Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. An example:
John Fields (89 years old at the writing of his narrative): "In most of us colored folks was the great desire to [be] able to read and write. We took advantage of every opportunity to educate ourselves. The greater part of the plantation owners were very harsh if we were caught trying to learn or write. It was the law that if a white man was caught trying to educate a negro slave, he was liable to prosecution entailing a fine of fifty dollars and a jail sentence. We were never allowed to go to town and it was not until after I ran away that I knew that they sold anything but slaves, tobacco, and wiskey. Our ignorance was the greatest hold the South had on us. We knew we could run away, but what then? An offender guilty of this crime was subjected to very harsh punishment."
This is an eye-opening collection.
I spent some time reading through a few of the actual manuscript pages (online as images) and the stories just tear my heart out.
Some of them are hard to read because the writers simply transcribed slave English phonetically, when it occurs.
And yet what comes out of reading through these text is an incredible humanity and dignity, emerging from an environment inhuman cruelty.
Of course, part of the story may have been that these narratives were told to white writers, and either the slaves didn't voice their real feelings, out of fear, or the writers soft-pedalled the troubling anecdotes.
We'll never know for sure, but the fact is that America was built on the broken backs of these people.
They are martyrs in my mind.