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Introduction to the Mississippi Narratives - The Once and Future History of Slavery
In recent years, no institution of American
life, with the exception of the U.S. presidency, has commanded as
much attention from historians as has slavery. Paradoxically, it
is studied as a thing-in-itself; histories of the nation generally
devote little attention to the institution other than to argue whether
it was or wasn't important to the framers of the Declaration
of Independence or the main cause of the Civil War, or whatever.
Most of the responsibility for this contradiction rests with the
consensus view that history was made by great white men. But part
of it rests with the historians of slavery, whose work only rarely
treats slavery historically. There is quantitative slavery, comparative
slavery, and local slavery; the origins of slavery are compared
and sharply debated; and so forth. Rarely do historians treat slavery
as an institution that had a long and varied life in the United
States, shaped and molded by the accidents of nature, the march
of technology, the pressure of the world market, the exhaustion
of the soil, the political needs of the slaveowners and their enemies,
and, most of all, the struggles of black people themselves for freedom.
To be sure, there are exceptions; the best recent ones are Lerone
Bennett's The Shaping of Black America, Peter Wood's
Black Majority, and John Anthony Scott's Hard Trials
on My Way.
Writers who have set out to paint a new picture
of the past by using slave sources have generally confined their
attention to the final two or three decades of the institution,
often implying, with scant documentation, that their portraits of
slave community life can be projected backward. This is an easy
rut to travel, given the scarcity of first-hand accounts of the
early years of American bondage. I believe, however, that a more
careful approach to the final antebellum decades can flesh out details
whose history can be confidently backtracked more reliably than
can most of the traits of culture and community. Combining the insights
gleaned from the narratives of former slaves with evidence from
traditional sources, we ought to be able to reconstruct the struggles
and technologies that forced a transformation from gang labor to
task labor, and countercurrents, on the large cotton plantations;
the tendency toward job specialization and its development; the
tendency of hiring out to transform itself into quasi-wage labor,
and sometimes to return to the plantation in this form; and the
trend, as the slave labor system collapsed, for striking plantation
hands to demand, and sometimes win, wages for their labor. Turning
our analysis to the process of production will permit us to show
how the slaves applied the collective will derived from their family,
community, religious, and cultural life to transforming not just
their own social group, but the society that enslaved them as well.
That demonstration will bring us a great deal closer to the task
assigned us by C. L. R. James: revealing the role of the
slaves in the making of the modern world.
Pursuit of this history will place us squarely
at odds with C. Vann Woodward, who told the Organization of American
Historians that black people.
should receive all the credit they have been
denied. But during the greater part of the struggle for power and
place and fame that make up so much of history, black men were kept
in chains and illiteracy and subject thereafter to crippling debasement
and deprivation. The number of landmarks and monuments they were
able to leave on the history of their country was necessarily limited.
With history thus defined, Woodward's
prejudice against “celebrating ever more obscure and deservedly
neglected figures of the past” informs the mock respect he
expressed for the WPA narratives in his American Historical Review
article. Moreover, his scholarly standards, at least those he applies
to others, reinforce his white southern legacy. Woodward believes
that historians qualify themselves by “mastering” the
literature in the field—by demonstrating a familiarity with
all prior literature in any particular area of historical interest.
I do not agree. I think that one of the greatest burdens facing
historians of slavery is the requirement that each and every one
assimilate and critically discuss so much trash. This has two debilitating
effects: it delays for months or years a student's chance to
get on with important work, and it habituates the student to past
historical prejudices as a norm and a standard against which to
measure his or her own product.
I believe we should retire a number of books
from active duty. Hereafter, students of slavery can be taught their
essentials from review essays; enough copies will survive in libraries
to satisfy special needs, like, say, studies of racism in U.S. historiography.
My candidates for immediate retirement are: Ulrich B. Phillips,
American Negro Slavery; Stanley Elkins, Slavery; and
Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross.
Others would be added to the list as they are superseded. Surely,
even the strictest paring will leave behind enough marginal material
on which to hone the critical faculties.
If this suggestion were to prevail, not only
would historians be liberated from their anachronistic albatross;
publishers, too, would be able to devote themselves to propagating
the creativity of the present rather than the dead weight of the
past. History, as a humanities discipline, would reflect a dignity
that only literature has so far achieved—the propagation of
classics and the dismissal of unworthy efforts.
The profitability of outmoded histories of
slavery is well established, however, and so there is a new edition
of Elkins’ book. In a lengthy essay, the author attempts to
answer many of his critics and remove some of the tarnish from Slavery.
He notes that the current discussion of slavery focuses on culture
and resistance, while his own work dwells on damage to the slaves.
With clever sleight- of-hand he equates oppression with damage,
and then contends that his work should stay on the shelf because
“any theory” of slavery “that is worth anything”
must allow for damage.
Elkins has harsh remarks for two books based
on slave sources, Blassingame's The Slave Community
and Rawick's From Sundown to Sunup. He concludes his
comments about the former with the comment that if the slaves were
as successful as Blassingame argued, “perhaps the entire subject
of slavery is less important than we thought.” It is a curiously
perverse mind, it seems to me, that considers slavery worthy of
study only to the extent that it debased its victims.
