[QUOTE=Foxy40]
I am currently working my way through The Slave Narratives and it certainly is an eye opener to me. Not that so many wanted to be freed but quite the opposite. The number of people who thought they were better off during slavery came as a great surprise to me. I would imagine since those interviewed were very old, they possibly recalled their lives as children on a plantation and perhaps their role wasn’t a hard one. It may also be that the ex-slaves lives were so hard after emancipation, it may have seemed better to have a full belly and a place to live.
I don’t want to hijack this thread but does anyone else have thoughts on why some interviewed would feel that way after 60 plus years?
Please do not think that I advocate slavery or any kind of enslavement of any humans. I am simply pointing out what I have read and how shocked I was to find that some ex slaves actually embraced slavery.
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I am wondering if those narratives are really of much use, and whteher they shed much light on slavery. According to the site you cite, “From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War. . . ..”
Now remember, 1936 to 1938 was 71 to 73 years after the abolition of slavery!
So they were asking people in their late 70s to early 80s what they remembered from their early childhood?
Add to this the fact that before the age of 5 or 6, very few people remember anything but brief images and impressions. If they remember very specific events, it is usually out of any helpful context.
Early childhood memories are largely absurd distortions of reality because we do not possess the base knowledge needed to analyze what we see in a larger social, political, economic or other context.
To a five-year-old, Mommy and Daddy are gods and omnipotent (even if Massa did buy them just last year).
You need to be at least 10 before you start to look around your society and analyze it and ask questions such as “Why do coloured folks have to work for free for white folks?”
To give a modern example, I know a family of (white) rural poor near my country home. They have kids from 4 to 14 years of age. The teens are obviously aware that their family is poor and looked down upon, and are somewhat ashamed of their home. As they get older, they feel it more and more. But the 4-year-old runs and plays around the wrecked cars all around the property, shows me the litter of kittens that one of their cats had in the back seat of a stinky old wreck, enjoys his Kraft dinner and hot dogs, and probably thinks he is in a nice place. His parents are loving people who do the best they can.
To get a REAL first-hand narrative on slavery, you would have had to interview a group of people who had been at least 10 to 30 years of age when slavery ended. In 1936, these people would have been 81 to 101 years of age. Most would have been dead or senile.
Or else, they should have run the interviews much earlier, such as 1905, say.
By their own admission, these narratives were mainly asking what it was like to be a very small child under slavery. And we have a natural tendency to see the past as happy, unless it was truly horrible (like, say, being in Dachau).
Say what you want about slave owners, I doubt if many of them ever lashed a five-year-old black kid. They were far more likely to show they were not such bad masters by telling the little “pickininny” he was cute and giving him a nice apple. The fact that they expected the cute little guy to give them a lifetime of free labour under threat of violence and torture would not have been understood by the kid as he munched his apple from the nice Massa.
And at home in the slave quarters, no matter what the parents thought of Massa, they were not stupid enough to say it in front of kid of 4 or 6 who sould blurt it out in front of whites.
My guess is that these narratives were part of the desire of white America in the 1930s to “sanitize” slavery and forget the horrible chapter that it was. Look at “Gone with the Wind” (the novel and the movie are both products of the 1930s).There is not a mention of field hands, or the economics of working a slave to death young and replacing him, or any of the brutality used to keep slaves terrorized and in line. All we see is loving old Mammy who is practically a member of the family, or Butterfly McQueen as the hilarious, “half-witted darky”.
On the other hand, it is possible that house slaves formed an almost-family relationship with their masters in some cases, and that the people interviewed remembered living in a nice house where they ate well when they were 5 or 10 years old and their parents were maids and footmen.
But on the whole, this “Slave Narrative” sounds to me like a salve for white guilt from the 1930s.