• Project Timeline

• Introduction to the LOC collection (PDF)

• 1941 introduction to the LOC collection (PDF)

• Introduction to the Mississippi Narratives

• Instructions to the interviewers (PDF)

• Sample narratives

• Introduction to the Index

• Acknowledgements

• Foreword by Dr. Charles Joyner

About the Comprehensive Index—Foreword By Dr. Charles Joyner

Nineteen seventy-two was a banner year in the study of American slavery. The publication of George Rawick's From Sundown to Sunup and John Blassingame's The Slave Community in that year inaugurated a new era, marking a decisive change in emphasis from a concentration on the slaveholders to an effort to understand the experience of the slaves.¹

Perhaps even more significant was Rawick's publication that year of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. It made widely available for the first time more than 10,000 pages of typescripts of interviews with more than 2,000 former slaves by interviewers for the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration conducted in seventeen states between 1936 and 1938 and deposited in the Library of Congress. Despite difficulties, it is perhaps the most important source ever for the study of slavery in the United States.²

While slavery left what Rawick terms "an indelible mark on American life" during the century following emancipation, the slaves themselves were "virtually absent from the written history other than as the victim of white aggression or the recipient of white paternalism."³ Most studies of slavery in the United States have been derived from investigation of the records kept by the slaveholders. It is not surprising that this should be so. One of the characteristics of American slavery was the enforced illiteracy of the slave. As former slave Elijah Green expressed it, "And, for God's sake don't let a slave be cotch with pencil and paper. That was a major crime. You might as well had killed your master or missus."⁴ A people systematically kept illiterate were not likely to leave written records of the kind that historians normally study.

The slaves had in fact left behind a distinctive oral literature, often in song and story, that constitutes evidence directly or indirectly expressing their personal perspectives on the institution that bound them and the people who claimed to own them. It must be acknowledged that this evidence offers special hazards to those who would attempt to understand the slaves' experience. Few historians, for example, are trained in interpreting the kinds of myths and symbols that suffuse African American folktales and folksongs; and few folklorists have shown any disposition to put their special skills to the service of those who would attempt to understand the nature of the whole black experience under slavery.⁵

In addition there were scores of antebellum slave narratives, mostly the autobiographies of self-emancipated slaves who had escaped to the free states. Some of these were written by the former slaves, while others were dictated or ghostwritten by a writer who took them down and saw them through publication. A few were made up wholly out of the writer's imagination. They were usually published under the auspices of abolition societies.⁶

The antebellum slave narratives have been troublesome sources for historians, marred both by their frankly propagandistic purpose and by the narrowness of their sample of the slave population. The slave who was able, against tremendous odds, both to make himself literate and to escape was too remarkable an individual to typify the experience of the millions who could do neither. Furthermore, despite the intention of these self-emancipated slaves, as authors of antislavery tracts, to portray slavery in an unfavorable light, most of them had actually experienced slavery at its most lenientùenjoying, as literate servants, relatively favored positions within the system. Few of them really knew slavery in its harshest aspects. Despite their concern to depict the evils of slavery at its worst, they more often merely exaggerated the evils of slavery at its best. Such other sources as the trial testimony of slaves (as for example), in the trials following the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in South Carolina in 1822 or in the Adams County slave revolt in Mississippi in 1861, are even more dubious, since both testifiers and examiners in such situations had important axes to grind.⁷ It is little wonder that scholars have questioned the validity of sources requiring so much skill and circumspection. Despite their uneven quality, however, the antebellum slave narratives are guilty of no more special pleading than the accounts of the slaveholders, abolitionists, and travelers whose writings constitute standard fare for historians.⁸

There appear, however, to have been no systematic efforts to interview former slaves until the 1920s. The earliest interviews with former slaves were conducted under the auspices of Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee. From 1927 to 1929 Andrew P. Watson, a graduate student in anthropology at Fisk under the direction of Paul Radin, recorded autobiographical accounts and religious conversion experiences of one hundred former slaves. In 1928 sociologist Charles S. Johnson established the Social Science Institute at Fisk, and as Watson was finishing his interviews, Ophelia Settle Egypt of the Institute's research staff launched another large-scale interview project among ex-slaves in Tennessee and Kentucky. During 1929û1930 thirty-six students of historian John B. Cade at Southern University in Louisiana conducted eighty-two interviews with former slaves.⁹

Apparently it was Lawrence D. Reddick, who had interviewed ex-slaves while studying with Charles S. Johnson at Fisk, who was the first to seek federal funding for a systematic project. In 1934 Reddick, then teaching at Kentucky State College, proposed a project "to study the needs and collect the testimony of ex-slaves" in Indiana and Kentucky to Harry L. Hopkins, director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Approximately two hundred fifty interviews were conducted in 1934û1935 as a pilot project under Reddick's direction, but the larger project never materialized.¹⁰

Of all the various efforts to preserve the memories of the former slaves, the most outstanding was the comprehensive program of interviewing conducted in seventeen states under the auspices of the Federal Writers Project of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) from 1936 to 1938. As Director of the Federal Writers Project (FWP), former journalist Henry G. Alsberg assembled an outstanding staff, including folklorist John A. Lomax as National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways and poet Sterling A. Brown as National Editor of Negro Affairs.

