Norman R. Yetman - Voices from Slavery: 1 Authentic Slave Narratives

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Compiled in seventeen states during the years 19361938, the Slave Narrative Collection consists of over two thousand interviews with former slaves. The interviews, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents personal reactions to bondage, afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their account of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave.

The Slave Narrative Collection provides a unique collective portrait of a historical population. Aside from the large number of life histories it contains, the most compelling feature of the Collection is the composition of this sample of the slave population. Almost all those interviewed had experienced slavery within the states of the Confederacy and still resided there. The major slave occupations are all represented. Moreover, the size of the slave holdings varied considerably, from plantations with over a reported thousand slaves to situations in which the informant was his or her masters only slave. Reported treatment ranged from the most harsh, impersonal, and exploitative to work and living environments that were indulgent, intimate, and even benevolent. Except that the informants were relatively young when they experienced slavery (older slaves had died long before the interviews were undertaken), all of the major categories of the slave population appear to have been represented in the Collection.

While those interviewed did not represent a random sample, the Collection provides a more heterogeneous and diverse pool of informants than any other set of slave testimonies. At least the sample biases that characterized the antebellum slave narrativesthe disproportionate number of runaways, individuals who had purchased their freedom or had been freed, males, craftsmen, and individuals from border statesare absent. The WPA narratives thus constitute an illuminating source of data about antebellum Southern life, the institution of slavery, and, most important, the reactions and perspectives of those who had been enslaved.

The Slave Narrative Collective was the product of two major influences. The first was the importance of the oral tradition and life histories as a distinctive black literary form. As the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Malcom X attest, the personal narrative has been a prominent genre in black literature, which first appeared in written form as the narratives of former slaves, whose personal accounts of bondage were widely published in the three decades before the Civil War.

In 1939 some of these life histories were published in the critically acclaimed work, These Are Our Lives , which focused on the lives of a diverse group of undistinguished individuals from the southeastern United States. In 1978 Tom Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch published a sequel, Such As Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties , which was drawn from the same materials. Twenty-eight Alabama life histories have recently been reprinted in James Seay Brown, Up Before Daylight: Life Histories from the Alabama Writers Project , 19381939 (1982). The most comprehensive of the works utilizing these materials is Ann Bankss First Person America (1981), which in its selection of interviews emphasizes the nations occupational, ethnic, and regional diversity during the thirties. The Slave Narrative Collection was thus a natural and logical extension of the Writers Project goal of letting ordinary people tell their own life histories.