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ISBN 978-0-8078-1343-0

Published: Fall 1988

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Copyright (c) 1988 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Introduction:
The Narratives as a Source

The primary sources for this book are slave narratives, specifically the Federal Writers' Project Slave Narratives and two collections of narratives produced by researchers at Fisk University. These represent three of the six different projects undertaken in this century to interview former slaves before their death. Aside from the published nineteenth-century narratives that have been used very effectively by John Blassingame, these narratives constitute the most important body of interviews with former slaves, and the interviews studied in this book comprise a large majority of the total.[1]

The earliest attempt to interview former slaves came at Fisk University in Tennessee in 1927. A. P. Watson, a graduate student in anthropology who worked under the guidance of Dr. Paul Radin, set out to gather the religious conversion experiences and autobiographical accounts of former slaves. After two years of careful labor, he had compiled transcripts of interviews with one hundred individuals. As Watson was completing his work, another researcher at Fisk, Mrs. Ophelia Settle Egypt of the Social Science Institute, was beginning a separate interview project. In 1929 and 1930 she contacted more than one hundred former slaves and later made thirty-seven transcripts available as "Social Science Source Documents."[2]

At Southern University in Louisiana, historian John B. Cade was also pursuing interviews in 1929. His article, "Out of the Mouths of Ex-Slaves," published in The Journal of Negro History in 1935, reflects part of this work. But the records of approximately four hundred interviews conducted later with former slaves in thirteen states have never been published and no longer seem to be available. Still another collection of interviews developed with federal support under the supervision of Lawrence D. Reddick. In 1934 about 250 interviews took place in Indiana and Kentucky, and these remain in Dr. Reddick's possession.[3]

By far the largest set of interviews, however, came out of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. Between 1936 and 1938 federal authorities organized teams of interviewers in seventeen states who gathered the recollections of over two thousand former slaves. The typescript of these interviews, running to more than ten thousand pages, was deposited in the Library of Congress and has been avilable on microfiche for many years. In 1972 the Greenwood Publishing Company published the typescript, plus the two Fisk projects, in nineteen volumes under the title, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. The editor, George P. Rawick, wisely refrained from editing, and as a result scholars can examine the text of the typescript with its original revisions and emendations.[4] The Virginia Federal Writers' Project had held back most of its records for the preparation of a separate book, entitled The Negro in Virginia; consequently, few of those interviews appeared in the federal collection. Through the vigorous detective work of Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, many of the interviews have been recovered and published, along with valuable comments on editorial changes and distortions, as Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves.[5]

What are these narratives like? The two Fisk collections differ substantially. Ophelia Settle Egypt's interviews, entitled "Unwritten History of Slavery," take the form of verbal autobiographies ranging from three to seventeen typed pages. Most are several pages or more in length, however, and of consistently good quality. The conversion experiences gathered by A. P. Watson are short and focus almost entirely on religious belief; six useful autobiographies are also included in his volume. The Federal Writers' Project produced quite a variety of written interviews. Some are short, filling only a page or two, while others go into considerable depth. The typical interview might cover four or five pages. Unfortunately, a few of the "writers" employed by the Federal Writers' Project took their vocational responsibilities too seriously and used each visit to a former slave as an excuse to demonstrate their literary creativity and skills. Prose portraits of sharecroppers' cabins or flowery descriptions of trees and surroundings resulted from such interviews, which yielded little useful information. Most of the interviewers, however, realized that their purpose was to put down on paper what the former slaves had said, and they stuck to the subject.

