Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1938, digital archive, Library of Congress (review)

To the white myth of slavery must be added the slaves’ own folklore and folk-say of slavery.

—B.A. Botkin, Chief Editor, Writers’ Unit, Library of Congress Project (1941)

Since the 1970s, scholars have debated the authenticity and use fulness of materials housed in this digital archive, which includes over 2,300 narratives and 500 photographs of formerly enslaved people. Released in 2000 by the Library of Congress, it features the collaborative efforts of the primarily white interviewers, writers, and editors of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a government-funded program tasked with documenting “America as a more pluralistic, inclusive society” in the 1930s (Shannon Carter and Deborah Mutnick, “Writing Democracy: Notes on a Federal Writers’ Project for the 21st Century,” Community Literacy Journal 7, no. 1 [2012]: 2). Because the database’s core contents have been scrutinized for decades, its “About this Collection” and “Articles and Essays” sections prove more valuable for students and scholars of history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology who can determine on their own how the slaves’ accounts could serve them.

The title of this database might mislead some readers. While these slave narratives portray scenes of brutal punishments, rape, inhumane slave auctions, backwoods weddings, and ecstatic religious worship similar to those found in the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs, the differences in their contextual and compositional constraints should be noted. Both sets of narratives involved editorial negotiations with socially and politically progressive white editors and publishers who sought to liberate African Americans from society’s prejudicial views and discriminatory laws; however, ideological conflicts and methodological inconsistencies among the FWP administrative staff who produced these early twentieth-century accounts warrant serious considerations that explain ongoing deliberations regarding their historical significance.

Organized on a state-by-state basis, each slave narrative includes the interviewer’s name and a brief introduction with their impression of the subject. These prefaces expose the interviewers’ biases toward the “informants,” generally in favourable terms that remind us of the white aboli tionists who endorsed nineteenth-century slave narrators. For example, writer Cecil Miller describes ex-slave John W. Fields as a “fine, colored man” and a “fine example of a man who has lived a morally and physically clean life.” However, the stylistic variations among entries reveal inconsistencies in the narratives’ production—including differences in questions posed, rhetorical framings, and editorial revisions or over-writing. In some cases, the interviewer acts as an amanuensis writing an objective transcription; in others, as an interlocutor who panders to the reader’s sympathies by sensationalizing the slave’s story through flowery, pathos-laden language. The anonymous writer of Sarah Graves’s story, for example, includes an epigraph by Shakespeare, “Sweet are the uses of Adversity / which like a toad, ugly and venomous, / wears yet a jewel in its head,” which clearly frames a compassionate depiction of Graves’s life. This writer, referring to themself as “the interviewer,” opens by describing Graves’s physical appearance (as many writers do of their subjects), including her hair, posture, smile, and clothing, and closes by glorifying the story of African Americans who survived slavery: “These children of a transplanted race, once enslaved, have through years of steadfast courage overcome the handicap of race and poverty.” The most objective entries resemble a transcription and only include a brief biographical abstract with the informant’s name, birth date and place, occupation, and current living situation.

Notwithstanding the variations in each narrative’s rhetorical framing, style, and interlocutor influence, these slave narratives reveal at least two significant features about the genre that students of African American history and literature should consider. First, these narratives differ substantially from their nineteenth-century predecessors in plot: they depict the experiences of emancipated slaves as opposed to escaped fugitives. Arguably, one of the most compelling elements of antebellum slave narratives was the portrayal of how the enslaved escaped—whether...