ECHOES of SLAVERY - Volume I E-Book

Cotter Bass

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

During the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to document their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. In 1937 the WPA directed the remaining states involved in the project to conduct interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions regarding the kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects, the result of which may occasionally be offensive to contemporary readers. The field workers often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of the informants and their dwellings. The completed narratives were then turned over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C.

The former slave narratives presented in ECHOES of SLAVERY - Volume I represent a small segment of more than two thousand first-person accounts of actual slave experiences, transcribed in their own words by the FWP and recorded for posterity. These first-person testimonials open a window into the past, enabling contemporary readers a rare opportunity to share the trials, fears, frustrations, hopes, and visions of those individuals caught up in the maelstrom that was 1800’s America.

Walk alongside these resolute men and women in Volume I of ECHOES of SLAVERY as they portray the real world in which they struggled and endured. Experience the harsh and often brutal reality of slavery as it really was!

Leseprobe

Cotter Bass

ECHOES of SLAVERY - Volume I

FORMER SLAVES SHARE THEIR FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNTS OF LIFE IN BONDAGE.

For Violet – my wife, partner, soulmate, best friend, and inspiration for more than 60 years.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Introduction

ECHOES of SLAVERY - Volume I

IN THEIR OWN WORDS, FORMER SLAVES REVEAL

THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT SLAVERY!

Harriet Tubman with rescued slaves (The New York Times, 1885)

A CHILD BORN INTO SLAVERY WAS SIMPLY CONSIDERED AS ANOTHER ADDITION TO THE MASTER'S

WEALTH AND PROPERTY.

ABOUT THE NARRATIVES . . . . . .

During the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to document their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. In 1937 the WPA directed the remaining states involved in the project to conduct interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions regarding the kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects, the result of which may occasionally be offensive to contemporary readers (see A NOTE ON THE LANGUAGE OF THE NARRATIVES, below). The field workers often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of the informants and their dwellings. The completed narratives were then turned over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C.

The former slave narratives contained herein represent a small segment of more than two thousand first-person accounts of actual slave experiences, transcribed in their own words by the FWP and recorded for posterity.

A NOTE ON THE LANGUAGE OF THE NARRATIVES

The WPA former slave narratives usually involve some attempt by the interviewers to reproduce in writing the spoken language of the people they interviewed. The interviewers were writers, not professionals trained in the phonetic transcription of speech. And the instructions they received were not altogether clear. "I recommend that truth to idiom be paramount, and exact truth to pronunciation secondary," wrote the project's editor. Yet he also urged that "words that definitely have a notably different pronunciation from the usual should be recorded as heard, evidently assuming that "the usual" was self-evident. In fact, the situation was far more problematic than the project leaders recognized. All the informants were of course black, most interviewers were white, and by the 1930s, when the interviews took place, white representations of black speech had already acquired had an ugly history of entrenched stereotype dating back at least to the early nineteenth century. What most interviewers assumed to be "the usual" patterns of their informants' speech was unavoidably influenced by preconceptions and stereotypes. The result is a mélange of accuracy and fantasy, of sensitivity and stereotype, of empathy and racism that may sometimes be offensive to today's readers.

In order to render these narratives less stereotypical and potentially offensive, while at the same time enhancing the flow and rhythm of the reading experience, the author has taken the liberty of modifying certain words as originally transcribed by the interviewer. For example, the word gwine [going] may appear as goin’, remembah may appear as remember, or fahm may appear as farm. The vast majority of verbiage, however, remains exactly as transcribed and faithful to the character and intent of the original narratives.

LEGEND

Paragraphs, sentences, and singular words or phrases displayed in bracketed italics, [Stoneman's Calvary in 1865] or [ends of thread left on the loom], for example, represent actual transcribed commentary by the interviewer.

Paragraphs, sentences, and other non-italicized verbiage appearing solely within each narrative represent actual transcribed commentary of the subject being interviewed.

Singular words or phrases displayed in brackets, [sic] or [secessionists], for example, represent clarifications or observations by the author.

ANDY J. ANDERSON

Age: 94 years

Fort Worth, Texas

Interviewer: Sheldon F. Cauthier

Date of Interview: September 16, 1937