The astounding collection of life stories made available in the “Opinions Regarding Slavery” collection held at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and which now can be seen via JSTOR’s Open Community Collections, allows for surprises and revelations as well as confirming and enriching our knowledge of better known aspects of life under slavery. It veers from pedestrian details about things such as lack of shoes to sharp memories of torture, accounts of Ku Klux Klan activity and, almost always, the pain of family separation. These 229 interviews were conducted with elderly survivors of slavery, and consistently demonstrate that the worst memory of all was having a family torn apart. As Lewis Parker of South Carolina noted, sadly: “I will never git [sic] over it.” Those wounds never did heal.
Historian and archivist John B. Cade published some of the narratives in 1935 in the Journal of Negro History.
As you might expect, these narratives reveal much about enslaved experiences and the process of 20th century memory. Significantly, though, this collection also provides us with a glimpse into notions of education, the history of Black Studies, the disciplinary development of Folklore and anthropology studies and the first steps into understanding enslaved narratives as the astounding storytelling and fundamentally literary testimony that they also are.
What you see here is classwork and, indeed, you can see teacher’s notes in red pen on most of the assignments.
John Brother Cade was a young academic when he first started assigning his history students to interview former slaves between 1929 and 1935. This portfolio of classwork, now accessible on JSTOR, consists of interviews with enslaved people sometimes transcribed with attempts at dialect reproduction, or sometimes with smooth paraphrasing that might elide some of the more forceful points individuals might have been making. (You can listen to or read more about the project in our interview with archivist Angela Proctor.)
One dialogue is transcribed as follows: Student: “I came for a bit of your history.” Lewis Parker of South Carolina replied “History. What’s dat? I doan spech I got none, boy.” But other students chose to avoid the problem of verbal reproduction altogether such as the student who interviewed Judie Martin of Kansas, for instance, and with frustratingly succinct summaries wrote ”Judie liked social and religious activities” and “Judie was sold away from her mother when she was old enough to wash dishes” with few other details or attempts to evoke the emotions that surely must have surrounded these accounts.