To assist local workers in their interviewing, the national director of the Federal Writers' Project periodically sent out directives or detailed lists of suggestions. On 30 July 1937 Henry G. Alsberg dispatched a long memorandum containing several suggestions and a list of twenty categories of sample questions. Although interviewing was already well advanced in some states, Alsberg's memorandum seems to have become a model for many of the interviews. It urged state workers to "take the greatest care not to influence the point of view of the informant" and emphasized that "all stories should be as nearly word-for-word as is possible." Unfortunately, many of the interviewers could have taken the first suggestion more seriously, but most sought to comply with the second. Alsberg's sample questions, which were to be used "only as a basis, a beginning," covered three main areas: conditions of life in slavery, including work, food, clothing, religion, resistance, care of the sick, and relations with one's owners; experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction, including contact with the Union army or the Ku Klux Klan, first knowledge of freedom, school attendance, and land; and, more sketchily, later patterns of life, including family history and religious activities. Certain questions held great potential for throwing light on black attitudes and culture. For example, one question asked, "How did slaves carry news from one plantation to another?" Among the other inquiries were the following: "Did the slaves have a church on your plantation? … Did the slaves ever run away to the North? Why? … What do you think of voodoo? … What medicine (herbs, leaves, or roots) did the slaves use for sickness? … What happened on the day news came that you were free? What did your master say and do?"[6] These questions provided an underlying structure for many of the narratives and suggest the potential value of the information elicited.

But for many years reluctance to use the narratives or suspicion about their value left these sources virtually untapped. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, one of the pioneer students of American slavery, dismissed the narratives. "The lapse of decades has impaired inevitably the memories of men," he wrote, and therefore "the asseverations of … aged survivors are generally unsafe even in supplement."[7] Historians discarded the explicit racism that permeated Phillips's work long before they reconsidered his attitude toward the narratives. Not until Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll, published in 1974, did a major study of slavery make extensive use of these slave sources. Widespread doubts about their value and character remain today.

There are, in fact, many problems that must be overcome in the use of the slave narratives. A common objection is that the informants were too old at the time of their interviews to give a reliable recollection of events. Memories are fallible, and in the 1930s the former slaves were recalling events of seventy or eighty years before. Yet, it is also true that the brain records and preserves the events of an individual's life and that older people often dwell more in memory than the young. Recent studies have shown that aging does not impair the recollection of the elderly, despite society's common assumption that it does. Failing health is associated with loss of memory and intellectual function at any age, but there is no necessary connection between age and memory loss. Some authorities contend that intellectual function improves with age.[8] Furthermore, it seems likely that people would remember events that took place at critical junctures in their lives. Just as individuals in modern America remember their wedding days or graduations and family births or deaths, former slaves would be able to recall the day of jubilee when freedom came or the tragic selling of a relative. It should not be exceptionally difficult for historians, who are trained in the critical use of sources, to watch for more recent attitudes that might taint the recollection of an early event or to separate common knowledge and shared impressions from the actual experiences of an individual. This author has tried to do these things and, to minimize the dangers arising from second-or third-hand testimony, has excluded from aggregations of data all events that did not occur on the slave's own plantation. Unhappily, this decision might have excluded important occurrences that a wary informant attributed to a nearby plantation, but pitfalls exist on all sides. In the end each reader will have to judge the success of the author's methods, which are explained in greater detail in Appendix A.

The most formidable problem encountered in using the narratives is the problem of candor. The Civil Rights Movement was decades beyond the horizon in the 1930s when former slaves were interviewed, and southern blacks lived in the grip of a system of segregation that was nearly as oppressive as slavery. Old, poor, and dependent, they were trying to stay alive while the nation's economy lurched sickeningly through its most serious crisis. They could not afford to alienate local white people or agents of the federal government, which might provide them with vital relief or an old-age pension. All the rules of racial etiquette had to be observed, and the informant had to give priority to appeasing his interviewer rather than telling the truth about the past. Thus some of the former slaves pulled their punches.

Reverend Ishrael Massie, for example, frankly asserted, "I ain't tellin' white folks nuthin' 'cause I'm skeer'd to make enemies," and Jennie Patterson admitted that "even now in dis new day an' time" she carefully rationed what she told white folks. Perhaps Martin Jackson described the problem most eloquently when he said, "Lots of old slaves closes the door before they tell the truth about their days of slavery. When the door is open, they tell how kind their masters was and how rosy it all was." Interviewers should have been aware of such pressures and known when the door was open, but they often were not. One white woman who called on an elderly South Carolina couple asked the wife why they had no electricity when there was current available at their door. The reply was very revealing: "White folks run me [away] if I do that!" Seeming to grasp the situation, the interviewer observed that her informants lived "with many old and odd beliefs one being that the white man only is entitled to the good things—the better things." But in her very next sentence the interviewer complacently repeated the "old and odd belief" that this elderly couple "like most old ex-slaves … love and revere the names and memories of their old masters."[9] Occasionally a former slave was interviewed by the grandchildren of his old master, though the circumstances of such an interview were unlikely to encourage frankness.