The interviewing process was almost finished when folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin joined the Project as folklore editor in 1938. From 1939 to 1941 he supervised the organizing and arranging of over 10,000 pages of typescript for deposit in the Library of Congress. The interviews were arranged by state, then alphabetically by the name of the former slave within each state. The seventeen bound volumes were catalogued in the Rare Book Room as A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.

Some of the interviews were included in various Writers Project publications including Drums and Shadows by the Georgia Writers Project, Gumbo Ya-Ya by the Louisiana Writers Project, and The Negro in Virginia by the Virginia Writers Project.¹¹

The first book to be compiled entirely from the WPA interviews, however, was Ben Botkin's Lay My Burden Down, an impressionistic montage of short excerpts from the collection, taken from the original interview context and organized by topic. Botkin described the book as "a selection and integration of excerpts" from the interviews, except where the complete interview "constituted an irreducible minimum." Within the excerpts he engaged in considerable "cutting, arranging, and titling," eliminating "attempts at dialect writing, successful and unsuccessful," maintaining that the "essential qualities"of oral speech are those of "style, of word choice and word order" rather than pronunciation. Botkin described the slave narratives as "a kind of nonviolent slave revolt," since he considered "slavery itself, as experienced and reported by the slave," to be "the best argument against slavery."¹²

Two anthologies of the WPA interviews were published prior to Rawick's massive facsimile edition in 1972. Julius Lester's To Be a Slave was released in 1968 and Norman Yetman's Life Under the Peculiar Institution two years later. Yetman deleted some passages and rewrote others in order "to improve readability and continuity." The principle deletions were passages describing post-slavery experiences and the contexts of the interviews themselves. Both Lester and Yetman standardized the slaves' speech "in order to achieve some uniformity," as Yetman put it, however variable the speech and experience of the slaves might have been.¹³ A later anthology of interviews with former slaves in Virginia, Weevils in the Wheat, was edited by Charles Perdue and his associates. The Virginia Writers Project had held back interviews for inclusion in The Negro in Virginia. Most of the interviews that were not used in that book appear to have been simply thrown out, rather than sent to Washington. After assiduous digging, Perdue and his colleagues located all or part of 159 interviews, which they believe to be all the extant Virginia interviews. They know of at least eighty other interviews that were conducted, but have been unable to find any trace of them.¹⁴

Although Rawick received the customary designation of "editor" for compiling this massive amount of source material, he did not, in any literal sense, edit the interviews. Rawick deliberately chose not to alter the typescripts in any way. In the Greenwood facsimile edition, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Rawick took the approach that "oral history records, if they are to have scholarly use, must not be altered." He left the interviews "exactly as they were recorded," including "all the editorial marks." He also retains the interviewers' "efforts at rendering regional black speech dialects." Even if some of such efforts may have been inept, they were nevertheless "evidence of a matter of considerable importance: the development of American Speech."¹⁵

He knew, of course, that the typescripts were not truly primary sources, that they cannot be cited with certainty as evidence for what the ex-slaves "really said." We often assume that the typescript is the primary source, but it is tertiary at best. The primary sources are the ex-slaves' oral testimonies, but they do not survive. Nor do many of the interviewers' field notes survive. In some cases the interviewers are themselves unidentified. Readers have no way to know with certainty what the ex-slaves actually said, or even what the interviewers reported that the ex-slaves actually said. In any individual narrative readers can only know that someone interviewed a former slave at a certain time and place. The former slave's name is almost always supplied, but the place, the date, and the name of the interviewer are not always given. Readers know also that person or persons unknown (perhaps a typist or typists in the state office of the Writers Project, perhaps working from the interviewer's notes) prepared a typescript that was sent to Washington. Readers cannot actually know from the typescript whether or not the ex-slave actually said the words that are on the page, or whether or not the interviewer understood the ex-slave correctly, or whether or not an unknown typist copied the interviewer's notes correctly. The silences are recalcitrant; and they are likely to remain so.

Until the publication of Rawick's edition in 1972 the WPA interviews had never really received the scholarly attention they deserved, for several reasons. First, access to the collection was limited. It had been deposited by the Federal Writers Project in the Library of Congress, where it was housed in the noncirculating Rare Book Division. Accessibility was somewhat improved in the 1960s when the collection became available on microform. Second, its great unindexed bulk was in itself a deterrent to scholars.