Elkins points out that Rawick incorrectly rendered
the name of white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. If Elkins
had paid as much attention to Higginson's teachings as he did
to Higginson's name, he might have reconsidered his own argument
about slavery. One of the most powerful rebuttals to Elkins’
“Sambo thesis” is found in Higginson's book Army
Life in a Black Regiment:
I cannot conceive what people at the North
mean by speaking of the negroes as a bestial or brutal race. Except
in some insensibility to animal pain, I never knew of an act in
my regiment which I should call brutal. In reading Kay's “Condition
of the English Peasantry” I was constantly struck with the
unlikeness of my men to those therein described. This could not
proceed from my prejudices as an abolitionist, for they would have
led me the other way, and indeed I had once written a little essay
to show the brutalizing influences of slavery. I learned to think
that we abolitionists had underrated the suffering produced by slavery
among the negroes, but had overrated the demoralization. Or rather,
we did not know how the religious temperament of the negroes had
checked the demoralization.
Elkins was also distressed about the claim
that the abolitionist movement was a product of the black community.
He writes: “There is nothing in Rawick's evidence—eighteen
volumes of it—to support such an extraordinary assertion, nor,
so far as I know, in anyone else's evidence either.” There
is already work in progress, based largely on the narratives, that
will place blacks at the center of abolitionism in Mississippi,
a movement hitherto ignored by historians. Other historians using
ex-slave testimony, particularly C. L. R. James and John
Anthony Scott, have drawn conclusion similar to Rawick's.
Lawrence D. Reddick, architect of the slave
interviewing project, wrote, in 1937, that
there are but two aspects of the field unexplored.
First, there is need for a thorough study of the attempts to break
the system by the slaves through suicide, flight, individual resistance
and group insurrection. Secondly, there is not yet a picture of
the institution as seen through the eyes of the bondsman himself.
Herbert Aptheker quoted this passage in the
introduction to American Negro Slave Revolts, the book which
took up the first of the tasks set forth by Reddick. For thirty-three
years Aptheker's work has weathered criticisms from every quarter;
it remains the definitive and preeminent treatment of the subject.
The second of Reddick's proposals did
not fare so well, despite the fact that he had already taken steps
himself to implement it three years earlier. For thirty-five years
the WPA narratives were rarely used. Since the publication of the
first series by Greenwood in 1972, they have been cited by scholars
with increasing regularity, but often in a thoroughly distorted
manner. The very size and complexity of the collection provide a
refuge for scoundrels as well as a potential force for truth. Then,
just as it seemed that the needed work was about to begin in earnest,
Time on the Cross appeared, diverting the attention of the
best scholars for nearly two years to its refutation. That interlude
is now mercifully behind us, and, with luck, the most revealing
studies will soon appear.
No longer can anyone seriously argue about
whether to use the evidence provided by former slaves. That
debate has been won. The discussion now proceeds to matters of substance;
historians are finally on the verge of writing the history of African
slavery in the United States. After that is done, the whole panorama
of the past can enter the popular imagination, as a rule mediated
by novels and film.
The tension between history and historical
fiction creates, as its offspring, legend, myth, song, drama, and
lore. In these domains, humans made of ordinary flesh and blood
are transformed into heroic figures, larger than life. These in
turn are reified and become part of the present and the future as
later generations strive to emulate them. Thus, the theft of a people's
past costs a great deal more than a few missing history texts.
Of course, no one's history can be completely
eliminated, and works like Black Thunder by Arna Bontemps
and Jubilee by Margaret Walker provide proof, if any is needed,
of the magnificent future that is in store. Nearly a century ago
Americans thrilled to Huckleberry Finn's duel with his conscience
and his final capitulation to sin—he will run away with Jim,
a slave, rather than return him to Miss Watson, his owner. Today
the picture is quite different. The largest share of the slavery
budget is being banked by Kyle Onstott, author of Mandingo
and Drum, and his imitators.
In Mandingo, Hammond Maxwell's
greatest triumph is the defeat of his own humanity. He vomits while
Agamemnon is being whipped and cries afterward, but he hardens himself
into a cruel master. Lest any reader mistakenly believe that the
intended message is the barbarism of the slaveowners, a publisher's
note reassures us that the system wasn't their fault. “Ten
years of intensive research” by Onstott produced slaves indistinguishable
from those of Elkins. The sequel, Drum, climaxes with the
heroic Drumson sacrificing his life to save Hammond Maxwell's
life by fiercely fighting to defeat a rebellion of his fellow slaves.
The Cuban film El Otro Francisco is
the finest recent example of a fictional but accurate portrayal
of the slave experience; Ganga Zumba places the heroism of
Palmares, the Brazilian maroon nation, on the screen. But U.S. slaves
still await their due, despite efforts ranging from Mandingo
and Drum to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.*
It is by our literature and theater that we
measure our souls, and the current readings are not favorable. We
hope that in publishing the narratives of former Mississippi slaves
we can help turn the tide.