As a result of these coercive situations, former slaves clammed up and said little of substance. A white interviewer who signaled his traditional, racist attitudes frequently obtained only a long series of entertaining but irrelevant stories for his trouble. Blacks knew how to amuse whites, for story telling was a basic survival tactic that could be used in difficult moments. They also knew how to evade a dangerous question. The same individuals who talked at length about Abraham Lincoln generally had an astounding ignorance of the president of the Confederacy. Most, like Bert Luster, simply said, "Don't know much about Jeff Davis," and that was all they would say.[10]

It is surprising, though, how many were willing to reveal their feelings and come out into the open with their stories. "Some white folks might want to put me back in slavery if I tells how we was used in slavery time," Wes Brady told his interviewer, "but you asks me for the truth." Risks are worth taking for some purposes, and the interviews seemed very important to most of the former slaves. They wanted their story to be told; they wanted future generations to know what slavery had been like, and they were willing to risk truth telling. Accordingly, the slave narratives contain many passages of remarkable candor. As one example, take the comment of Elijah Green, who discussed the South's famed leader, John C. Calhoun: "I never did like Calhoun 'cause he hated the Negro; no man was ever hated as much as him by a group of people."[11]

Elijah Green's interviewer was black, and the presence of a number of black interviewers added greatly to the value of the narratives. In the Federal Writers' Project, several states employed at least one black interviewer, and two state projects relied upon a majority of black workers. Eight of the eleven writers who could be identified in Florida's project were black; thirteen of Virginia's twenty interviewers shared the same skin color as their informants. Black people also conducted all of the Fisk interviews. In all more than 400 of the 2358 usable interviews came from black writers.[12] Thus almost one-fifth did not take place across a steep racial barrier [see table I.1].

As might be expected, the black interviewers obtained information that white workers could not get. There was more honesty in the all-black interviews and less obeisance to social rituals. In most Federal Writers' Project narratives, even those who were harshly critical of their former masters often found something complimentary to say about them first. Racial etiquette required that the former slaves express gratitude and respect for their white folks. This ritual was wholly lacking in the Fisk collections. The former slaves said very little about loving their owners when they were not in the presence of whites who expected it. Black interviewers were also more likely to learn about tricks such as adding stones to the baskets of cotton that were weighed at the end of the day. The Florida narratives contained much more information than other state collections on such topics as the slaves' interest in the Civil War, their desire to be free, the practice of slave breeding, and sexual abuse by whites. As tables I.2 through I.4 illustrate, former slaves were more likely to reveal to black interviewers than to white ones negative feelings about their treatment and masters and their willingness to act upon those feelings.

Even if one accepts the view that the interviews conducted by blacks can correct and amplify conclusions drawn from the narratives, other questions remain. How representative of the entire slave population were the people who were interviewed? If the interviews had been technically perfect but the sample badly skewed, the information obtained would still be unreliable. There are biases in the slave narratives, but they are not fatal and in some respects are less serious than many historians have thought.

The creators of the collections of slave narratives did not set out to obtain a random sample of the slave population or even of the former slaves who were still alive. In fact, they used no scientific principle of selection at all. Interviewers merely looked up elderly black people about whom they had heard and asked them to talk about their experiences. Thus a number of factors influenced the selection of an informant. A list of these, by no means exhaustive, might include the fact that the former slave was still alive, that the former slave was available on a particular day, or that he or she was known to the interviewer. The list might also note the energy of the interviewer and even the size and scope of the project in which the interviewer worked.

