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SLAVE NARRATIVES

As part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) work relief programs, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) conducted interviews with former slaves that continue to have a major impact on the scholarly studies of slavery and on the portrayal of slavery in the popular culture. A group of ex-slave interviews submitted to the national FWP office by the Florida project in March of 1937 led to the establishment of a nationally directed interview program with former slaves. John Lomax, the first FWP folklore editor, encouraged field workers "to get the Negro talking about the days of slavery." Several months later, Henry Alsberg, national FWP director, added several new questions to Lomax's instructions. Alsberg asked interviewers to also focus on life since 1865—what the former slaves hoped freedom would mean and what they actually experienced. He wanted to ensure that the interviews were more than nostalgic tales of contented plantation slaves—a tradition that helped justify the southern caste system.

With the support of Sterling Brown, national FWP Negro Affairs editor, and B. A. Botkin, Lomax's successor as national folklore editor, the Washington, D.C., office worked to obtain a black perspective to help inform the study of slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction. They hoped not only to obtain a better understanding of the past, but also to contribute to reopening the issue of race relations since the Civil War. They envisioned making these interviews available to general readers. They also saw these interviews as a new form of literature, folklore, and history in which the narrators, the former slaves, became their own historians, offering their own interpretation of the past, what Botkin called "folk history." Although the relationship between the civil rights movement, black nationalism, and the social upheavals of the 1960s and the new social history and revitalization of slavery studies in the 1970s is frequently recognized, much less attention has been given to connections between the study of slavery and the cultural programs of the New Deal and the ideological dimensions of World War II for New Dealers.

PUBLIC AND SCHOLARLY RECEPTION OF THE FWP EX-SLAVE NARRATIVES

Although the FWP ended before any of the interviews with former slaves could be published, historians have long been aware of these materials. Under Botkin's direction, the interviews were evaluated, inventoried, and deposited in the Library of Congress. In 1945, Botkin edited Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, an easily available collection of FWP interviews. Nevertheless, historians showed little interest in this material before the 1960s. In part this was because some historians did not question the plantation tradition, but even the increasing number of historians who did question it were slow to use the FWP interviews. They privileged written documents as objective and reliable over oral and folklore materials, which they regarded as subjective and untrustworthy. They thought of memory as individual and as only a matter of accurate recall, rather than as contested, communal, and socially constructed. Thus, although Lay My Burden Down was widely reviewed in the nation's newspapers and hailed by many, historians virtually ignored it.

In the opinion of many of these reviewers, the combination of folklore and oral history made the former slave narratives a contribution to American literature, as well as to American history. Like the FWP officials, the reviewers did not privilege one genre over the other or see them as mutually exclusive. They recognized that the narratives of former slaves could introduce readers to voices they had seldom heard or listened to. They understood that those voices associated with the romantic plantation tradition that had dominated public discussion regarding slavery were now being answered. Liberal reviewers interpreted the memories and lore they found in the narratives as a valuable part of an ongoing struggle to combat racism and segregation in the contemporary United States, especially in light of the end of a war for freedom and democracy and the results of the genocidal racism of Nazi Germany. They were working to make the black experience part of a more widely shared national memory of American history as a struggle for freedom. Most reviewers in southern newspapers saw the narratives as an attack on the plantation tradition, as an attempt to question contemporary race relations, and they reacted by denouncing the narratives as unreliable and folklore as irrelevant. It would be another generation before academic historians began to use these materials, and then with little knowledge or interest in the FWP's goals.

Despite the growing challenge to the authority of scholarly versions of the plantation tradition in the period since the end of World War II, influential studies using the FWP interviews with former slaves did not appear until the 1970s. Without a sense of the role oral tradition can play in a community, or of the usefulness of oral history interviews in studying the past, most historians dismissed the folklore in the FWP slave narratives as failing traditional tests of validity. Looking over the historiography of slavery in the period from World War II to 1970, historian Nathan Huggins argued that, given the problematic status historians assigned these FWP interviews, any historians who used them would have found the professional authority of their work compromised.

Only in the 1970s when scholars became interested in slave culture did they begin to carefully examine the FWP interviews and chart new directions in the history of American slavery. With the publication of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography in 1972 (and subsequent supplemental volumes) under the editorship of George Rawick, these materials become easily accessible to historians. Historian David Brion Davis has called the publication of the entire FWP collection one of the major turning points in the post-World War II historiography of slavery. Along with this renewed interest there developed a scholarly literature on the validity and challenges of using this material. Initially this discussion focused on the representativeness and reliability of the interviews. In time the discussion broadened to include a debate over the role of oral tradition and folklore in these materials. Still, only a few historians have begun to treat the interviewees, interviewers, and FWP officials as historians contributing to the study of slavery, not merely the creators of a source for professional historians to mine.

SCHOLARLY AND PUBLIC USES OF THE EX-SLAVE NARRATIVES

Regarding the questions of representativeness and reliability, it must be noted that while the former slave narrative collection represented all types of slave occupations, the collection was not conducted on a scientifically random basis. Local fieldworkers chose interviewees on the basis of previous contact and geographical proximity. The slave experience in the upper South and the border states is underrepresented. Very few of the ex-slaves who were interviewed were more than fifteen years old when the Civil War began. It has been estimated that only two percent of the former slave population in the United States at the time was interviewed.