The WPA narratives provide the view from the
bottom of society—the side that is usually left out of history
books. Historians of the last years of slavery, the Civil War, the
Reconstruction era, the triumph of Reaction, and all the years through
the Great Depression, will find a gold mine here—largely untapped
documents representing a century of human existence, suffering and
survival.
Very little in the WPA collection illuminates
the early frontier years in Mississippi; these are the lives of
those who experienced slavery, freedom, and near reenslavement.
Historians of the early years will not get much help here, but those
who study the century following the 1830s will find these narratives
indispensable. More can be learned about the pattern of forced migration,
Old South to New, from these documents than from any other source,
an investigation well suited to both traditional and quantitative
methods.
French provincial archives indicate that slave
imports from Africa began early in the eighteenth century, and the
interviews collected along the Gulf Coast by WPA workers reveal
that the illegal African slave trade operated until the bitter end
of slavery. Other WPA writings say that the seaside home of pioneer
historian J. F. H. Claiborne had cages for keeping Africans
until they were “tamed,” and white testimony in the WPA
collection describes the slaving pirates who hid out in secluded
bays nearby smuggling in fresh human cargoes from Africa. A close
look at these materials, perhaps enhanced by a first-hand review
of coastal folklore, will probably indicate a much stronger and
more recent and sustained injection of African ways into Mississippi
than historians following Charles Sydnor have previously been willing
to admit.
No one has written the history of abolitionism
in Mississippi, one of the most exciting episodes in the state's
history. When someone does write it, the memoirs of former slaves
will provide much of the fact, flesh, color, and romance of the
story. The tortured oscillations of the freedom struggle—from
interracial to separatist, from open to underground, from reformist
to revolutionary—cannot be adequately told without reference
to the narratives.
Charles Sydnor's book Slavery in Mississippi
is the only monograph on the subject, and as Carter G. Woodson showed
when it first appeared, it is entirely inadequate. As the only widely
available secondary source, it supplies most of the information
about Mississippi that creeps into general studies of slavery in
the United States. At the time Sydnor was writing his book, there
were more than twice as many ex-slaves alive in Mississippi as there
were when the WPA interviewers sought them out; yet, he apparently
felt he could adequately tell their story without consulting a single
one. The only slave narrative he used as a source was that of William
Wells Brown. Virtually every estimate he made of the institution
will be radically revised when a new history incorporates the testimony
of the system's victims.
The main effect, however, will not be on Sydnor's
book, which should have been put out to pasture long ago. General
histories will probably receive the largest jolt from these “new”
sources. African slavery in Mississippi dates from the second decade
of the eighteenth century. By the time abolition was a significant
political force nationally, Mississippi was a pivotal slave state.
Its political significance grew to match its economic importance,
providing the Confederacy with its president and one of the decisive
battles of the Civil War. But Mississippi, where cotton was king
and thriving, fueled by the forced marches of thousands of black
men and women, received scant attention from most of the slavery
specialists, far less than parts of the South where agriculture
based on slavery was leveling off or declining. When the pieces
are all in place, the picture that emerges will certainly be more
complex and turbulent than any of those that now appear in the standard
texts.
Our find was announced in the June 30, 1973,
issue of SCEF Notes, in Joseph Delaney's article “Slaves’
Narratives Give Accounts of Slavery in Interesting Book” in
the November 9, 1973, issue of Muhammad Speaks (a review
of From Sundown to Sunup), and in an article entitled “Oral
History of Slavery” in the Winter 1974 issue of Southern
Exposure.
Very quickly a number of historians and educators
began to incorporate these materials into their writings and curricula.
For example, the highly acclaimed ninth-grade history text Mississippi:
Conflict and Change makes good use of one of the narratives
from the Mississippi Writers’ Project collection. (This is
the book that the Mississippi State Textbook Purchasing Board refused
to approve for use in the schools.) Graduate and undergraduate historians
began mining this collection even before C. Vann Woodward advised
them to bring their buckets to this well. Though our goal of massively
popularizing the life experiences of ordinary people—in this
instance, the slaves—remains elusive, we are pleased that so
much has been accomplished already and confident that publishing
the entire collection constitutes another milestone on the journey.
*This section was sufficient
at the time it was written, but the subsequent appearance of Alex Haley's
Roots (both the written and televised versions) requires an adjustment.
At a minimum, the success of Haley's enterprise reveals the enormous
potential for the redemption of American culture, particularly once a
proper foundation has been laid. Despite the range of criticism aimed
at Roots, the masses have registered their approval on the level
that capitalism understands best. News reports have quoted Haley as ranking
his achievement with the Holy Bible as a literary classic. The irony of
his prediction is that a worse fate is hard to imagine: if Haley is right,
it will be because he has failed to ignite a renaissance, but if he is
wrong, Roots will be remembered as “merely” the first
sign of an unprecedented cultural revival in the United States.
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