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The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, George P. Rawick,
General Editor, with A Comprehensive Name Index for The American
Slave, compiled by Howard E. Potts and Subject Index, from Index
to The American Slave, edited by Donald M. Jacobs, assisted by
Steven Fershleiser
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Introduction to the Mississippi Narratives
by Ken Lawrence
To talk to me about black studies as if it's something
that concerned black people is an utter denial. This is the history of
Western Civilization. I can't see it otherwise. This is the history
that black people and white people and all serious students of modern
history and the history of the world have to know.
—C. L. R. James
Black Studies and the Contemporary Student
Introduction
Charlie Smith, the oldest man in the world (and second oldest person),
was born in Africa in 1842, kidnapped as a child, and sold into slavery
in New Orleans at the age of twelve. He clearly recalls slavery and the
Civil War; life in the West cowpunching and working for Jesse James; Ku
Klux lynchings; labor in the turpentine camps, logging, and road building;
desegregating a Florida town in 1905; managing a dance and gambling hall
during World War I; and picking oranges. He worked all his life until
1974, when he finally retired, closing down his soda and candy stand and
moving into a retirement home in Bartow, Florida.
At a time when so many people in the United States—especially white
people—believe they are celebrating 200 years of freedom, Charlie
Smith's life should remind everyone of the stain on our civilization
that has yet to be removed. Instead, his story appears in the papers as
filler—an interesting but unimportant feature item.
Smith's story attracts only marginal interest because the lives
of the millions who endured slavery and sought, prayed, and fought for
freedom are still shrouded in obscurity and buried beneath a mountain
of false and prejudiced history-writing.
Reconstructing our past and popularizing it is an essential part of establishing
a new social order. Unfortunately, the so-called primary materials used
by most students of Mississippi history are so one-sidedly white-supremacist
as to undermine thoroughly sincere efforts to unearth and report the truth.
Popular history-writing therefore had to be placed on the back burner
until the WPA narratives of former slaves interviewed in Mississippi were
prepared for publication. After an exhaustive and exhausting three years
of labor, that task is now complete, and these materials are now available
as volumes 6–10 of The American Slave, Supplement, Series 1,
published by Greenwood Press.
The professional establishment is already attempting to separate our
politics and purpose from our product. Writing in the April 1974 issue
of American Historical Review, C. Vann Woodward deplores the fact
that “historians have almost completely neglected these materials,”
but goes on to caricature and disparage George Rawick's pioneering
attempt in From Sundown to Sunup to restore these sources to their
proper place. Reviewing the WPA narratives in the New York Review of
Books, Eugene D. Genovese takes a subtler tack. He calls Rawick's
book “the most valuable book I know of by a white man about slave
life in the United States,” but then says that the author is “not
wary enough” of his sources and that the “grave limitation”
of the narratives “can produce historical romance or bad history.”
The remainder of Genovese's essay praises the letters and diaries
of planters and their families as sources for historians, but nowhere
does he suggest that these have fueled historical romance or bad history.
One reply we would offer to these and other critics is to note that nearly
all traditional historians, the advocates of so-called detached objectivity
as well as the more overtly reactionary practitioners of history, allowed
the ex-slave narratives collected by WPA workers to lie unused and decaying
for two generations. If left up to them, these precious documents would
probably have disappeared without a trace, the apparent fate of every
black newspaper published in Mississippi in the nineteenth century. At
the same time, by way of comparison, untold thousands of dollars have
been spent to acquire, preserve, edit, and publish the papers of Jefferson
Davis, and more than $360,000 of government money financed the pied piper
of modern racist historiography, Time on the Cross. Under these
circumstances, much of the criticism aimed at the narratives and Rawick's
use of them appears, when placed in perspective, to rationalize the jaded
priorities of so many leading white historians.
The purpose of studies in the humanities, if there is one, must be to
detail, summarize, and critically evaluate the march of civilization,
with the aim of preparing people to consciously participate in that advance,
franchised as fully as possible.
Naturally, for most purposes the most competent and useful understanding
of the shaping of a people (and its civilization) is gained from the inside:
living with its idiom, religion, art, music, literature, and lore; learning
its past and its accumulated wisdom from grandmother's knee; and
finally, armed with all this and much more—the stuff that “specialists”
call “culture”—studying its history.
Outsiders are invariably restricted to a more limited, distorted view,
generally obtained from incomplete, fragmented, unrepresentative, prosaic
sources, often poorly understood. Those who would overcome as much of
this handicap as possible will search for the largest accumulation of
evidence on which to base their interpretation. The scholars who scour
the Middle East for remnants from Biblical times are noble examples. But
the starting point, whether one is an insider or an outsider—“to
draw up the real, profane history of men in every century,” as Karl
Marx wrote—is to present those people “as actors and authors
of their own history.”
SNCC chairman H. Rap Brown once said, “The only relationships that
we intend to have are with those white organizations that are sympathetic.
And you know what we would say to all white organizations, sympathetic
or not? It is that they better civilize their own community. We feel like,
I quote Bernard Shaw, when he says that America is the only country that
he knows that came from barbarism to decadence without going through civilization.
So their problem, and it is a problem, is that they’ve got
to civilize their communities. Because black folks has always been civilized.”
C. L. R. James has written:
One of the great underestimations in the whole sphere of historiography
is undoubtedly the contribution of the slaves to the making of America
as a civilization. . . . Slavery is a peculiar institution not
only because of its horrors but because it was something-unto-itself.
The Southern attitude seems so often a matter of temperament—unformed
character expressing itself against a general trend in worldly affairs
which opposed the fixed investment of wealth in land and human chattel.
In other words, the South produced “personality” rather than
minds of singular or original power. But the personalities are of a singular
and sustaining force: Patrick Henry, Jefferson, Calhoun, Clay, Stonewall
Jackson, Tom Watson, Huey Long are personae who will interest the public
imagination until possibly they are surpassed by the characterization
of the lives of the obscure slaves and indigent blacks. This tends to
be the ongoing matter of interest in our own day.
Though these observers represent a minority view, increasing numbers
of scholars of every persuasion are being inevitably drawn to studying
the black experience; the past two decades have seen more written on the
subject than any previous half-century. This cannot be accidental on the
part of the outsiders; when large numbers of people take up the study
of someone else's experience, more than idle curiosity is the motive,
never mind the individual perceptions. From the time of the civil rights
explosion, more and more white people have sought lessons for their own
lives and struggles from the black experience.
One product of the upsurge in interest in the black experience was the
reappearance of published materials describing the experience of slavery
first-hand. In 1972, Greenwood Press published the first nineteen volumes
of The American Slave in two series under George Rawick's
editorship. (Volume 1, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black
Community, introduced the narrative materials in the other eighteen
books.)
The largest body of ex-slave testimony in the first two Greenwood Press
series, sixteen of the eighteen volumes of narrative materials, was collected
by employees of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Work Projects
Administration in the 1930s and deposited in the Library of Congress.
Two volumes were collected earlier and mimeographed by scholars at Fisk
University. Prior to publication in The American Slave, very few
of these materials were widely available. Since their publication a sizable
number of historians, folklorists, linguists, sociologists, psychologists,
and others have subjected the narratives to a wide variety of uses and
abuses. The present supplement of The American Slave should help
attract further attention to these sources.
Read more about this product in our downloadable
fact sheet (PDF Format). |
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