The Slave Narrative Collection is not without its difficulties. Three-quarters of a century had elapsed since the informants had been slaves. Only three percent of them were over thirty in 1865. Two-thirds of them were under fifteen. Any slave over twenty at the time of emancipation would have been over ninety at the time of the interview.

Folklorists have often shown how variation creeps into song and tale texts of an individual informant over a period of time. How reliable are the memories of aged men [and women] three-quarters of a century removed form their subjects? Furthrmore, since most of the collectors were white, there remains the problem of the informants telling the interviewers what they thought the interviewers wanted to hear.

The slave narratives are, of course, uneven. Many are riddled with demonstratable inaccuracies, ambiguities, inconsistencies, internal contradictions, and dependence on hearsay rather than firsthand knowledge. Some of the problems may be attributed to the natural consequences of aging and failures of memory. But others relate to the context of the interviews themselves. As I wrote in another context of one former slave:

Former slaves may have engaged in flattery and exaggeration to please interviewers, or may have trimmed their tales to tell interviewers what they thought interviewers wanted to hear.¹⁶ "In all probability," notes historian C. Vann Woodward of the WPA narratives, "the most serious sources of distortion in the FWP narratives came not from the interviewees but from the interviewersùtheir biases, procedures, and methodsùand the interracial circumstances of the interview. The overwhelming majority of the interviewers were Southern whites."¹⁷

The failure of scholars to utilize these awkward and difficult sources before 1972 is understandable, but their failure to recognize the consequences of trying to comprehend slavery without them is not. The hazards of using the slave narratives are insignificant compared with the hazards of ignoring them. Without studying slavery from the slave's point of view, there is simply no way to answer such questions as, "What was it like to be a slave?" This has not prevented numerous scholars from contending that slaves were contented or discontented, docile or rebellious, that they did, or did not, accept a "Sambo" image of themselves foisted upon them by their mastersùall on the basis of circumstantial evidence in sources preserved by the masters.

Historians should not dismiss the slave interviews as useless, contends C. Vann Woodward,

unless they are prepared to be consistent and discard most of the other sources they habitually use. Not while they still use newspapers as sources, or, for that matter, diaries and letters and politicians speeches and the Congressional Record and all those neatly printed official documents and the solemnly sworn testimony of high officials. Full of paradox and evasions, contrasts and contradictions, lies and exaggerations, pure truth and complete fabrication as they are, such sources still remain the daily bread on which historians feed. The slave narratives have their peculiarities, as all types of historical sources do, but they are not all that different from the norm.¹⁸

The WPA interviews, for all their shortcomings, represent a much more diverse [although far from random] sample of the slave population than any other source, including all major slave occupations, all types of environment from the one-slave farm to the thousand-slave plantation, and all shades of treatment from permissive indulgence to sadistic cruelty. They provide not only commentary on the interactions of slaves and masters, but also a wealth of folk speech and imagery, songs, superstitions, as well as descriptions of folk medicine, foodways, magic, religious practices, crafts, games, courting customs, and material culture, with a full description of the social matrix in which they functioned, all from the perspective of the slave.

Since publication of the Rawick volumes the WPA interviews have become indispensable sources for studies of the African American experience in slavery and Reconstruction, such as Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll, Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Leslie Howard Owen's This Species of Property, Lawrence W. Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Albert G. Raboteau's Slave Religion, Thomas L. Webber's Deep Like the Rivers, Paul D. Escott's Slavery Remembered, Leon F. Litwack's Been In the Storm So Long in the 1970s; Charles Joyner's Down by the Riverside, Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman?, Clarence L. Mohr's On the Threshold of Freedom, Sterling Studkey's Slave Culture, Margaret Washington's "A Peculiar People," Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's Within the Plantation Household, and Eric Foner's Reconstruction in the 1980s; and Janet Cornelius's When I Can Read My Title Clear, Ann Malone's Sweet Chariot and Brenda Stevenson's Life in Black and White in the 1990s. As a group they have taken seriously Rawick's injunction that "the reading of the narratives ought to lead to fresh questions, new insights, a new historiography of slavery.¹⁹

When Howard Potts first came to me at the University of Alabama in the Fall of 1987, proposing to prepare an index to the interviews conducted with former slaves in Mississippi by Federal Writers Project fieldworkers, I was of course enthusiastic. The need for such an index was obvious, and I knew that Potts possessed the skills and computer experience that the project would require. I do not think either of us expected that the project would expand to cover the entire Slave Narrative Collection, or that it would consume much of Potts' working time during the next decade.

