• 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

Mississippi

by Ken Lawrence

Forgery and Dialect-ics

Much worse than corn pone, however, are the distortions deliberately imposed on the narratives by WPA writers and editors. In some instances, stories of brutality were deleted; in other instances, statements were added which completely altered the meaning of certain narratives. Dialect was routinely imposed and standardized.

It is ironic that the abrupt end of the Federal Writers’ Project may have been what saved these narratives. If they had all been rewritten and sent on to Washington in final form as twenty-six of them were, we might have lost a great deal of the most important episodes described in them. The best way to reveal the alterations in the narratives is to compare the twenty-six from Mississippi contained in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress (hereafter called “LC”), previously published in volume 7 of The American Slave, with the versions of those same narratives found in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, published in volumes 6–10 of the Suplementary Series 1. Here are some of the most glaring examples:

In Dora Franks’ narrative, she tells of her Uncle Alf running away. But the LC version omits this: “But he tole us he was glad he done what he had cause he never could have stood another whuppin’ 'thout killin’ somebody and course he knew what dat would have meant.” Also missing is her complaint about a white woman who sleeps with black men:

You is heard of dis Miss Sally what lives out here? She lays wid de men all day and all night and de chillen hangs round and peeps thru de winder at her goin's on and laughs at her and think they is smart. Now you know dat ain't no way to raise chillen up. Dey larns all dat devilment soon enough 'thout a white woman settin’ such a bad ’zample for dem. Why when I was a kid dey allus told me dat babies was found in stumps and I believed dat until I was grown and went ’round lookin’ in every stump I see a tryin’ to find a baby for me and Miss Emmaline. I was right smart disappointed when I found out better.

Dora Franks, LC version
Dora Franks, Mississippi supplement

Pet Franks, Dora Franks’ husband, recounts one of the most graphic torture tales told by any narrator. It is entirely missing from the LC version.

I recollect one time when dere was snow on de groun’ and it was freezin’ cold and in de middle of de night we heared somebody knockin’ at de door and when my pappy got up dere was a nigger man out in de cold without no shoes on and with mighty few other clothes on. He said he was freezin’ to death. My mammy got up and did all she could to help him but his feet was froze and two of his toes dropped off when dey thawed. Next mawnin’ we called de mistress out to see him and she jest natchally cried when she look at him. When she found out whar he come from she made de marster hitch up de surry and go carry him back and de marster say he was gwine turn that owner over to de law or know de reason why. But ’fore he got there de nigger had done died.
I member ’nother time but dat was durin’ de war when I was ridin’ on my horse over to Columbus to carry some clothes to de soldiers. On de way back I heared a bell ringin’ and I think it must be a cow strayed off but when I look I sees a nigger man with his hands in a iron halter up ’bove his head and a bell strung 'tween them. He say his marster had beat him and den for two days had kept his hands and feet nailed to a board, you could see de nail holes too, and den had put his arms in dat halter and turn him loose. He say it was all cause he marster heared tell dat he say he would be glad if de Yankees won de war so's he could be free.

Pet Franks, LC version
Pet Franks, Mississippi supplement

Statements in the LC version of James Lucas’ narrative saying that freedom “was jus’ somp’n dat de white folks an slaves all de time talk about” and that “Slaves like us, what was owned by quality-folks, was sati’fied an’ didn’ sing none of dem freedom songs” do not appear in the original Edith Wyatt Moore handwritten narrative. They were added to it as part of the pencilled-over editing.

John Lucas, LC version
John Lucas, Mississippi supplement

Similarly, Charlie Moses’ narrative has editorial gratuities added, like this, near the end of the LC version: “If all marsters had been good like some, the slaves would all a-been happy. But marsters like mine ought never been allowed to own Niggers.” Moses began his narrative by saying: “When I gets to thinkin’ back on them slavery days I feels like risin’ out o’ this here bed an’ tellin’ ever’body ’bout the harsh treatment us colored folks was given.” To that sentence the rewriter or editor added, for the LC version, “when we was owned by poor quality folks.” These changes, while very small for the size of the narrative, completely transform it. What Charlie Moses the ex-slave and Esther DeSola the interviewer presented to the WPA was a condemnation of slavery. Pauline Loveless, the rewriter, and/or Clara E. Stokes, the editor, transformed it into an attack on just his own cruel master and other “poor quality folks,” and invented references to “good” masters and “happy” slaves.

Charlie Moses, LC version
Charlie Moses, Mississippi supplement

The WPA editors were certainly aware of what they were doing. One wrote:

It seems that the story of the Negro uprising should give more testimony in favor of the white men—from merely reading the story it might give some damn Yankee, even to-day, a good excuse to complain of the treatment accorded to the Negroes in those days. The gory details of the execution are given but the untold horror of a possible Negro rule, as people saw it in those days, should be made clearer for the benefit of readers whose grandfathers did not take part in all this.