Historians have pointed out that the vast majority of the interviewers were white and worked in their local communities in the South in the 1930s during an era when economic depression, disfranchisement, and violent racial intimidation were a pervasive part of everyday life. The interviews, and FWP correspondence, provide ample evidence that most of these fieldworkers accepted the plantation tradition as fact and a segregated racial order as just. Drawn from the relief rolls, few interviewers had any experience relevant to interviewing. They often failed to pursue important topics and asked leading questions designed to confirm their preconceptions. In addition, former slaves interviewed by the FWP were frequently living in an abject poverty that in many areas of the South was demonstrably worse than what they had known in slavery. They often assumed their interviewers were government employees who could help them materially. Too often the interviewers did nothing to dispel these misconceptions. The interviews indicate that some interviewers were the direct descendants of individuals who had owned the interviewees. Given these factors, it has been argued that the interviews are biased toward a paternalistic view of slavery.

Comparing the small number of interviews conducted by blacks with those done by whites, scholars have discovered that interviewees talked more openly with black interviewers than they did with whites about attitudes toward slavery, their former masters, punishments, family customs, and other topics. Furthermore, white women interviewers received more open responses than did white men. Material dealing with kinship relations and slave culture appears to have been less affected by the race of the interviewer than other topics. Finally, the written transcripts of these interviews provide ample evidence that they are rarely verbatim accounts and have been heavily edited by either the interviewers or FWP officials. White editors tended to find interviews that contained accounts of cruel treatment as untrustworthy and in at least several instances deleted such material. Although few historians would advocate disregarding the interviews for the above reasons, they have pointed out that the interviews need to be used with an awareness of their strengths and limitations, as is always the case with historical sources.

FWP officials understood that in the interviews with former slaves, they were challenging not only traditional scholarly authority, but also the role of scholarship in democratic public discourse and the role of those interviewed in interpreting the past. As historians drawing on oral history and folklore theory continue to analyze these interviews, they are increasingly focusing on issues that FWP officials first raised, such as the collaborative effort that goes on between interviewer and interviewee in creating an oral history, the value of the subjective perspective of historical actors, and the role of oral tradition and folklore in creating individual and group memory.

Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation marked a return to many of the concerns of FWP officials, and not only provided an introduction to these interviews in the light of modern scholarship on slavery but also recognized that in the aftermath of slavery former slaves kept alive memories that contested the once dominant romanticized plantation tradition. Berlin and his colleagues' commitment to public history was manifest not only in their book, but also in their collaboration with the Smithsonian production of a radio documentary based on the transcribed interviews and on previously unavailable audio recordings of former slaves in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

New caches of interviews with former slaves continue to be discovered and there is no end in sight because not all the interviews with former slaves were sent to the national office by the state FWP units and because interest in these materials shows no sign of declining. The number of published collections of FWP slave narratives organized by state or around specific topics continues to grow. Scholars continue to pose questions that these materials can help answer about the contested negotiations between slaves and masters about family, work, religion, the material culture of the plantation, growing up as a slave, disability among slaves, and slave expressive culture. Scholars have moved beyond using these materials to describe slave culture to examining these interviews as a way of understanding slaves as both the bearers of tradition and the creators of culture. These materials still await a thorough examination regarding what they can reveal about race relations in the 1930s. Scholars are learning that these interviews are important not only for what they reveal about slavery, but also for what they have to say about lives lived in slavery and freedom—a point FWP officials had made from the beginning.

See Also: AFRICAN AMERICANS, IMPACT OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION ON; FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT (FWP); RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS; WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bailey, David T. "A Divided Prism: Two Sources of Black Testimony on Slavery." Journal of Southern History 46 (1980): 381–404.

Berlin, Ira; Marc Favreau; and Steven F. Miller; eds. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. 1998.

Blassingame, John W. "Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems." Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 473–492.

Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. edition. 1979.

Botkin, B. A. "The Slave as His Own Interpreter." Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions 2 (1944): 37–62.

Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slave's Narrative. 1985.

Davis, David Brion. "Slavery and the Post World War II Historians." Daedalus 103 (1974): 1–16.

Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. 1974.

Hirsch, Jerrold. "Foreword." In Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (1945), edited by B. A. Botkin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

Hirsch, Jerrold. Portrait of America: A Cultural History of the Federal Writers' Project. 2003.

Huggins, Nathan. Black Odyssey: The African American Ordeal in Slavery (1977). 1990.

Rawick, George P., et al., eds. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 19 vols; Supplemental Series no. 1, 12 vols.; Supplemental Series no. 2, 10 vols. 1972, 1977, 1979.

Rawick, George P. From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community. 1972.

Woodward, C. Vann. "History from Slave Sources: A Review Article." American Historical Review 79 (1974): 470–481.

Yetman, Norman R., ed. Life Under the "Peculiar Institution": Selections from the Slave Narrative Collection. 1970.

Yetman, Norman R. "Ex-Slave Interviews and the Historiography of Slavery." American Quarterly 36 (1984): 181–210.

JERROLD HIRSCH