The Florida Slave: Interviews with Ex-Slaves, WPA Writers’ Project, 1930s, and Testimony of Ex-Slaves, Joint Congressional Committee, Jacksonville, 1871 by Stetson Kennedy (review)

The Florida Slave was the last project that Stetson Kennedy completed, and his last book fulfills the work he undertook as head of the Florida Writers’ Project unit on folklore, oral history, and ethnic studies between 1937 and 1942. In Kennedy’s work on the Florida Writers’ Project, one finds the beginnings of an approach to culture and politics that would shape his first book (Palmetto Country [New York: Duell, Sloane & Pearce, 1942]) and this last one, released posthumously. He offers us an insider’s perspective on both the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives and their relevance to oral history today as a source for the study of slavery. This is the first time that both the Florida slave narratives and the proceedings of the Joint Congressional Committee can be found together in a single volume.

Benjamin D. Brotemarkle, Executive Director of the Florida Historical Society, provides a splendid publisher’s preface to the book. Brotemarkle quotes Kennedy from an interview for Florida Frontiers (the weekly radio magazine of the Florida Historical Society) in 2009: “I am a great believer in oral history because [of what] I call … the ‘Dictatorship of the Footnote.’ The academicians are quoting each other instead of going out and getting first-hand primary source material. And oral history, of course, is [the perspective of] a participant and a witness, at least, and seeing it with all their sensory organs, and for that reason it has more validity from my point of view” (iii). Kennedy’s point (reinforced in this radio interview) is about the validity of oral history for social historians and the fact that the Florida Writers’ Project interviews have proven to be an invaluable source for the study of slavery from the bottom up.

The Florida Slave’s narratives are divided in two parts. The first consists of sixty-eight Florida Writers’ Project interviews, while the second features the testimony of seven ex-slaves who were eyewitnesses before the Joint Congressional Committee that met in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871. In the appendices, Kennedy has added, from a variety of sources, a number of profiles of other Florida slaves and free persons of color, including his narrative about Jonathan Walker, “The Man with the Branded Hand,” that originally appeared in Palmetto Country. While these are effective seedbed documents, I found the most useful to be an oral history questionnaire by Rivana Boynton and another original WPA questionnaire found in the interview with Salena Taswell. Both reveal the methodology of the Florida Writers’ Project in terms of collecting oral histories and provide a useful research tool for historians interested in primary sources. Some of the open-ended questions probed for memory and detail, while other questions relied on sensory details experienced on the plantation.

Kennedy’s introduction to The Florida Slave is an effective social history of the “root-hog-or-die days” of the Great Depression of the 1930s (1). Kennedy traces the economic stimulus package of its day, called the Federal Emergency Relief Act, and its successor, the WPA. Both provided relief for the millions of prostrate people, including folklorists like Kennedy. The introduction is part historiography, detailing how the Slave Narratives Project came about and what other historians (Benjamin Botkin and George Rawick) collected and published. Kennedy notes that the Florida interviews constituted volume 17 of Rawick’s collection, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing, 1972), which had long been out of print. The Florida Slave brings back not only those compiled by Rawick but also other manuscripts archived at the University of Florida Library, the Florida Historical Society, and the Library of Congress.

According to Kennedy, the Florida Writers’ Project was less discriminatory than similar projects in most other states, which helps explain why he was able...