Bearing Witness: Memories of Arkansas Slavery

Introduction

Introduction In the relatively brief history of the United States some dark clouds hang over the paths to the present.One of the largest and darkest of them is African American slavery. In attempting to penetrate the darkness, scholars have produced a great deal of words and ink, but the academic insights have had only limited influence, for their consumers are a small percentage of the population . Yet it remains important for each generation and each individual, not just the limited group of historians, to confront that dark period as directly as possible, if for no other reason than to appreciate the sheer alienness of it. For most people, the ideal experience would be to converse with the actual participants in the American phenomenon of slavery, especially ancestors on the land where the new generations now live. In 1977, as a folklorist and local historian in north Arkansas, I thought I was finally able to do that. I held the four Arkansas volumes of ex-slave narratives in my hand for the first time. As I read, I realized with chagrin that I was not reading Arkansas testimony, but the stories of men and women from other states who had moved to Arkansas in postwar years. As they were at that time, the volumes of testimony were virtually unusable for my local historical interests. Unknown to me then, the editor of the published volumes already recognized my problem; he knew the publication’s organization did not serve the needs of the local historians (Rawick 1977, 1:xl). I sadly set the books aside,vowing that I would return to them some day to reorganize them as the narratives of Arkansas slaves, if no other researcher did the task in the intervening years. Twenty-five years have passed, and no one has done so. This book is the result. My hope is that Arkansas historians and family researchers will find it helpful in understanding slavery in this state. For American slavery in general, of course, there are some much used sources, such as public documents and the writings of slave owners, as well as the writings of white people who opposed the“peculiar institution.”There are also voices from the other side of the racial divide, in particular the writings of African Americans who emerged from slavery as articulate chroniclers and interpreters and who recorded their memories and their thoughts. These literary slave narratives have also been much used by both literary and Lankfordtext:Lankford / Final Pages 7/14/09 10:05 AM Page xiii historical scholars.For more than a half century another body of evidence has existed, but it has been much less utilized than the other sources. In a brief period of time—largely between 1936 and 1938—a great many interviews were conducted with elderly African American men and women who had lived as slaves. This extraordinary project documented the testimony of people who otherwise would have gone to their graves without leaving behind a record of their experiences. These interviews, when added to the literary slave narratives,comprise an impressive corpus of personal testimony.In 1985 a team of historians was led to conclude that “the written and oral accounts of slavery known collectively as‘Afro-American Slave Narratives’have no parallel in the Western tradition in terms of sheer scope of testimony”(Davis and Gates 1985, 35). That same year, however, another historian pointed out that despite decades of the existence and availability of the interview collection, “historians have almost completely neglected these materials” (Woodward 1985, 48f). There are several reasons for this neglect. One is the general distrust of oral testimony in historical research. The oral history movement in the historical fraternity only began a decade after the slave narrative project was conducted , and historians who are willing to work their way through the thickets of evidentiary problems in oral testimony are still in the minority today. Another reason for the neglect of these slave testimonies lies in the peculiarities in the way in which these materials were collected. These difficulties will be surveyed in a later section of this introduction, but it is fair to say that they are daunting for anyone seeking to establish reliability of evidence. Then, too, the materials have been difficult to use. The slave interviews were not published until the 1970s, and then they were printed only as state collections (Rawick 1972, 1977, 1979). Those state collections, moreover, were put forth in three separate published series, due to...