Now a new generation of students will have the advantage of the splendid Potts index. It promises to extend the usefulness of the Federal Writers Project interviews to scholars in a variety of disciplines, with special usefulness for enhancing local studies of various elements of slave life, more textual analysis of the various interviews and their contexts, more systematic comparative study and analysis, and more studies of the mobility patterns of former slaves after Emancipation. It also promises to lead a new generation of scholars to questions and insights of their own, even fresher questions and insights that will enable them to build on the scholarship of the past in ways that will make their own distinctive contribution.

Dr. Charles Joyner

Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture Director of the Waccamaw Center for Historical and Cultural Studies Coastal Carolina University, South Carolina.

Notes

1. George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: the Making of the Black Community,Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, no. 11 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1972); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

2. George P. Rawick, ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, no. 11, Series 1, 19 vols.; George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, no. 35, Supplement, Series 1, 12 vols

3. George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1972), xiv

4. Rawick, ed., The American Slave, S.C., 2, pt. 1, 125

5. A conspicuous exception is Roger D. Abrahams, whose Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), who has used his folkloristic skills to decipher layer upon layer of cultural meaning in corn-shucking rituals and narratives. Librarian Dena J. Epstein also made skillful use of slave songs in her Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). For an excellent compilation of slave songs collected during the Civil War see William F. Allen, Charles P. Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds., Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson and Co., 1867). Another compilation collected at the same time as the Federal Writers Project narratives is Lydia Parrish, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands (New York: Creative Age Press, 1942). Letters from slaves are collected in Robert S. Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves, 2d ed. (New York: New Viewpoints, 1988)

6. One narrative long considered to be such a fabrication, was authenticated in the 1980s by the patient scholarship of Jean Fagin Yellin. See Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by Herself rpt., ed. Jean Fagin Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). It was originally published as Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: by the author, 1861). In addition to the prewar narratives, there were a few memoirs written during and after Reconstruction. For both see Charles Nichols, Many Thousands Gone: The Ex-Slaves' Account of Their Bondage and Freedom (Leiden, Netherlands: E.=tJ. Brill, 1963)

7. For Testimony in the Vesey trials see Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker, An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes Charged with an Attempt to Raise an Insurrection in the State of South Carolina . . . (Charleston, 1822), reprinted as John Oliver Killens, ed., The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). Winthrop D. Jordan reprints the trial records of the Adams County insurrectionists in his prize-winning Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993)

8. See, for example, Robert Manson Myers, ed., Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972); C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); J. Harold Easterby, ed., The South Carolina Rice Plantation as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945); Frances Anne Kemole, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–1839 (rpt. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984); Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853–1854, with Remarks on their Economy (New York: Mason, 1860); and his The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 2 vols. (New York: Mason, 1861); Evangeline Walker Andrews, ed., Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal in the Years 1774 to 1776 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922); Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World (2 vols., New York: Harper, 1853); Basil L. Hall, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828 (3 vols., Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1829); Harriet Martineau, Society in America (3 vols., London: Sanders and Otley, 1837) and her Retrospect of Western Travel (3 vols., London: Sanders and Otley, 1838)

9. Transcripts of thirty-seven of Settle's interviews were made available in mimeograph form as Unwritten History of Slavery, Social Science Source Documents, No. 1, Nashville: Social Science Institute, Fisk University, 1945. Watson's interviews were made available as God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Negro Ex-Slaves, Social Science Source Documents, No. 2, Nashville: social Science Institute, Fisk University, 1945. Unwritten History of Slavery was published as volume 18 and God Struck Me Dead as volume 19 of Rawick's The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Some of the material from the Cade interviews is published in John B. Cade, "Out of the Mouths of Ex-Slaves," Journal of Negro History, 20 (1935), 295

10. The Reddick interviews were never published

11. Georgia Writers Project, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940), rpt. Georgia Writers Project, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, ed. Charles Joyner (Brown Thrasher, ed., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Louisiana Writers Project, Gumbo Ya-Ya (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1945); Virginia Writers Project, The Negro in Virginia (New York: Hastings House, 1940)

12. Benjamin A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945). Quotations on pp. vii=nviii, ix

13. Julius Lester, To Be a Slave (New York: Dial Press, 1968); Norman Yetman, Life Under the Peculiar Institutiion: Selections from the Slave Narrative Collection (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., 1970)

14. Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976)

15. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup, xvii–xviii

16. Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), xv. The sociologist Charles S. Johnson described the varied motivations of such latter-day griots in Alabama in his Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 18-19

17. C. Vann Woodward, "History from Slave Sources: A Review Article," American Historical Review, 79 (1974), 473

18. Woodward. "History from Slave Sources," 476

19. George P. Rawick, "General Introduction" to The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement, Series 1 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), xxxix; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Pantheon, 1976); Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Albert G. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978); Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Leon F. Litwack, Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985); Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Margaret Washington Creel, "A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991); Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)