sometimes the scientist, the artist, and I, the historian,
go out to the rice fields together. This environment has
become second nature to me. It has become over the
years of my career, but not something that I paid at-
tention to in this way. I have been to the rice fields so
many times in West Africa and South Carolina, but
I never paid attention to the sounds of the birds and
texture of the trees, leaves, soils, and grasses as I do
when I am in the rice fields with artists and scientists.
I thank my collaborators for opening my senses.
Sometimes it's frustrating because artists, historians,
and scientists can think very differently. We don’t
always get along and I, as executive producer, have to
solve this problem quickly so we can get back to work
and get this thing done. On some days I threatened
that I was going to go back to the archives and sit by
myself because that's what historians do. There would
be days when I thought I would find comfort in sitting
alone in my carrel, but I haven't done it yet.
This discussion of your new sensory awareness of
your surroundings fascinates me. Do you remember
any revelatory moment as you peeled off the scab
and revisited the rice fields? Last August, John Wine-
glass and I went to rice fields in South Carolina with
one of my scientist colleagues down there, Dr. Travis
Folk of Folk Land Management, Inc[ELF1] . Travis
always tries to open my eyes and get me to see my sur-
roundings, but I rarely understand what he's saying.
John Wineglass wanted to be in the rice fields at the
mosquitoyist time of the year. When we went to the
rice fields I started to recognize the trees for the first
time. I told them, “Oh my goodness, those are Cypress
trees and that's Tupelo and that's this and that's that” –
I could totally see it!
Now I'm working on a few chapters about Harriet
Tubman before the Combahee River Raid. This re-
minds me of another oh my goodness moment. Last
December, I was on the Combahee in South Caroli-
na. Some friends got me access to the plantations that
were raided. I was on the Combahee River and oh my
4 EDDA FIELDS-BLACK
“As a historian,the
emphasis remains
on the sources...With
artists,the emphasis is
about the experiential.”

4.
gosh there was nothing like it. I could literally imagine
the gunboats coming up that River. Of course, you can
read about it. But being there and seeing it and expe-
riencing it was just amazing -- there is nothing like
seeing it for yourself.
You see landscape as a necessary part of your pro-
cess as a historian and artist. Of course, you can
only work from home now. How are you adapting
your writing plans to our quarantine reality? You
need to create an ambience to tell history and unfor-
tunately, I have not been able to travel to the Maryland
Eastern Shore or any of the sites Tubman visited on
the Underground Railroad . My husband and I have
two school-age children, and they have been out of
school for months. This has been tough on my writing
schedule. I could see the effects of quarantine on my
writing schedule approaching like a 18-wheel truck.
To side step it, I just get up before my children. I'm
awake at 6:15 and write until 1:15. I block those hours
off so I can focus.
In February, I planned to write three and a half new
chapters about Harriet Tubman over the summer. I'm
not where I projected, but I'm still making progress
and that's about all you can ask for at this point. The
Carnegie Mellon library has really been wonderful.
Thankfully I'm writing about the 19th century Afri-
can-American history and a lot of sources are digi-
tized. Thank God for Amazon, that's all I'll say. The
CMU Library has been able to get what I need and
get it delivered to my inbox or to my door. Also, I
had a glut of pension files that I hadn't transcribed.
Neither my Research Assistant nor I have been able
to travel. I tasked him with transcribing these sources
and we have made some amazing finds. We’ve found
the names of the Tubman spies, scouts, and pilots who
Tubman recruited and actually conducted the raid —
that's a silver lining to covid-19.
You have to look for them. But it has been unex-
pectedly fruitful in many ways for me. I agree, and I
think that sometimes the things that you don't expect
can be the most rewarding. Even though we would not
have chosen this under any circumstances.
No, definitely not. Do you look forward to any aca-
demic, artistic, or personal events in the next few
months? Do you have hope for November or the
school year? Do I see hope? I haven't been in a very
hopeful place as of late. The killing of George Floyd
was the final straw, but there has been a shift. Shifts of
this magnitude are never going to be comfortable. In
fact, they can be quite painful. COVID-19 has been
particularly painful for communities of color. But I am
hopeful that we're going to come out on the other side
of this adversity and recalibrate toward equality. Full
equality for everyone. That’s my hope. If not, we would
have gone through all of this for nothing.
I have one more question, and this is on a different,
lighter note. Of course, recalibration for equality
of opportunity is of utmost importance, but I must
circle back to one thing you mentioned in the be-
ginning: dragon boating. My dad has been very into
dragon boating for a few years. There are very few
people he can connect with about dragon boating,
so I needed to bring this up before letting you go. I
got into dragon boating because I'm a breast cancer
survivor. The paddling is very good exercise to help
strengthen the muscles after women and men have
had cancer surgery on the breast and lymph nodes. I
also wanted a community, and I now have a floating
support group. I enjoy physical activity and the out-
doors so it brought all of that together for me. Unfor-
tunately, my team has not been able to get out in the
boat this summer due to COVID-19. Has your dad
been out this season at all?
Dragon boating is not in the cards, because you can-
not practice social distancing in the boat. He is, by
the way, a fan of paddle boarding. That’s great, well
I'm going to look into that. Our season has been vir-
tually canceled. I'm on a team in Charleston also and
their season goes until late November. There’s a slim
chance and they also get back in the water sooner
as you can imagine because of the weather. I might
paddle in Charleston before November. It’s a very slim
chance because people down there are not wearing
their masks but if I hope that by March the Charleston
dragon boat team will be back in the water. I miss it
this summer, I really do.
On that note of having communities beyond the
work world, it’s been a joy to connect with you and
discuss your brilliance as a historian, artist, and
dragon boater. Thank you very much, and I’ll add ar-
tist to my first sentence with another borrowed semi-
colon!
5YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW