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Introduction to the Mississippi Narratives - The Federal Writers in Mississippi
Notes and letters deposited in the National Archives reveal that the
people in Washington responsible for evaluating the ex-slave narratives
from the states were enthusiastic about the ones they received from Mississippi.
One evaluator wrote:
The narratives from the State of Mississippi are colorful, interesting
and most of them rich in description and color regarding slavery, plantation
life, and the Civil War. They were by far the most valuable and important
narratives that I accessed. Some of the narratives from Mississippi can
be used as short stories as well as material for social study of slavery
and plantation life.
Another said:
The Mississippi narratives, many of which lack names of either
field worker or editor, are among the best. They average six to eight
pages in length, and are full of information about slavery told in the
first person in a lively, interesting manner. Most of the interviewers
handle the dialect quite well and several of the narratives—such
as one by Edith Wyatt Moore—are worth reading for their colloquial
expressions alone. Some of the interviewers’ comments are patronizing
and detract from the work.
Writing about the entire WPA collection of ex-slave interviews, Benjamin
Botkin wrote:
In the absence of full information about the informants and
the interviewers, our impressions or opinions of reliability are themselves
unreliable. The only valid tests of reliability are the tests of evidence,
such as competence of the witness, internal consistency and consistency
with historical facts and common sense. In the present instance, however,
the interviewer is as important as the informant, and we have no direct
way of checking on either.
If he had added editors and rewriters to his list of imponderables, he
would have covered all bases. Historians who compare early, unedited versions
of narratives with their final versions in Washington can address some
of the doubts he raised.
The Federal Writers’ Project in Mississippi was headed by Eri Douglass,
who was working on her doctorate in English at George Washington University
(Washington, D.C.) at the time. The writers on her staff ranged in background
from students on their first job to well-known and experienced writers
and journalists. All of them, Douglass wrote, were “certified relief
cases.” (This and other quotes that follow in this section are taken
from letter found in the WPA papers at the Mississippi Department of Archives
and History.)
There is no telling how many of the writers were hired for political
reasons. A letter to the Jackson office offers a clue. Ruby Huff of Summerland
had been laid off in November 1936, possibly as a result of reclassifications
around the time of the presidential election. She wrote, in December:
“My friend and ex-neighbor Hon. Pat Harrison assures me that my work
is to continue as prior to November 1st. I am sure you are going to do
all you can and I shall thank you for I am anxious to begin again.”
Senator Harrison, of course, was one of the country's most powerful
politicians.
Some were not so lucky. Minnie S. Holt apparently was laid off after
finishing her interview with Polly Turner Cancer in July 1937. A year
later she complained, “it seems that nearly everybody is being put
back to work except me.” The rest of her letter to Eri Douglass is
a combination of flattery and bitterness.
Earlier, Rose M. Wells had fared better than Minnie Holt, but she, too,
wasn't satisfied.
I confess myself to have been surprised and disappointed that
I did not receive the ranking of a SKILLED worker. Some of my Relief clients,
with very little education or background of any kind, have been assigned
to cafeteria work and will receive $46 per month. . . .
If you can, I shall be very grateful if you can make my salary $46, instead
of $42.
Aside from fragments like those, the WPA files in Mississippi contain
very little information about the men and women who conducted the interviews
with former slaves. We found biographical data on only three of them:
Edith Wyatt Moore, Marjorie Woods Austin, and William B. Allison. Allison
was not out of his element, a businessman and banker who had gone broke
in 1931, with academic training in biology. Austin of Meridian and Moore
of Natchez were both supervisors of their respective district offices
and established professional writers. It is likely that both assigned
themselves the task of interviewing the ex-slaves in order to gather material
for their literary efforts.
Edith Wyatt Moore died about the time we began working on this project,
so we were unable to get her first-hand account of the work. She had been
well known in Natchez, especially for her book Natchez-Under-the-Hill.
According to her WPA vita, she was born and raised in Georgia; her family
was close to a number of southern white literary figures—Henry Grady,
Joel Chandler Harris, Frank L. Stanton, and Corra Harris. At eighteen,
she became a correspondent for the Chattanooga News and sold verse
to Hearst's Magazine, edited by Tom Watson. She traveled widely
in the United States and abroad and wrote for the Chicago Tribune,
the New York Times, and many of the large southern newspapers.
She moved to Natchez in the early 1930s and quickly earned a reputation
as a historian. In 1933, the Natchez Association of Commerce sent her
to tell the Congressional Roads Committee the history of the Natchez Trace,
testimony which may have been instrumental in persuading Congress to appropriate
money for the Natchez Trace Parkway. In several letters, she complained
that her work was “plagiarized” by Catherine Vancourt, author
of In Old Natchez, and “copped” by many others, including
Stark Young in So Red the Rose.
Marjorie Woods Austin is still living in Meridian. According to her WPA
vita, she was born there on February 2, 1892, the only child of “a
doting family rather noted for sticking its nose in the air and being
generally pleased with its ancestors and otherwhat.” Her father
was the ruling element in my youth, seeing to it that I had
ponies to ride as soon as I could sit a horse, that I should never miss
a Sunday School session nor go to a dance, should finish at an expensive
Southern college (Brenau, 1912) and allowed me to select between
further study at university or abroad. I chose the latter, doing two glorious
years of free-lancing in literature, languages, folk-ways and music in
Paris, Leipzig, Rome, Florence, London and Glascow, returning home one
month before the outbreak of the World War in 1914.
After that, she
expended her energies on every sort of cultural jimcrack (always
provided the lure of originality were present) that the age afforded;
only to find at the end of that time (along with the generous father's
increasing age and declining earning capacity) that a diet of glory is
not fattening and that when people get ready to pay real money for a dramatic
producer or lecturer on Art or Literature or pretty nearly any other subject
under heaven, they will seldom consider one whose services they have long
had free of charge; besides, they'd rather get somebody from St.
Louis or somewhere.
The “cultural jimcracks” included “an endless succession
of ambitious choreographs” and helping to launch Meridian Little
Theater. Her poetry appeared in Poetry World and other periodicals,
and in several anthologies.
She lived for nine months in the Canal Zone with her husband, and then
returned to business as usual in Meridian.
When her father's health and business collapsed in 1932, she went
to work for the government, and a succession of jobs and layoffs led her
to the Federal Writers’ Project. Jan Hillegas interviewed Marjorie
Woods Austin at her home on March 24, 1974: “When I was coming along,
young ladies had to be ‘finished.’ I was sent to Europe to be
finished, and when I came home, that was just two or three weeks before
the first World War broke out.”
How did she happen to go to work for the Writers’ Project?
It was a job, my child. It was depression. You people
don't realize in the least what that meant, not in the least—especially
in my case, because I’m sure my father thought he was giving me the
best education a young lady could have. But I was educated for the drawing
room, not for making a living; nobody knew there was going to be a depression.
She gave out the assignments. One writer got the Indians, another got
cotton mills. She took the ex-slave assignment, one of the very last,
for herself. How did she locate former slaves?
Well, I talked a lot about my project, and being a native, I
knew everybody. Meridian's no great size now, but it was much smaller
then. You will find in the South, as a rule—I say it used to be,
things have changed a lot, you know—but when I was coming along anybody
who had any early associations with the antebellum South was just delighted
to talk about it and tell you things. I knew about these people, these
Negroes; one I knew personally. Such-and-such a family had a slave and
the thing to do was to locate them, see if they were still living, and
get a member of the family interested enough to locate the subject and
go to see him—tell him that a lady wanted to come to see him to get
him to tell her the way things were when he was young.
How were the interviews done?
It had to be remembered constantly that all of these ex-slaves
were quite old and mostly quite simple people. They weren't like
our Negroes today, no initiative. So I went myself; everything was personal
contact. Everything in them is there because of my questions. None of
them had any initiative at all, as you can well imagine. If a stranger
were to come to you and say “Now, tell me all about your childhood,”
or something, you wouldn't know where to begin.
I took shorthand, as unobtrusively as possible. Some of them were a little
skittish about being written down. The voodoo sense is very strong, was
at that time. Some of them were very proud to be written about. Very often
when answering the question it would remind the subject of something else,
and it was those bits which really gave the color.
I had to formulate my own questions. They made a few suggestions, things
they were especially interested in: we want to be sure to find out any
special medicinal herbs that are used, and special customs of that kind.
But that was all; it was very little.
She said she included everything she was told, only rearranging it. She
had saved copies of three of the interviews and recalled details about
those ex-slaves.
Did you read the one on Nettie Henry? I kept a copy of it, had
a copy made for myself, because it was of interest to the family, and
it did quite a bit of traveling. Different members of the family scattered
over the country had a ball with it—they'd have parties and
read it to their Northern friends. They found it entertaining. Nettie
was a very high class colored lady, and she hired herself out on special
grand occasions when they needed expert serving and extra help, things
like that. So she'd been to the parties and all the family affairs
that I knew about, and she mentions members of my family.