One of the oddities of the Federal Writers' Project was that the most extensive state project was in Arkansas, a state which had a small population and relatively few slaves in 1860. Nevertheless, because local officials proved ambitious and industrious, almost seven hundred interviews originated in that state. Obviously this large number would tend to misrepresent the experience of slavery, had those interviewed been slaves in Arkansas. In fact, they had not been. The vast majority of former slaves who were interviewed in "the land of opportunity" had moved there after the Civil War. When one looks at the location of the former slaves before emancipation, Arkansas does not dominate the Federal Writers' Project and Fisk collections. As table 1.5 suggests, the locations during slavery and Reconstruction of those who were interviewed roughly approximate the locations for the entire black population. The correspondence is not exact, but the cotton states are strongly represented and border areas do not dominate. Patterns of migration during Reconstruction are reflected faithfully: the percentage of former slaves who were in older southern states like South Carolina and Georgia falls while the percentage of former slaves in new areas like Texas, Arkansas, and Kansas rises. Thus the problem of geographical distribution is not severe.

It is also possible that the interviewers reached a group of former slaves who were disproportionately prosperous or poor and that the financial condition of the former slaves at the time of their interviews affected their recollections of slavery. The vast majority of southern blacks, of course, were poor during the 1930s, and impressionistic evidence from the narratives confirms that this was the typical condition of most of those interviewed. Moreover, a comparison of attitudes and land ownership reveals little difference in viewpoint between those who owned no land and those who were more prosperous.

The occupational distribution of the informants presents a more serious defect. As various commentators have suspected, house servants are substantially overrepresented in the slave narratives. The number of informants who had no job during slavery or merely performed light chores on the plantation is also very high. The heavy weighting of former house servants probably arose from the fact that interviewers were pursuing former slaves known to them or to other white people. Because house servants often became enmeshed in the activities of their owners' families, they probably had good opportunities to maintain contact with whites through the decades following emancipation. Such contact may have been forced upon them, they may have chosen to sustain it to gain material and social advantages, or personal relationships may simply have persisted. The overrepresentation of those who did not participate in the adult slave work force, on the other hand, is purely a function of age. Most former slaves who had reached maturity before the Civil War were dead by the 1930s. Consequently, the largest portion of those who remained had been children or youths while the peculiar institution still endured.

A closer look at the years of birth of the former slaves illuminates this problem. Almost one-fifth of the informants were less than five years old in 1865, so young that they could have had very few personal memories of slavery. Their information probably came in large part from their parents. Twenty- two percent were still so small at emancipation that they would not have entered the work force, and another 25 percent were no older than fifteen. On the other hand, 34.4 percent of the former slaves had been born before 1851, and most of these had experienced the difficulties of adult life under slavery.

Serious as these problems are, they do not present insuperable difficulties. In the first place it is easy to adjust and correct for possible biases. If one fears that the overrepresentation of house servants or young slaves tends to produce an erroneously favorable picture of slavery, the experiences of field hands and older slaves can be examined for comparison. Then one can base an estimate of the treatment or attitudes of all the slaves upon a weighted average constructed to reflect the true distribution of the slave population. This book will not employ such methods very often. For in the second place the potential bias that arises from overrepresentation of certain groups runs against the major findings of this study. Astute commentators have warned that the predominance of house servants and young slaves could produce overly fond memories of the master, of the security of slavery days, and of the relationships between whites and blacks.[13] The author has found few such memories in the narratives and many of quite a different kind. Probably most readers will find this book's statement of its conclusions strong enough without corrections for possible biases in the slave narrative collections.

Ultimately, it is greater use and examination of the slave narratives that will foster understanding of their characteristics and faith in their reliability. In large part that is what this book aims to achieve. Those who retain doubts can approach the material with an open mind and draw their own conclusions. It might also be useful to recall the comment of C. Vann Woodward: "It should be clear that these interviews with ex-slaves will have to be used with caution and discrimination… . The necessary precautions, however, are no more elaborate or burdensome than those required by many other types of sources [the historian] is accustomed to use."[14]