The note, from a WPA file in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, refers to a manuscript of Civil War and Reconstruction folk tales by Mississippi writer Hubert Creekmore.

These examples suggest that historians who have attempted to support a view of slavery as a benign or paternalistic institution with evidence from the narratives should reconsider their arguments, checking to see if they have been taken in by the forgers. It is a tribute to the effectiveness of the fraud that two of the most carefully selected anthologies of WPA ex-slave narratives—John Harris’ Voices from Slavery and Norman Yetman's Life Under the “Peculiar Institution”—include sizable selections from Mississippi narratives that contain substantial editorial tampering.

All the narratives that reached Washington have been edited to some degree. Typically, this includes cutting and rearranging; spelling, punctuation, and dialect are standardized; “eye-dialect” (“wuz,” “uv,” etc.) is deleted. Obviously, some of this is helpful; more often it is not. Typical editing depersonalizes statements that indicate ties between the ex-slave and the interviewer's family. “Folks” become “niggers”; “we” becomes “us.” The latter is especially aggravating because this syntax form rarely, if ever, appears in the earliest unedited versions of narratives. In his book Black English, J. L. Dillard refers to this usage as an “undifferentiated pronoun.” However, all of his examples showing “us” used in this fashion are taken from Botkin's slave narrative selections in Lay My Burden Down and therefore are suspect.

Botkin realized that the dialect was not true-to-life, and he felt free to modify it in his book: “In accordance with the same criteria of truth and readability, the original attempts at dialect-writing, successful and unsuccessful, were abandoned, except for a few characteristic and expressive variations.”

Instructions to interviewers

None of the dialect in these narratives can be considered authentic. The interviewers had been instructed in the “proper” renderings, and most strove to comply. Marjorie Woods Austin's protest mailed to headquarters reveals a lot about the result of standardization:

Never in my life have I ever heard a negro say de for the. To spell it so gives the wrong eye-sound. If they drop the t, they say der (deh.) However, since “de” seems to be part of Washington's idee, fine, I am using it—under protest.
Our white hill billies say wa’nt; the negroes say wudn’, never wa’nt. I am transcribing it “wasn't,” since wuz is taboo.
I have not used “mammy” as of your correction because none of these negroes have used the word. They say mamma and mother, daddy and father interchangeably.
Bell has never spoken of his owner as marster except in the quotation from the white preacher, and used mistress as spelled in the same line. He invariably addressed me as madam.
None of my darkies say every, but always ever’.
I have changed uv to of wherever possible. It depends on the content. Sometimes negroes say uv for of and again they use er for of; it depends on the next word. I am holding out for er in certain spots; it would sound most unnatural with the of sound.

A copy of this letter is attached to one of Charlie Bell's narratives in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Frederick Douglass wrote: “When a black man's language is quoted, in order to belittle and degrade him, his ideas are put into the most grotesque and unreadable English, while the utterances of negro scholars and authors are ignored.” When Rose M. Wells interviewed Ben Richardson, she was disappointed that he spoke “carefully phrased English, without the usual dialect pronunciation,” so she asked “Uncle” to tell his life's story “the way you talk to your colored friends.”

Ben Richardson, Mississippi supplement

Scholars working with these materials face other complexities. There is a natural tendency, for example, to consider first-person narratives more “authentic” than those written in the third person. Sometimes this is a mistake. In the earliest version of Charlie Bell's narrative, Marjorie Woods Austin asked him why he left Pearl River County and came to Meridian. “He supplied this information politely but appeared slightly embarrassed by the questioner's ignorance. ‘Taint no piece over there’.” She concludes this part of the narrative by saying, “The inference is obvious, we believe?” Later, she notes that he lives in Royal Alley, “a section more or less given over to the daughters of joy, regardless of color.” The narrative was returned to her with instructions to rewrite it in the first person. None of this material appears in any of the rewritten versions of Charlie Bell's story.

Charlie Bell, Mississippi supplement

Another difficulty is that many important questions weren't asked properly, if at all. To illustrate: Washington instructed interviewers to ask for recollections of Nat Turner's uprising, and many of them did. This question may have revealed a great deal in Virginia, but in Mississippi about the only thing it could have uncovered was whether the news had carried this far west and whether that memory persisted for a century. If these same ex-slaves had been asked about the Murrell insurrection conspiracy of 1835 or about Jupiter's conspiracy later on, much might have been learned.

Instructions to interviewers

Finally, of course, there is no way to be certain how much of what an ex-slave was saying was being correctly and fully understood by the interviewer. The best way I know to become sensitive to this problem is to read Robert Gover's novel One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, the story of an encounter between a white, upwardly mobile middle-class college boy and a very young, ghetto-bound black prostitute.

The Scope and Potential of the Mississippi Narratives -->