The most historical one—that would be of interest to you, I would
think—would be old Sam McAllum. The Kemper County riot was mentioned
in that. When I went to see Sam he was living in a cottage back of the
Currie home at the outskirts of Meridian. Mrs. Currie had been out to
see him and told him I was coming. He was quite an old gentleman. So I
asked him how it all started, and he looked at me mighty hard. He said,
“You won't get mad with me, little Miss, if I tell you?”
I said, “No.” He said, “It all started on account of a
yellow woman.” It's all there.
A time or two I had to go out in the country, and I went with a carful
of people, but they didn't go in with me. I remember I went out to
see old Sam Broach; he belonged to a well-known family here. He was quite
old, and it petered out into his telling me about the dancing they used
to do. He began to pat and sing a little, and that was the end of it.
I never did get any more out of him. But he went to the war with the two
young Broach men; he said on cold winter nights he'd crawl right
up betwixt them.
Nettie Henry, LC version
Nettie Henry, Mississippi supplement
Sam McAllum, LC version
Sam McAllum, Mississippi supplement
Sam Broach, Mississippi supplement
In addition to the three narratives, Marjorie Woods Austin saved a play
she wrote based on one of her interviews, “The Cunger Bag.”
She didn't remember other WPA workers who interviewed former slaves,
except for William B. Allison, who worked out of her office. But she did
recall Eri Douglass:
Eri Douglass was somewhat Old Maidy. She became quite upset
with me at the end of the project, I remember. You know the Mississippi
Guide, of course. When it came out they were very proud of it. But
I nearly got lynched here in Meridian, because I had worried hundreds
of people about this project, you know, made their lives a burden, to
extract the last drop of information from them.
When the book came out, Meridian was represented by a picture of the Burnley
shirt factory. They were angry because when they came here there wasn't
any business. Any business that could be coaxed to come here was offered
all manner of inducements; I happen to know those inducements extended
to the Superintendent of Public Schools telling all of the teachers that
it would be nice if they would give ten per cent of their salary to Burnley
Shirt Company. Well, everybody loathed the Burnley shirt factory. And
for Meridian, after all they'd been through and all I'd laid
it on, to be represented by the picture of the Burnley shirt factory,
ooooh!
Of course Miss Douglass didn't realize that, but it was true, and
I never was any hand at telling lies. Miss Douglass said, “Maybe
we'd better not have any more Federal Writers’ Project in Meridian.”
She got quite huffy about it.
Jan Hillegas was interested in a letter in which Austin had protested
the dialect instructions, submitted along with Charlie Bell's narrative.
We don't realize, of course, here, how we talk. It was
borne in on me very forcibly one time in crossing the Atlantic; I was
with two college mates. We were going over together, and there were some
nice young men on shipboard we'd become acquainted with and enjoyed
knowing. They were overheard talking to the purser, tried to get the purser
to persuade the captain to “put those Mississippi girls at our table.”
They said, “They’re good as a play. They talk just like blacks.”
Which is true, to their ear, you know.
She recalled Charlie Bell calling her “Madam”: “They’re
very ceremonious as a race, Negroes are. Very. They have a strong sense
of dignity and ceremony.”
Charlie Bell, Mississippi supplement
Dialect instructions
Marjorie Woods Austin retired in 1964. She lives alone but has many friends
and enjoys “reading” tape-recorded books (she can no longer
see well), listening to the news, and discussing politics.
We tried unsuccessfully to find and interview other Mississippi writers
who had participated in the ex-slave interview assignment. We learned
about a handful who had either died or left the state. We were unable
to find a trace of most of them. The interview with Marjorie Woods Austin
is very revealing and suggests sources of both strengths and weaknesses
in the collection. She cannot be considered a typical interviewer, however—at
least not without further evidence. In 1973, the editors of the Virginia
narratives interviewed six of the Federal Writers’ Project workers
who had collected ex-slave interviews, but, as reported in Weevils
in the Wheat, they learned more about their techniques from WPA records
than from interviews. In any case the Virginia situation, with a mostly
black staff, was far from typical. We hope others will locate and interview
writers elsewhere who participated in the project before it's too
late.
Each interviewer approached the slave narrative assignment differently.
Edith Wyatt Moore and Marjorie Woods Austin, both district supervisors
and experienced writers, sought detail and color and encouraged the ex-slaves
to volunteer anecdotes. Black writers Will Strong and Ethel Fleming stressed
the political, professional, or business achievements of the former slaves
they wrote about. Ed Hopkins used the excuse of writing about ex-slaves
to concentrate on the masters and to locate them in Lowndes County society.
These tend to be the extremes, and the collection includes all shades,
variants, and combinations of these approaches as well as many who simply
followed Washington's suggested questions as though they were conducting
a Gallup poll.
Read more about this product in our downloadable
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